Consumers are more protective of their inboxes than ever, which goes hand in hand with the glut of email now.
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Consumers are more protective of their inboxes than ever, which goes hand in hand with the glut of email now. J oin VB analyst Jon Cifuentes and guest panelist Realtor.com CMO Nate Johnson as they share how to how to break through instead of getting banished to email purgatory .
With 43 percent year-over-year growth and up to 50 million unique visitors a month, Realtor.com is the fastest growing online real estate company in the category. For Nate Johnson, CMO of Realtor.com, email marketing is central to their user engagement strategy.
“Every web property, every mobile app, wants people to come to their site multiple times a day,” Johnson says. “But the reality is, there are a lot of other places out there for people to visit.”
Email actually allows you to reach out to users and re-enage those that might not necessarily be coming back naturally. “We don’t really think of it as marketing emails,” says Johnson. “We actually think of our email as an extension of our product experience into a user’s inbox.”
Every email needs to have the same attributes and characteristics that their product does, Johnson says: It needs to be helpful, useful, relevant, timely. And when that content shows up in a user’s inbox, it should really feel like a very seamless experience between that email and actually visiting the site or opening the app.
It takes great content that’s highly relevant to address the delivery challenge and break through the cluttered inbox, says Johnson. Realtor.com boasts a long-standing relationship with the National Association of Realtors as well as the realtor community at large, which allows them to offer a ton of expertise to users, including news and advice content.
Personalization and testing are also key. They found that Realtor.com users were 3x more likely to open up an email with a city-specific subject line, says Johnson.
And at LinkedIn, where Johnson spent three years as Head of Consumer Marketing, extensive multivariate testing revealed that the right opening hook in an email made users seven times more likely to take action on the LinkedIn website.
Even the time of delivery is an essential part of the puzzle. What day of the week and what time are users most likely to be thinking about your product and willing to engage? With Realtor.com, their sweet spot is towards the end of the week as home-buyers start to stake out open houses. Other businesses need to determine their customers’ habits specific to their industry.
“The motto is ‘Always Be Testing,’” Johnson says. “There are always new challenges, and this is why I think it’s such a fascinating medium in general.”
One of the other critical challenges email marketers face is mastering mobile. “We need to understand what our emails look like when they’re displayed on mobile screens,” says Johnson, “making sure they’re responsive and delivering a clear user experience.”
As important, is knowing what happens once a client clicks within an email. Deep-linking into apps is critical to create a seamless experience for Johnson, and if a user doesn’t have the app downloaded, or open, and clicks through to the mobile web from an email, Realtor.com will prompt the user to download or open the app for a better user experience. It’s connecting all these dots that makes Johnson see email as part of a much bigger picture in the total product experience.
Join this packed webinar for as Johnson will share more insights and best practices on leveraging the power of email marketing — and VB analyst will divulge the most helpful email solutions based on VB’s cutting-edge research.
Don’t miss out!
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to: Boost sales and cement customer relationships Address implementation challenges Discover best practices for high tier email marketing Choose the right, highly-rated email marketing solution for your business.
Panelists: Jon Cifuentes, VentureBeat Research Analyst Nate Johnson, CMO, Move Inc. (Realtor.com)
Moderator: Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
This webinar is sponsored by Sendgrid. All research is conducted entirely independently.