Interview with The Best Email Marketer – Dela Quist

Before becoming involved in the digital world my background was in publishing and advertising, in other words using content to provide marketers with an opportunity to showcase their products and services to our readers. As I see it the content on the pages of the magazine or newspaper acted as the interface between the readers and the advertisers.

The main driver of success in the world of publishing was and still is the size and quality of the readership or subscriber base. And that is predominantly determined by the quality of the content – sounds like email marketing, right? So, when I first became involved in a digital project, involving email I immediately understand the nuances of email, especially the value of permission and opt-in. But my light bulb moment came when I realized that if you had a permission. Email database, you had the right to send your content or offer to your customers directly and cost effectively rather than pay Google or Facebook to send them to you. Eureka!

When I first set up Alchemy Worx as an agency my plan was to focus on content marketing. Our intent was to provide great content to brands that wanted to keep their customers engaged throughout the lifecycle so they could send it to them via email newsletters. However, in the beginning, none of the people who wanted to work with us had the expertise, resource and in some cases the technology to send the emails out in house. Which is how Alchemy Worx became the first ever agency to focus its entire offering on email.

The key to understanding how well – or badly you are doing is to analyse the data over time. Most people view their campaign by viewing a snapshot of the results of each email campaign they send. Today’s email got an open rate of 14% and a click rate of 6% yesterday’s email had an open rate of 13% and click rate of 7%. That is like watching a movie one frame at a time! Most ESP reporting is designed in the same way the only way to take a long view is to export all the data via the API and create your own report. We use a tool Touchstone Analytics here at Alchemy Worx that we developed ourselves. It automates the process of exporting the data and creative sent from your ESP and creates a series of chart that allow you to see 2, 3, 4 or more years performance at the same time.

The other tool we use – to improve rather than measure performance – is Touchstone Tests a subject line testing tool that uses AI to replace the Humans on your list when you AB Test. This fixes many of the problems and challenges marketers Email face when testing subject lines. On average Touchstone users are able to improve open rates by around 18%.

Our entire focus is on retention and re-engagement rather than Lead Generation. No matter which company you look at, I can tell you that between 40% and 60% of their list has not opened a single email for 12 months or more. So, I would argue that $10,000 spent increasing the number of people on the list who are engaged with your email program from 40% to 45% or 60% to 65% as important $10,000 spent on lead gen. You have to do both right? If you do we are the best people to work with you on that. 

The best way is to keep sending (better) email. More seriously this is a subject that is far too important to deal with in one paragraph, so I would like to recommend this Beyond Open Rate a White Paper I wrote that you can find here http://bit.ly/BeyondOpenRateWP

I am lucky that I enjoy what I do and head up an agency that I founded. Our aim is to make significant improvements to our clients’ bottom line by increasing their customers engagement with email. Our proprietary methodology and approach to reactivation turns inactive subscribers into active subscribers increasing annual revenue per subscriber by 50% or more. Long may that continue!