The Email Boss Shares How to Win at Email Marketing in 2024

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Lainey.

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She is a digital marketing and email marketing expert.

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She's been doing it for over 15 years.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you.

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Thanks for having me.

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Nice to be here.

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Why don't we start off by you giving us a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, so my name is Lainey Balcastro.

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I am the owner of LMB Digi Marketing and I have been in the email marketing world since probably its inception which ages myself, but that's fine Probably since 2007,.

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I went to school for marketing, so I am very experienced in the old school, traditional marketing realm, and then, once email marketing and digital marketing came into play, I just dove into that because I'm a tech nerd and love untangling digital knots.

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I worked for about eight years in different media companies in New York City right after college and self-taught myself different platforms and dove into how to create good emails, how to create decent messaging for clients.

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And then in about 2014, I moved to Atlanta and was working for a lovely company there.

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It was a financial tech company again doing marketing automation.

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That's where I dove into more of the Salesforce product suite, and it was a classic story of I got poached by a startup, took a chance, they promised me the world and six months in none of that happened.

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I just started networking around and looking for what I thought was going to be a full-time job, but in the back of my mind I had always known that I wanted to own my own business.

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So, as I was networking and talking to people and having a million cups of coffee.

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I basically was offered a lot more consulting jobs than permanent positions, and so that snowballed, and then I just decided that this was going to be my job, and that's what I started my company in 2015.

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And here we are nine years later.

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Awesome, almost to that.

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10-year anniversary Congratulations.

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That's great.

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Thank you.

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So why don't you tell us a story about some of the best marketing that you've done?

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the marketing that you're most proud of.

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So I feel like the best marketing always comes out of the audits that I do for clients.

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So what I focus on mostly is the email service platforms that clients are using and how they are optimized and integrated with their own website and CRM and third-party platforms website and CRM and third-party platforms.

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So what typically happens is clients will end up coming to me with a huge mission to clean up their email marketing platform and they have no idea what's going on in there.

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They don't know why they're not getting results from the emails that they're sending or from just event campaigns they're setting up, etc.

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Cetera.

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Or they just have no clue where their leads are going and they don't understand their lead routing process.

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There's a million things that could go wrong in an email platform.

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So one of the packages that I offer is an audit of their systems.

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So, particularly with this one client, I went through and did a full audit, deep dive into their system.

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They were using Pardot, so I went through and did a full audit.

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I looked at the backend setup, looked at the integration with Salesforce and then went into their segmentation how healthy is their data?

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So many things, and what comes from this audit is a document basically grading their system.

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So I help them identify gaps and create recommendations on how to make their system better, which will then deliver better results from their marketing efforts.

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So what came of this was that, to be perfectly blunt, the system was a mess.

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They had really old data just sitting in there and they had really high bounce rates going on.

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A lot of the system integrations weren't working correctly, so there were a lot of gaps between syncing, between Salesforce and Pardot, as well as not knowing what's connected to their website.

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So I went through and did a form audit as well to just say, okay, these forms are connected and working properly, but there's a huge chunk that's not, and so no wonder you have no idea where your leads are coming from, because they're not syncing correctly, and no wonder your salespeople don't have a clue what's coming in, because nothing is being pushed over correctly.

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So once we went through all of that and we identified, okay, here's the holes and here's why your emails are not performing right, because you don't have your data cleaned and segmented correctly, because there was no way of knowing where people were coming from.

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So once we went in and we cleaned all that up which was a huge undertaking we were.

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They started to notice that not only were their emails getting better results, but they also had way more visibility into what's going on with the leads that we're working with or their clients that we're working with, what's coming in from the website, because that way we can target those people into the right funnels and create nurture programs for them.

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So they had a much better strategy going into their email marketing, so that they didn't despise doing it every day, as well as visibility into what's happening afterwards.

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So they had better reporting.

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They had easy ways to identify who was doing what so that at the end of the day, their sales teams could take that information and do their job better.

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So those are the best things I like to do.

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And what was the impact of once you made those changes after doing the audit Directionally?

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What was the impact for the company and results?

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So directionally.

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So ultimately it built a better relationship between marketing and sales.

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So marketing and sales always tend to butt heads in all of these companies because, you know, sales never thinks marketing is doing their job and bringing in leads.

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Marketing thinks sales never doing their job to follow up on the leads.

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So ultimately this brought those two teams together and there was no more question of what is marketing doing, because sales can easily see it.

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And then sales is not questioning where their leads are coming from and marketing is able to provide reporting on their own ROI so that their boss can basically say okay, we're keeping you as a marketing team, you're delivering ROI.

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Yeah, it is a pretty nerdy thing to do audits and talk about systems syncing, but I think the impact has been high at companies where I've seen they do a similar sort of project, because it does at some point become spaghetti-like and really messy and if you can't measure what's happening then you're going nowhere fast, so I think that's pretty awesome.

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Let me ask you a question about email marketing as a general trend.

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Some people have said that email marketing as a channel is under a lot of pressure.

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Because of the new deliverability measures that a lot of providers are putting in place, it's harder and harder to get messages into people's inbox.

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You've been doing this for a long time.

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What is your view on how things have evolved?

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So it's definitely making my job harder, for sure, but at the same time, it's also a good thing.

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So privacy laws have been getting more and more strict as the years go on.

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We know this, and then really nothing has changed between the parameters that Google and Yahoo have put in place.

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It's really just that now they're paying attention.

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So nothing's really changed.

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You still have to be validated, you still can't spam people, you still have to know that you're using good data and your system is set up correctly.

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It's just Google and Yahoo are now paying attention and they're going to stop people who are not following these rules, which is great because it cleans up our inbox.

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I know.

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I love it for my own email.

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I don't like getting a ton of junk email any more than the next person.

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So that's one of the things that I ultimately like to work with clients as well on is the privacy laws, because there's still tons of companies out there that just ignore those things and then they wonder why they are on a blacklist of some sort.

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But ultimately, these are good laws to have in place.

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We're way behind in terms of the rest of the world.

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United States should have done this years ago, but here we are, and yes, it makes my job harder to hit the inbox, but if everything is set up properly and we're using good data and good systems, there shouldn't be an issue.

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So I think the first thing is that people who were doing cold emails where people have not opted in it feels like that era is coming to a close of being an efficient channel for people.

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Is that right?

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I certainly hope so.

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I don't think it's going to close for a long time because people are still out there doing it and I just had a conversation recently with someone who's on the sales side and the cold outreach side and they still firmly believe that if the email is out there in the public, that they can Google it or find it on LinkedIn, that they can use it to market to people and do cold outreach.

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And while there is that gray line or gray area where, okay, yeah, you might be able to get away with that, it's still going to catch up with you eventually because the rules are just getting strict and more strict.

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Yeah, I think they're getting very strict.

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Some of the companies that I've spoken to.

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They are doing things like sending out cold emails to batches of five or 10,000 people and what happens is they actually get zero response and they're like what happened.

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So I think when I hear stories about things like that, it's evidence that that era of cold emails is over.

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But I think there's also a challenge, along the lines of what you're saying, with people who have done the hard work of building up opt-in lists which.

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I think it is actually pretty hard to build up good opt-in lists.

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It's not a feat for the faint of heart, I would like to say, but I think even for some of those folks it's harder to get into the inbox because sometimes people, for example, don't remember that they opted in a long time ago and then they'll report it.

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And once you get like very few people, like two or three people out of a thousand, they report it instead of just unsubscribing.

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That's when you, like, all your emails start getting blocked.

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So is it going to become harder and harder, even for people who even if they did opt in, there's still the responsibility on our end or the client's end company's end to send an email that's honest.

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So a lot of times I see clients sending out emails with a subject line that has nothing to do with what's actually in the email, and that's where clients or end users are going to read that email and say this is not at all what I thought you were sending.

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So if we're being dishonest in what we're sending, clients are going to mark you as spam.

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I mark people as spam all the time because I'm sure you probably get this too, and a lot of people get these emails that are supposedly from LinkedIn and they'll have the reply to in the subject line and you open it and you're like I've never met this person, we've never spoken, this is not a reply to email.

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I know this is just a ploy to get into the inbox and see if I'll respond, and those people will get marked as spam immediately because it's a lie.

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Nobody wants to work with dishonest people.

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Yeah, and one of the main points of this podcast is to celebrate the top 1% of marketers who do the best marketing, because 99% of the marketing that I see out there is pretty bad, and that includes a lot of the email marketing.

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I get quite a high volume of email every day.

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That's just terrible.

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It's people who will sit there and do things like they'll email every single day nonsense that doesn't even make any sense.

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It's people who try tactics like they'll send three or four emails in a row and then they'll try to guilt me into responding.

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Have you reviewed my email below and you didn't reach out to me.

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Is there something wrong?

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Should I talk to your boss?

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Just the tactics that people use are insane.

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It's like watching the sea of badness of email is what I think encourages Google and Yahoo and others to just really clamp down on these restrictions, because people do it so badly, thinking we can send a million emails and I might get one person who falls for it and under that logic, it's terrible for everybody.

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Yeah, yeah, it's terrible for everybody.

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And again, those are the people that are going to get marked as spam, but I think they're just trying to get away with it as long as they can, and they'll go to lengths as even setting up a new domain so that they can have a fresh email reputation, which doesn't really work.

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So it works, but you're still going to get caught.

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What are your top two or three tips for people who are building opt-in lists that want to do things right and want to get great results?

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What are two or three things you recommend to clients to get great results in the opt-in email marketing channel?

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So it has to be organic.

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So one of the ways to do this is, if you're, for example, going to a lot of events, have an opt-in.

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Right at your booth or just on your phone, you can have people scan a QR code that allows them to type in their email and give it to you.

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So, whether it's you're collecting business cards or whatever, that's one organic way of collecting information that's opted in.

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And then another way would be, if you're posting to social media or you're just posting to your LinkedIn, make a landing page with an opt-in and make sure that form has a checkbox that says yes, I'm going to be emailing you.

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However you want to say it, it can be once a month, but you have to make it clear that you have a double opt-in and that these people are very aware that they are going to be getting an email from you one way or another.

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So that is really the.

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Those aren't the only two ways to do that, but any organic growth where people are physically giving their information whether it's a form on your website or at an event, or you're just talking, like we are today you have to have organic opt-in.

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So that's the number one way to do it.

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The third one that I would add that I hear from a lot of fellow marketers that is very effective.

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That I'll just toss out there is give something of value to people in advance of getting them to opt into your list.

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So give them like a pretty beefy ebook or research report that they would see as a lot of value.

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In a lot of cases, people will be willing to opt in to get something like that.

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There's a big debate also just about gated content, but I've seen some interesting strategies where people will give the email for a high value resource if you're giving that resource to them complimentary or free.

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And then I've seen some other interesting strategies similar to that where they give the resource to them complimentary or free.

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And then I've seen some other interesting strategies similar to that where they give the resource to people and after ungated, but then, after they give it to them, they ask people for their email to send them more, and that also has worked for some people.

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So I do think, just because it's so hard to build up opt-in lists like I don't like to give my email to people because then people start doing crazy things Some retailers will email me I'm not exaggerating every single day.

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Yeah, I'm like, is that necessary?

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I get those.

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That's just poor segmentation, right there.

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Necessary roughness.

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Yeah, I agree, I agree, I totally agree.

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No-transcript.

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Awesome.

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Thank you very much for your story and sharing these insights.

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I'm going to link in the show notes to your website so that people can go there and learn more, reach out to you if they like help in winning and email marketing in this very interesting times we live in.

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Yes, so I'll link to all of that right there and appreciate you making time to be with us today.

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Thank you for being on the show.