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Kath Pay

Member since September 2014Contact Kath

Kath Pay is CEO at Holistic Email Marketing, winner of the ANA/EEC’s Thought Leader of the Year 2021 Award, and the author of the award-winning Amazon #1 best-seller "Holistic Email Marketing: A practical philosophy to revolutionise your business and delight your customers."

Articles by Kath All articles by Kath

  • How To Craft a Compelling Subject Line in Email Insider Europe on 11/13/2015

    Subject lines are always a challenge to most email marketers. Here are a few key do's and don'ts to keep in mind when you write your next one.

  • More Golden Opportunities To Boost Your Email Marketing ROI You May Be Missing in Email Insider Europe on 10/01/2015

    Picking up where I left off in my last post, here are more ways to move up from "good" ROI to "amazing" ROI with basic tweaks, updates and alterations:

  • Are You Missing These Golden Opportunities To Boost Your Email Marketing ROI? in Email Insider Europe on 09/16/2015

    Like life, email marketing is full of missed opportunities. It happens because email can deliver a substantial ROI with seemingly little effort on your part. But your email could move up from "good" ROI to "amazing" ROI with just a few basic tweaks, updates and alterations.

  • Getting The Call-To-Action Right For Email in Email Insider Europe on 09/02/2015

    When creating call-to-actions, be mindful of the fact that email is a push channel and the Web site is a pull channel-a key difference oft-forgotten when creating call-to-actions for emails.

  • How To Craft a Compelling Subject Line in Email Insider Europe on 08/18/2015

    Subject lines are always a challenge to most email marketers. Here are a few key do's and don'ts to keep in mind when you write your next one.

  • Moving Up The Purchase Funnel: Making The Most Of Low-Hanging Fruit in Email Insider Europe on 08/11/2015

    As email marketers, we're all well aware of how easy it is to re-market to and convert the low-hanging fruit within the ecommerce customer journey using cart recovery emails. These cart recovery emails target those customers who abandon after adding items to their basket. On average, 75% of carts started are abandoned, and 20% of those who are sent remarketing emails can be recovered. But what about the low-hanging fruit further up the customer purchase funnel? Sure, they're not quite as low-hanging and not as easy to convert as those who have abandoned after reaching the checkout pages. Generally speaking, the stronger the purchase intent, the higher the conversion rate. However, implementing recovery tactics further up the funnel still pays handsome dividends.

  • What's In A Name? in Email Insider Europe on 07/16/2015

    Anyone who has ever heard me speak knows that I'm a huge fan of focusing on the objective, whether it's focusing on an email programme, a newsletter or an individual email. That's what will set you on the path to conversion. I'm going to take this one step further now and propose that for every email programme we set up, we focus on the objective of this programme and name it accordingly.

  • Email Conversion Optimisation Panel in Email Insider Europe on 07/09/2015

    I had the pleasure of moderating the first panel at the fantastic three-day Email Insider's Summit in Portugal, joined by an expert team of email marketers as panelists. Panos Melissaropoulos of Moosend, Sana Dubarry of Epsilon and Kay Kerman, an email marketing consultant, all shared their insights on the best ways to optimise for conversions with your email marketing programmes.

  • Let's Put The Marketing Back Into Email Marketing in Email Insider Europe on 06/19/2015

    Over the years I've discovered that many email marketers perform email marketing as their job, yet they don't use many of the basic principles of marketing that other channels, both online and offline, use. It seems many email marketers are not actually focused on marketing at all, but instead simply emphasize creating and sending

  • Subject Lines: More Than Meets The Eye in Email Insider Europe on 06/04/2015

    Attend any email marketing conference that has a session on subject lines, and I can guarantee it will be filled. Our fascination with them isn't a mystery, as in essence we're all on the search for the silver bullet: a subject line that will always work. Sadly, that silver bullet doesn't exist.

Comments by Kath All comments by Kath

  • Did John Lewis Just 'Borrow' Christmas? From Burberry 2015? by Sean Hargrave (London Blog on 11/10/2016)

    Hmm...not sure about this Sean. What jumped (yes pun intended) out at me when I first watched it was all the dog on the trampoline videos that I've watched and enjoyed this year - here's an example of one of them. You just can't help but smile when watching them.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcwij-yN8YIt just seems to me that they've picked up on a very 'enjoyable to watch' theme and been inspired by it. Ps I did the search and poor Buster wasn't even on page 1 of the results :-(

  • Leveraging Customer Inertia by Kath Pay (Email Insider Europe on 05/08/2015)

    Thanks for your comment Paul - I agree - treating your customers respectfully is key however I'm not sure what you mean by accurately? Personalisation comes in many forms and doesn't always start or end with a customer's name or indeed any other part of their personal life. An excellent example of personalisation is an automated email which has leveraged a touch point that the customer themselves have initiated...such as a cart abandonment email. The innate nature of these emails are personal. Only that particular customer is receiving that particular email at that particular time and the more customer service oriented the messaging is, the more successful the results are. This is also a great example which shows that customer service can be delivered through personalisation. The majority of our customer's additionally find that through this peronalised customer service email, they have an increased AOV - sometimes by 900%! Obviously not only does personalisation work for the the brand in this case, but it also works for and is a valuable service for the customer.

  • Your Last Email From Xxxx by Kath Pay (Email Insider Europe on 04/16/2015)

    Hi Christine,This is always a controversial subject. My belief (from having been a deliverability expert as well as being a marketer) is that UNLESS you have a problem with high unsubscribes and/or high spam complaints, then you shouldn't need to take action to remove the inactives from your list. Particularly so IF you don't have a single customer view of your subscribers i.e. if you aren't able to match their online AND offline purchases with your email database, then you don't know if you're removing a subscriber who buys regularly from you but doesn't open or click your emails, but is instead motivated by your subject line to go to another channel. The UK DMA, when survey consumers, found that that 35% of consumers will go to the website via another route (i.e. not click) and 30% will go directly to shop -t his report is called the Email Tracking Report 2014.Massimo of Mailup wrote a good roundup of a panel from EEC this year in which Outlook themselves, said to not remove inactives - as you're leaving money on the table. However, Gmail recommends a ramping down tactic with asking the BIG question after you've tried everything (and assuming you have a single customer view)http://blog.mailup.com/2015/02/sender-reputation-personalized-deliverability-inbox-engagement-really-means/

  • The Grass Isn't Always Greener In The Primary Tab by Kath Pay (Email Insider Europe on 03/13/2015)

    Hi Jason - thanks for your comment. Yes often we get so tied up with Best Practices and just getting our emails out that we forget to include the the consumer's mindset in our plans :-)

  • Is Double Opt-In Really A Best Practice For Europe? by Kath Pay (Email Insider Europe on 12/11/2014)

    Hi Greg and thanks for your reply. Congratulations on achieving a 90% subscribe rate with your clients' DOI - that's brilliant but unfortunately as compared to the majority of my clients here in the UK, not at all typical. I agree that it has much to do with the message (more on that later), but I also wonder whether it has something to do with 'trends'. For example, do the majority of subscriptions in Spain require a DOI? If so, then, as this potentially is the 'norm' and the customers are educated in what is expected of them - then combined with your excellent messaging skills - the results are impressive as you have shown. In the UK DOI is not a trend and as I explained in my previous reply many are unaware of the process. Back to the messaging side of things. I'm a big fan of crafting a compelling message. I'm also aware that first impressions are unbelievably important - and this includes emails. So when combining a carefully crafted message and a Welcome email together - then you stand a good chance of converting them -either immediately or in the future. The problem is that many DOI processes are neither welcoming nor carefully crafted and I believe this is where some of the problem lies....within the 'out of the box' solution that has not been customised. And this is where we as marketers need to take responsibility and ensure we create the most frictionless DOI process possible. One of the problems is that it is hard to calculate the 'loss factor' of using DOI and most marketers don't even try to do so and as such are not aware of how many subscribers they're losing to this process. As I said before, we marketers need to take responsibility and we should know what the loss factor is and not just blindly continuing to do DOI without understand the potential negative impact it can have on your business. The only point I would differ with you on is when you say "the best way to get success is through double optin." On the basis of my clients definition of 'success' as being increased revenue (and all that goes along with this - happy customers etc) and after calculating the 'loss factor', I've used their subscribe:conversion rate to forecast potential future conversions if we were to change over to being SOI. On the basis of this I've changed many of my clients from being DOI to SOI with great success. The bottom line is, the brand is happy because they have made more revenue because they used SOI and the customer is happy because they've been able to subscribe and been sent offers that they've taken advantage of. Success is two-sides of the same coin. The brand wants to achieve their objectives (sell, get downloads etc) and the customer wants to achieve their objectives (buy, read whitepapers etc). Putting it simply, one wants to sell and the other wants to buy, and as marketers it's our job to try and ensure this happens with as minimal friction as possible in order to enable both sides to achieve their objectives.

  • Is Double Opt-In Really A Best Practice For Europe? by Kath Pay (Email Insider Europe on 12/11/2014)

    Hi Marcus, Many thanks for your lengthy and emotive reply - it's good to see you have taken the time to consider at length whether DOI is suitable for your business. Which, by the way, was the message I was wanting to impart - not a blanket message that DOI wasn't any good - just that each and every marketer needs to review their own situation and determine whether it's suitable for them. The majority of UK and Australian students I've taught and clients that I've worked with over the past 5 years (numbering in the hundreds) have not used DOI and they've not had deliverability issues solely due to using SOI. It appears that your main concern is spambots and there are other options available other than DOI which will block the bots from subscribing (and no I'm not talking about CAPTCHA, as it's not a great experience for the subscriber/customer), such as the dragndrop game that ubokia have implemented. Not only does it stop the bots but it also gamefies the form and makes for an enjoyable experience for your customer. A win/win for all. With regards to DOI being legislative requirement within most EU countries, I'm afraid that you have been misinformed as this is not true. Finally, with regards to the customer experience and expectations, having questioned hundreds of email markers on this subject I am always surprised to discover that many of them are not familiar with DOI. They are not aware that they have to click the link in the email, otherwise they won't be signed up. So if this is the case with email marketers, then imagine the lack of knowledge within the average subscriber who doesn't perform email marketing as a living - hence why the loss rate of 40-60% is so high. So if we have a look at this, what in fact are the subscribers who need to fulfil the requirements of a DOI, but fail to, thinking? Maybe something along the lines of "Where are my emails from xx brand? I signed up and they're not sending me anything!" It can turn into being a frustrating and bad customer experience, especially when they (being very eager to hear from xx brand) go and re-subscribe again only to find that they're already on the database - yet are not receiving any emails. Again - all I am recommending is for the email marketer to take everything into consideration (including anti-spambot measures) before implementing DOI as I don't believe (based upon my lengthy experience of working with hundreds of UK, European and Australian clients and marketers) that DOI should be implemented simply because it is touted as being a Best Practice.

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