Ajay Goel, Author at GMass Blog

HubSpot is a leading inbound marketing and sales platform. GMass is a leading cold email and email marketing platform which excels at Gmail mail merges. And… fortunately, the two play quite nice together.

Let’s take a look at how you can use GMass’s BCC feature to automatically log all your outgoing emails into HubSpot CRM.

How to Log Outgoing GMass Emails in Hubspot

The goal here is having emails you send via GMass “logged” in HubSpot’s CRM. This means that HubSpot will:

Be aware you sent an email to that person.
Extract the email address from the sent email.
Then either add the person as a brand new HubSpot CRM contact and log the email to that contact — or, if you already have them in your HubSpot account as a contact, simply log that this email was sent to that contact.

Set up your Hubspot CRM account

First off, you’ll need a HubSpot account. For this tutorial, I’ll assume you have signed up for HubSpot CRM Free account.

(Note, although it asks for a website URL and company name, they indicate in their own help document that they do not validate either of these , so it’s OK to enter a fake company name and fake URL if you’re merely trying out HubSpot).

Before we do anything, let’s verify that your HubSpot CRM Contacts does not yet contain the people you are about to email. To see that, click on Contacts on the top menu bar in HubSpot, and it will bring up this page:

Notice there are only two sample contacts shown. These were provided by HubSpot at signup.

Here you can see that there are only two contacts, and these are just fake sample contacts provided by HubSpot when you first sign up. (This situation will soon change after we use GMass and BCC.)

Get your Hubspot BCC address

To log your sent emails in Hubspot you’ll need a special email address known in HubSpot terminology as your BCC address.

To get that address, make sure you’re logged into your HubSpot CRM account.

Click on the user icon in the upper right hand side of the HubSpot screen. This will open a dropdown menu. From that menu, select Profile & Preferences.

Clicking Profile & Preferences will take you to the Settings page in HubSpot CRM. The BCC address is pretty buried in here. On the left hand side menu, under Data Management click on Objects and then click on Activities.

On the activities page, click the tab to switch to the Email Logging options.

Scroll down and you’ll find a section called Manual Logging. There you’ll see a section titled “BCC Address (Outgoing)” with your address. It will be of the form “[email protected]”. Click Copy to copy this email address to the clipboard.

Compose your email in Gmail

Head over to Gmail and compose a GMass campaign email as you normally would, with the recipients of the email included in the To field of the Gmail compose window. (You could also connect a Google Sheet for this campaign. For simplicity’s sake in this example, I just put three emails in the To field.)

Click anywhere in the To field in order to reveal the option for including a CC or BCC in this email. (Alternately, you can use Ctrl-Shift-B while in the Gmail compose window).

Click on BCC to create a BCC field.

Now, paste your Hubspot BCC address into the BCC field.

Your unique HubSpot BCC address is now a part of this campaign. That address will be BCCed on every email.

BCC in place

Sending your campaign

Now you can simply send via GMass as you normally would by clicking on the red GMass button.

At this point you’ll receive that a warning popup. That’s because you included an email address in the BCC field of this email and GMass is making sure you intended to do this.

(Note: The reason for this check is important: if there is anything included in the Gmail BCC field, GMass will send a copy of all of the emails sent to all of the recipients in your list. That will mean that the address in BCC can receive hundreds of emails — so we want to be sure that’s on purpose. In this case, that’s fine, because we do want HubSpot CRM’s BCC address to receive a copy of all these emails so that it can log the recipients as contacts.)

Click “Yes, I’m sure” in the warning popup window. GMass will then send out your emails.

As usual, your emails went out as individual emails to your list of recipients in the To field, but also, in each case, to the HubSpot BCC address as a BCC — meaning your recipients will not know that a copy of the email they got was also sent to HubSpot (which is what you want).

Here’s an example of one email from my Sent folder. I can see there was a BCC. The recipient wouldn’t see that.

Finding your new contacts in Hubspot

Now let’s see what happened back in HubSpot CRM. Go back to that tab and make sure you have the Contacts page open (if not, click on Contacts on the menu bar at the top).

You will see the three people you emailed in this example have automatically been added to your HubSpot Contacts, and their names (if available), email addresses, and the timestamp of last activity with this contact (in this case, the sending of this email) has been logged.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully logged your GMass recipients into HubSpot CRM!

If you’d like to explore one of these newly-added contacts within HubSpot CRM, that’s easy. Click on the person’s name to bring up their whole profile page (or click Preview to see a simpler look). Note that this profile has a copy of the email and the time when you sent it.

Finally, in the future, if you send further emails to these same recipients and Bcc it to the Bcc address in HubSpot CRM, then HubSpot CRM will simply log the emails to these contacts, since they already exist in your HubSpot CRM account. However, if you include a new email address in the list of recipients, HubSpot CRM will create a new contact for that person as well as log the email that was sent to them.

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail

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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

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As the developer of two Chrome extensions, GMass and Wordzen, I’m always on the lookout for what other Chrome extension developers are doing. Mailtrack is a popular Chrome extension for Gmail that tracks individually sent emails. GMass tracks sent emails too, but it’s mostly used for batch email campaigns, although you can use GMass’s tracking features on individually sent emails as well. But I digress…in this post, I’ll focus on Mailtrack’s brilliance.

Mailtrack and Chrome extensions

MailTrack is one of the most popular Gmail Chrome extensions on Earth, with nearly 900,000 users, according to the Chrome Web Store. I admit, I’m envious of their growth and would love to see GMass have that many users.

One of the limitations of Chrome extensions has always been that they only work on the desktop, and not on mobile. GMass only works on the desktop, not on mobile. Wordzen only works on the desktop, not on mobile. Same with Mailtrack.

So when I saw their announcement that they could now show you the checkmarks indicating whether an email has been opened in the Gmail mobile app, my immediate reaction was, “No way, impossible!”

I had to see for myself. First, I turned ON the mobile option on the Mailtrack Settings page.

The checkmarks on the iPhone Gmail app

I sent a tracked email using Mailtrack to [email protected] from my desktop, and then looked at it in the Sent folder on both the desktop and iPhone.

Sure enough, the famous Mailtrack checkmarks were there.

Mailtrack shows the checkmarks in the Gmail app on both iPhone and Android by applying Labels that are named ✔ and ✔✔.

But how on Earth did they do this?

Did they hack the Gmail app? Did they develop a Gmail Add-on, which is a new way of developing functionality for the Gmail mobile app that was introduced just six months ago? Maybe, but that sill wouldn’t make sense because Gmail Add-ons currently only work on Android, not on iOS.

A closer look, and I discovered the brilliance of the Mailtrack developers.

The answer? Labels.

They creatively apply Gmail Labels to show whether an email has been opened. Looking at my account, I found two new Labels had been created, the first with one checkmark and another with two checkmarks.

Mailtrack creates two new Labels in your account, a single-checkmark Label and a double-checkmark Label.

When an email is sent, Mailtrack programatically applies the ✔ Label. When an email is opened by its recipient, Mailtrack removes the ✔ Label and applies the ✔✔ Label. Since the mobile Gmail app always shows the Labels that are applied to a message, you see checkmarks next to the message! Just brilliant.

But wait, if they’re applying these Labels now, won’t they also show up in the desktop UI?

No, they made it so that the Chrome extension hides the checkmark Labels when applied to a message, so that the user instead sees the more aesthetically pleasing checkmarks in the message list view.

The more aesthetically pleasing checkmarks look like this and show up when viewing a list of messages.

In the Gmail web interface, the Mailtrack Chrome extension shows the checkmarks in an aesthetically pleasing way, without the use of Labels.

Hiding the Labels in the web version of Gmail

In the example below, you can see the Sent Mail with the “✔✔” Label applied in addition to another Label, “Client Projects”, that I manually applied myself. But only the Client Projects Label shows next to the Subject. Where is the “✔✔” Label?

The Mailtrack Chrome extension is preventing its own checkmark Labels from displaying.

The Mailtrack Chrome extension is hiding it.

We can prove this by removing the Mailtrack extension and reloading Gmail.

Voila, now you see the checkmark Labels applied to a Sent Mail.

The Mailtrack Chrome extension hides its own Labels in the Gmail web interface. Deleting the Mailtrack Chrome extension reveals the checkmark Labels.

Since the UI of the mobile app can’t be altered by a Chrome extension or anything else, the checkmark Labels do show on mobile, which is exactly what they want.

Summary

The Chrome extension alters the UI to show the more aesthetically pleasing checkmarks while hiding the checkmark Labels. The native Gmail mobile app always shows the checkmark Labels and nothing else, since developers don’t have the ability to change the UI of the Gmail mobile app.

This is the most brilliant use of Gmail Labels that I’ve ever seen.

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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Sending a mail merge in Gmail from a list of email addresses is very simple with GMass.

That list can be copied from many different applications and Gmail will automatically parse it into separate email addresses. For example, the list could be from a text file, an Excel spreadsheet, a CRM system, or any other text.

Even better, if the email addresses are also part of your Gmail Contacts, you can easily personalize those recipients’ emails.

Here’s how to quickly send a mail merge using copy and paste:

Start with a list of email addresses. Again, the application where the list is saved can be anything as long as you can copy from it and into the clipboard as text. This would include such options as Notepad, Word, Excel, or a CRM, such as Salesforce. The email addresses in the list can be separated by, for example, commas, spaces, lines, tabs, or cells.
Next, copy the text. You can select the text as you normally would in a word processing program and copy it using either the menu, or Ctrl-C for copy. You’ll find that you don’t have to bother to exactly end your selection area where your list ends—it’s fine to just highlight any area that includes only the list.
Copying a list of email addresses from Excel.

Once you’ve copied it, that text is held in the clipboard, ready to be pasted somewhere.
Paste the text containing the email addresses into the “To” field in a Gmail compose window. Either right-click in the “To” field and select Paste:
Pasting the copied email addresses right into Gmail.

Or, you can use Ctrl-V to paste in the email addresses.
You will immediately see that Gmail has parsed your list, recognized them as email addresses, and then populated the To field with them.
Gmail parses pasted-in email addresses.
You’re now ready to write your message . Write it as you normally would compose an email in Gmail (see the “Bonus” below for how to personalize emails that are in your Gmail Contacts!).
Email is written and ready to click the GMass button to send out.
When you’re ready to send, click the GMass button to send, and an individual email will be sent to each recipient in the list.
The emails from the pasted in list are now shown as having been sent.

Bonus: Personalizing emails that are in your Gmail Contacts.

For email addresses that are in your Gmail Contacts, there is an easy option to personalize them.

In the Gmail compose window’s message body area, when addressing the recipient, you can use GMass’s curly braces syntax. You can do this either by directly typing it in, like this:

A Gmail compose window showing user using curly braces to personalize the email. — Personalizing email manually using curly braces.

Or you can use the handy GMass Settings window. To do that, click the red upward pointing arrow

to pop up the GMass Settings window. In the green area of this window, find the dropdown to the right of “Personalize:”

and select either the recipient’s first name (as shown above), last name, or email address. For example, selecting the first name option results in GMass automatically pasting this into the compose window: {FirstName|Friend}.

You can then use this in a salutation, something like:

Dear {FirstName|Friend},

The way GMass will interpret this line is as follows: if the email being processed is in your Gmail Contacts, it will substitute the recipient’s first name (producing, for example, “Dear Robert,”). If the email is not in your Gmail Contacts, it will simply substitute “Friend” (producing “Dear Friend,”).

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews

Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.

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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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In October 2017, Google released its Gmail “Add-on” platform, allowing developers to create add-ons for Gmail that work on both desktop and mobile (well Android right now, iOS coming later). I’m currently working on a Gmail Add-on for GMass that will let you see the campaign history for a contact when you’re viewing an email from that contact.

You can read the Google documentation on how to write an add-on, which I’ve basically memorized at this point. But if you’re like me, you’re going to run into some stumbling blocks while writing your Gmail Add-on, and you won’t have a place to turn, because this development platform is so new that these issues aren’t documented.

What exactly is an “Add-on” anyway?

If you’re confused, thinking that Add-ons have been around forever and all this hoopla is nothing new, you are partially right. The term “add-on” has been used in other contexts for far longer, like Firefox’s Add-ons, which are the Firefox equivalent of Chrome extensions. Many people use the term “add-on” to describe what is otherwise just a Chrome extension that extends Gmail. Google choosing the term “add-on” probably wasn’t the best idea, but since they did, let’s clear up the confusion. Chrome extensions are pieces of software that are installed in Chrome and can enhance the functionality of any website, Gmail being one of them. They are listed in the Chrome Web Store. Chrome extensions only work on desktop and not on mobile. If you are a Firefox user, the equivalent of Chrome extensions are Firefox add-ons. The new Gmail “Add-on” is a Gmail specific piece of software that enhances Gmail, and it has the benefit of working on both desktop and mobile, via the native Gmail app on Android (iOS support supposedly coming soon). It is possible to write a Chrome extension that does the equivalent of what your Gmail Add-on does, except for working on mobile. It is not possible to write a Gmail Add-on that does everything your Chrome extension does, unless what your Chrome extension does is limited to being present in the Gmail sidebar and only being active when an email is being read. Chrome extensions only work on the desktop. Gmail Add-ons work on desktop and mobile. Chrome extensions offer greater flexibility than Gmail Add-ons, in terms of look, feel, and the code that can be executed. Gmail Add-ons are more controlled, limiting you to certain fonts, layouts, and user interface controls.

No need to reload

As you’re writing your Add-on and testing it, you’ll be making changes to the HEAD deployment of your Google Apps Script project. To save your changes, you just hit the SAVE button in the Google Script editor, and then in another window, where you have Gmail loaded with your Add-on running, you do NOT need to RELOAD. Just open up another email, wait for your Add-on to present itself, and it will reflect your updated code. If you notice that your Add-on appears a bit too fast, then it might be cached, in which case you should reload Gmail.

Baffling error messages

While debugging, the error messages are just plain wrong occasionally. One of the things you’ll learn to do is to write navigation flows, so your user can navigate smoothly between cards. If you make a slight mistake in how you do this, you’ll be told that the updateCard method doesn’t exist.

A confusing error message, because the updateCard method definitely exists.

Of course it exists. You just didn’t build your card quite right. I don’t know why exactly this doesn’t work, but note the commented lines. If you uncomment the “var” lines, and comment out the line at the top, it does work, without the runtime error.

The Universal Actions are hiding

Where in the world are your Universal Actions? I wanted to add a Help menu item to my cards, so since its context-independent, I figured I’d use a Universal Action. You then go to run your Add-on, but it doesn’t show. It’s there; it’s just not obvious where. Click the three dots in the upper right. Since Google doesn’t give you a screenshot showing where the Universal Actions go, I will:

Want the user’s email address?

You’ll probably want the email address of the logged-in user, because that’s an essential part of the process of determining who this person is and what account on your web app to log this user into. I spent hours trying to figure this out. Google uses a default scope of https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email as part of your project, but the question is — once you have access to retrieve the email address, how do you write the Google Apps Script code to retrieve the email address? Googling it will lead you to Session.getActiveUser().getEmail. This will work fine during testing, because the Google Apps Script project owner will likely be the same as the Gmail account from which you’re testing. Once you test from a different Gmail account, you’ll be stumped as to why it’s returning an empty string. There are forum posts about this, and the solution appears to be using getEffectiveUser instead of getActiveUser. Why that works and the other doesn’t is beyond me, but if anyone else has any insight into this issue, I’d love to see a comment below.

What’s in a name?

The UI style guide states this specific rule:

Don’t include the words "Google" or "Gmail" in your add-on name.

However if you look at the G Suite Marketplace Gmail Add-on Store, you’ll note that pretty much everyone is breaking this rule. You want to get the name of your Add-on just right. The name that your user will see in the header of your Add-on the name specified in your manifest file. This name can be different from the name you use in the Gmail Add-on Store though. However, those aren’t the only names your user will see as they interact with and authorize your Add-on. They will also see the name associated with your OAuth client project for the Add-on authorization. They will also then see the name associated with your OAuth client project for authorization into your web app, assuming your Add-on works in conjunction with a web-app which most do, in order to be useful at all. And then there’s the name that only you, the developer, will see: the name of your Google Apps Script project.

Can’t install Add-on in test accounts

When building your Gmail Add-on, it’s easiest if the Google account that owns the Google Apps Script project is also the Gmail account that you are using for testing. As the documentation says, you can run a development Add-on in another Gmail account by specifying its Deployment ID, but if your project is owned by an @gmail.com account, and you try to load the Add-on into a G Suite account (like @wordzen.com), the Add-on won’t load, and you’ll be told it’s an invalid Add-on. Don’t worry. Your Add-on still exists, but for some reason Google won’t let you load developer add-ons owned by a Gmail.com account from a G Suite account.

You can’t install an unpublished Add-on owned by a gmail.com account in a G Suite account.

Publishing problems

There are a bunch of steps to actually publish your Gmail Add-on publicly to the G Suite Marketplace. After preparing all the text and image assets Google asks you for, you might find that the little checkbox at the bottom where you can tell Google that your project is indeed a Gmail Add-on is disabled and grayed out.

If you attempt to publish your Gmail Add-on using an @gmail.com account, this checkbox will be disabled.

Now you could fire up Chrome’s Developer Tools and try to re-enable that checkbox yourself (I didn’t try this), but I suspect Google is smarter than to let that fly. I went to publish and it was grayed out. I was publishing from an @gmail.com account — the same @gmail.com account that I used to create all my other OAuth client projects for my other live products, and the same @gmail.com account I use to manage my Chrome Web Store extensions. On a hunch, I logged out, and logged in with my @wordzen.com account, and voila! — the checkbox was enabled. I guess Google is only allowing G Suite users to publish Gmail Add-ons publicly. Now that doesn’t mean your G Suite account has to own the Google Apps Script project. In my case, my @gmail.com account still owns the project, but my G Suite account has EDIT permissions on the project, and according to the publishing guidelines, that allows my G Suite account to publish the project.

Double authorization

In most cases, you’ll want your Add-on to authorize with your own web app. That means your user will have two sets of authorizations when first setting up the Add-on. They will go through the authorization process so that your Add-on gets permission to run the scopes you’ve selected. That means your Add-on code will be able to access the user’s email address, and the Gmail Message Id that’s currently opened and all that jazz. Then, your user will go through the process of logging in or creating an account with your web app, because chances are, any useful Add-on will need to tie information about the email message they’re viewing to information from your web app. That double authorization might be confusing, and might make your user think there’s a bug in your software, so be sure to use a custom authorization prompt following this process, rather than the default. If you use the default prompt, your user is sure to think something is wrong, being asked to authenticate twice. Additionally, the docs state this:

The above widget must use the OnClose.RELOAD_ADD_ON setting in its OpenLink object to ensure the add-on reloads after authorization is received.

but I found it not necessary. In fact, it’s not even in the example. I found that the Add-on frame reloads automatically after the authorization popup is closed, regardless of whether authorization was successful or not.

Still confused?

I hope this article clarified the process of creating and publishing a Gmail Add-on, but you may run into stumbling blocks that I didn’t. If that’s the case, head over to the Stack Overflow section of Gmail Add-ons.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

So, in Part 1 of “Growing Your Email Marketing List the Right Way,” we introduced the subject of email marketing lists and addressed a number of strategies that can be used to grow these lists. (You can find Part 1 here in case you missed it). However, due to the extensive nature of the strategies, we couldn’t cover all the strategies we had in mind. Kindly find the remaining strategies addressed here, along with a conclusion on the topic.

Create Value-adding Content

Develop value-adding content in your emails using the following email marketing tips:

Awesome Subject Lines

Like the first email you send after a sign-up, your subject lines should be punchy and attention-grabbing to encourage the users to open and read the email. Most studies conducted regarding subject lines report that a majority of readers love short subject lines, meaning you should avoid getting too wordy with yours.

Straight to the Point Content

Avoid going in circles with your email or including too much fluff on the emails, as this will bore the hell out of your readers. If you have something to say, go straight to the point and keep it as short as possible while balancing your use of images and texts in the email.

Aesthetic Appeal

Yes, readers will judge your email (and may even decide to opt out of your list) if whatever you send to them isn’t appealing to the eyes. As such, you should steer away from plain emails—instead opting for well-designed and responsive emails that can suit all manner of email-accessing devices.

Personalization of Content

Using individual details such as past purchasing behaviors, purchase-based demographics (i.e. age and race) and location of the subscribers; you can easily segment your email list to ensure that your messages give your members the best personalized experiences. You’ll keep your subscribers glued to your emails while attracting many others who are seeking an organization that can offer such personalized experiences.

Use Brand Ambassadors alongside Valuable Content

A-list celebrities, prominent sports personalities, thought-provoking industry leaders, and other respected opinion leaders in the society can push your brand to higher levels if you involve them in email marketing as your brand ambassadors. By talking about joining your list or offering testimonials about the benefits of being members of your email list, the general public will feel like being part of your brand is cool, motivating them to join the list as well. Nike, Apple, Disney and Microsoft are some examples of top companies that have actively embraced the use of celebrities as marketing brand ambassadors.

Tap into the Value of Preference Centers

Preference centers allow members of your email marketing list to customize the mailing services to their preferences, which in turn reduces the chances of them unsubscribing, complaining, or even marking your emails as spam.

A good example of how a preference center can save you lots of trouble is by allowing members to decide how frequently they want to receive emails, or what type of content they want to receive from you under the “manage your preferences” section. By giving them this control, the users are more likely to respond positively to your email marketing campaigns.

Additionally, your email preference centers can include tools like QAs that ask your members about their product/service preferences and interests. Once you have such information, you can tailor your email deliveries to address these needs in a personalized way, which would—in turn—encourage more engagement with your audience.

Email Marketing: Amazon’s preference center — Amazon’s preference center

Emphasize Focus on Email Deliverability

It doesn’t matter how catchy, informative or well-designed your email marketing campaigns are if they won’t be delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes. 21% of email routinely goes undelivered, according to ReturnPath’s 2016 Deliverability Benchmark Report, and this greatly reduced the purpose of the email marketing campaign. Keeping this in mind; your top priority when sending any email to members of your list should be ensuring that the messages get delivered to your customers’ inboxes. Below are some of the email deliverability tips you can use to encourage success in this process:

Monitor and Evaluate Your Email Engagement Metrics

A majority of today’s email marketing templates and programs have provisions for monitoring your engagement with your customers, using data on clicks, opens, shares, likes etc. Monitoring this engagement not only provides useful information about your top email marketing campaigns, but it also helps you learn about what your customers like/hate most, thus allowing you to target the campaigns and email deliverables accordingly.

Below is an example of how you can monitor the delivery of your emails using Hubspot’s Sent/Delivery Rate tab:

An example of how you can monitor the delivery of your email marketing using Hubspot’s Sent/Delivery Rate tab

In the example that follows below, a highlight is given of how the Hubspot email tool can help you to monitor the Open and Click rates of your emails:

Email Marketing: Open and Click Rates

Cleaning Your Email List

Inactive addresses, unknown users and emails that generally end up with hard bounces can be very misleading to your company, giving you false numbers about how big your audience is or how many emails get delivered to customers’ inboxes. To ensure deliverability and avoid sending messages to ghost subscribers, be sure to clean your email marketing list, getting rid of such “stale” and inactive subscribers periodically (like in every three or six months, depending on how big your email list is).

Pay special attention to High-Value Customers

It goes without saying that every single member of your mailing list is important. Even so, there certain members whose value is bound to stand out, either because they are more engaged in your campaigns, or they make more purchases. When you identify these high-value customers, it is important that your communications and offers are customized such that your messages are delivered in a timely and personalized manner to them.

Avoid Inorganic Mailing lists

As mentioned earlier, the buying, borrowing, renting and sharing of mailing lists will more often than not lead to poor engagement rates with your audience, with most of the people in such lists often opting to spam your mails thus no delivery. If you’re looking for good email deliverability, stick to organic subscriptions—those customers that willingly opted into your email list.

Test Your Email Campaigns Before Sending

Once you have all the above-mentioned best-practice strategies in check, make a point of testing your email marketing campaigns on a small scale, either within your office or even by sending it to a small group of subscribers (and requesting for their feedback regarding these emails). By sending these emails and getting feedback about them, you are sure to learn about things that are working and those that need to be changed before being sent on a large scale.

Testing your email marketing campaign

FINAL REMARKS

Building a quality, user-engaged email marketing list is a process that takes time and involves quite a number of resources. That said, taking the time to build your emailing list the right way will help you avoid many obstacles (like quick unsubscriptions and spamming of your emails), most of which are often faced by companies that use inorganic email lists. Opting into your email marketing program gives control to the subscriber, and the availability of tools such as the preference center gives them more freedom to customize their needs and interests. In turn, this encourages better email engagement with the customers, leading to desired conversions for your company and satisfied (and returning) customers.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?

Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.

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Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

In the not-so-distant past, the buying, borrowing, renting and sharing of mailing lists were among the hottest trends in the email marketing industry. That isn’t the case anymore thanks to the increasingly growing preference of original user-engaged email marketing lists. The explanation behind this change is simple; building an engaged subscriber list often leads to far-lasting benefits compared to the rented, bought or shared mailing lists.

If you want to continue with the oft-futile and banal practice of trying to flesh out conversions from the skeletons of inorganically-built email marketing lists, then—by all means—be our guest and knock yourself out! But if you are all about growing your mailing lists organically and enjoying the endless benefits that come with them, then please follow this guide as we take you through well-proven strategies to help you build and maintain an engaged email marketing list.

Provide Multiple Email Sign-up Opportunities

Below are some of the best email sign-up options you can use to build your email list quickly:

Home Page

Your site’s home page will often be the most visited page on your site, so including an opt-in email sign-up section on it can do wonders for you. Not only does this give primary visibility to your site and its offerings, it also centralizes your engagements with the customers.

Sub Pages

Depending on the nature of your site and its products/services, you can include sign-up calls to action on your subpages in areas such as on the sidebars, in the footer and in your top navigation. Creative pop-up calls to action could also be an option here.

Welcome and Thank You Messages

Receiving a “welcome” and “thank you” message whenever someone completes a form, downloads or installs something from your site is an excellent opportunity for you to call the users to an email sign-up action. In this call-to-action, be sure to include short and appealing information about the benefits that will come from joining the emailing marketing list.

A study by Marketing Sherpa confirms this viewpoint by showing that welcome emails were the highest performing email marketing messages, as is highlighted in the picture below:

The Marketing Sherpa

Blog

If your website has a blog section, it will likely be one of the most visited areas, making it a great place to target your visitors with a call to action for email sign-up, be it in the top navigation or on the sidebar of the blog contents.

Supplemental Leads

Signing up for a product or other online forms can be tailored to include email sign-up opportunities as part of the package subscribers are opting into.

Supplemental Leads

In Person Sign-ups

Conferences, product meetings, and other related physical company events provide a perfect opportunity to not only market your brand in person but to also ask the people you meet to sign-up for your company’s mailing list. You can do this by bringing your own equipment to help sign-up these people or guide them on how to sign-up from their own devices.

Optimize Your Sign-up and Opt-in Pages

Here a couple of ways you can optimize your email marketing sign-up and opt-in pages:

Offer Incentives

Human beings are naturally self-serving, so signing up for your emailing list just to be part of your community may not be a convincing enough reason. On the flipside, offering them an incentive–like a simple gift or coupon upon signing up to the list–will most-likely entice and captivate their self-interests, making them opt-in to the subscription.

Offer Incentives

Have a Clear Email Sign-up Section

If you want users to sign up for your email list, make the process simple for them by having visible sign-up and unsubscribe options on your targeted pages. Consider a clear call to action placed appropriately on your site, preferably in an easily accessible area that has no competing ads or other attention-dividing calls to action.

Be Catchy and Straight to the Point

While it is important to include details such as your terms and conditions, your privacy policy and/or the benefits of signing up to the email marketing list; it is extremely important that you keep the email sign-up call-to-action brief, catchy and straight to the point. No one wants to spend a lot of time trying to read tons of stuff when opting into your list. Plus, if there are any other details you deem important, you can always provide links or send the info later to the signed-up people.

Transparency and All-Inclusiveness

As has been mentioned above, brief and punchy email sign-up messages are usually the best. Even so, you should never sacrifice quality just for the sake of being brief—be sure to include all the relevant details on the sign-up section, either by summarizing the points or offering links to relevant info. Doing this not only helps in establishing trust with the members of your list, but it also ensures that the people who sign up for the list are well-informed.

Security and Legitimacy Guarantee

It is advisable to have some form of testimonials or certifications on your opt-in pages. This serves the important purpose of assuring the people signing up to your email that their emails and sign-up details are secured. A study by Nielsen supports this point, reporting that “92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer, and 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know.”

Send a Dazzling Welcome Email

Making a strong first impression to the readers is monumentally important, as it sets the tone for future emails.

Dazzling Email

Typically, this email should be sent immediately after the signup. Some of the things the welcome email should be able to include are: show friendly appreciation for the new member (i.e. saying “thank you” or even sending a welcome coupon), provide useful information about the benefits and fundamentals of being part of the email list, address concerns about issues such as privacy and security through FAQs, and explain any relevant steps and tips regarding the use of products/services on your site.

More than that, the welcome email should be able to spark user engagement, be it through accessing an exclusive user forum or by encouraging them to watch your videos and/or participate on your social media forums.

If the new member didn’t set his/her email preference when signing up, you can include details of how this can be done in the welcome email as well.

Finally, remember to keep the email as catchy as possible. With the right images and designs, you actually don’t need a ton of text on the welcome email to dazzle your new members.

Conclusion

…See Part 2 of “Growing Your Email Marketing List the Right Way” for a highlight of the remaining strategies to build and maintain an engaged subscriber marketing list.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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Clear and Targeted Goal-setting

The goal-setting phase is unquestionably the most important stage of redesigning a website, considering everything else in the redesign process if built off this stage. It is therefore very crucial that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely), clearly defined and well-targeted to meet the objectives of the new site design.

Website Redesign: Clear and Targeted Goal-setting

To make certain that your redesign plans stay on track, ensure that your goals address all the key questions that drive the new design process. For example: What are the top design priorities by the site’s owners? Which success metrics are to be achieved by the redesigned site? What are the site’s main opportunities for improvement? Which industry trends can help take the site to the next level? What can be done during the design to increase customer engagement and the realization of conversions?

Assemble a Balanced Team

Usually, product managers and web designers constitute the core team in the design process, and rightfully so. That being said, the success of the process calls for everyone to do his/her job properly, which means market researchers, users, industry experts and data analysts (among others) must all be involved in helping design the new site. Like the cogs in the redesign process, a single member of this diagnostic team can easily mess up the design process, so no one’s importance should be overlooked.

Website Redesign: Assemble a Balanced Team

Build a Flexible Site

The world of online business is in constant state of flux, with new technologies and trends emerging and changing every other day. As such, your redesigned website should be tailored flexibly to allow for potential changes in the future. By flexibility, we also mean that your website should be easy to use and responsive when accessed by different devices.

Allocate Your Resources Realistically

As has been detailed above, the website redesign process is highly involving, which means that you will most likely have to allocate sufficient money, time and human capital resources for the success of the redesign process. Prototyping, website development and the experimentation stages are usually the most involving stages in terms of resources. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t allocate sufficient resources for, let’s say, the background research and content creation stages. Ultimately, each phase of the design process affects each other in one way or another, thus necessitating unbiased and realistic allocation of resources throughout the entire site design process.

Plan and Aim High

There’s nothing wrong with starting small or budgeting small when planning for your website design. However, the ubiquitous nature of web-based business can easily lead to unprecedented huge growths, meaning the smallest of ideas can change into global sensations overnight. So rather than aiming and planning small in your current redesign plans and then having to incur lots of resources when you want to make upgrades; you’d rather plan big and save yourself all that trouble. Of course, best-practice budgeting techniques should be duly considered here.

Webste Design - Plan and Aim High

Structure Your Metrics Accordingly

The key metrics to track in the design process vary from industry to industry, so we can’t say that there is one universal way for you to track the metrics and do your experimentation. Even so, studies conducted by various redesign experts indicate that the following metrics should be given top consideration per their industries, more so in regard to experimentation:

Top Ecommerce Website Metrics

Checkout rate
Add-to-cart rate
App downloads
Average value of orders
Average revenue per visitor

Top B2B Website Metrics

Accounts created
Free trial signup rate
Engagement metrics
Lead qualification rate
Average site visitors
Lead form conversion rate

Media Website Metrics:

Engagement metrics
Most popular stories and videos
Ad revenue from display and video
Video watches and video completions
Average number of stories read per visit

Continually Run Experiments (Even after Successful Launch)

Continually Run Experiments

Launching a successful site is indeed a cause for celebration. But even after success, your work shouldn’t stop there. From data collection on how the new site is performing to measuring the metrics against your goals, to looking for new opportunities that can help you hit your conversions, to optimizing and refining components of your new site; there are plenty of things to do and avenues to exploit after launching your website.

It is only by looking into such avenues and making relevant improvements that you’ll be able to stay ahead of the rest of the pack in the highly-competitive global business world.

Successful Website Redesign at a Glance

In recap, any successfully redesigned website should be able to incorporate aspects of the following key disciplines and elements:

Analytics
Content
Design
Engineering
Marketing
UX
Product Management

As far as your website redesign brief is concerned, your checklist should at the very least include the following elemental components:

Challenges with current site
Goals for designing the new site
Research on user and industry insights
Experimentation structure and techniques
Desired results following the launch of the new site

In conclusion, it’s worth noting that website redesign is always a highly-involving process that calls for the convergence of several design elements, tons of data-backed insights and research, immense contributions from members of the design process and the use of solid experimentation techniques for the project to be a success. You are therefore not going to have it easy when redesigning your website. However, if you consider the guidelines and recommendations detailed in here; then your burdens will be lightened and your chances of launching a successful and masterful website redesign will be highly increased.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

During the redesign process, a lot of changes are usually made at its many stages, thus making it difficult to isolate problems after the launch. This is where the experimentation process comes in very handy.

By infusing experimentation in the design process (rather than running the experimentations after the launch), you are able to test new designs, get customer feedback using various web design tools and even decide on the best elements for your site.

What is experimentation?

Experimentation is design process that involves the multifaceted use of three processes—A/B testing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and personalization—to test a site’s elements prior to launch. With key consideration of these elements, you stand a great chance of avoiding a failed website launch or facing mega problems after launch that may lead to huge losses and even force a rollback to previous site design.

Here’s a look at the role played by each of the three components of website experimentation

A/B Testing

Also referred to as split testing, A/B testing is a process that involves comparing two elements of your web page, blog or app to establish the version that performs best. By using A/B tests, you don’t have to deal with guesswork, as the tests will clearly guide on you on the best elements with regards to designs for your site.

Additionally, A/B tests help in risk mitigation by highlighting potential flaws during the design phase; something that encourages safety of the site before launch.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO is a highly structured process that aims at improving and easing the flow of your website through your engagement or purchase funnel, and then eventually to conversion. With regards to CRO, conversion is defined as the target action by a visitor to your site; an action that supports your business goals such as making a purchase, making a download or signing up to your site.
By increasing conversions, your site’s ROI is increased without you spending extra money. As a process, A/B testing is one of the methods used in CRO. There are many other ways to increase ROI through CRO, all of them being largely dependent on the nature of your website and its targeted conversions. According to Kissmetrics, the CRO process can be summarized as depicted in the image below:

Besides its value in ROI increase, different CRO processes can easily help you to discover challenges in the design process (i.e. areas where user get stuck), thus saving you a lot of headache that would otherwise be hard to deal with after launch.

Personalization

Derived from the word personal, personalization simply refers to the strategy where website owners tailor their site to meet individual needs of specific visitors based on their motivations and tastes. The more personalized your site it, the more you are likely to engage your visitors in an emphatic and lasting ways, leading to desired conversions.

In Part 1, we discussed “user and industry research” under the background research phase. The opinions collected from these users can form a good basis for your personalized designs, with your designers ensuring that you site is tailored to accommodate the needs of your users.

Example of a personalized homepage in YouTube

Infusing Experimentation into the Redesign Process

Below is a brief look at how you can infuse experimentation before, during and after the website redesign process to mitigate challenges while encouraging success and cost-effectiveness.

Before the Redesign Process

Before you commence the redesign process, you can use experimentation to determine the best types of changes that would be most impactful to your needs or conversion rates. Additionally, you can use customer feedback on your current site or incorporate expert opinion from industry leaders to hypothesize your redesign plans.

During the Redesign Process

This section pretty much entails following what we’ve described in A/B testing, CRO and Personalization. While doing so, special attention should be paid on validating the redesign elements, conducting more qualitative user and industry research, and identifying potential areas for optimizing the redesign process.

After the New Site Launch

One of the best ways to do experimentation after the launch of a site is to use the Q&As you created during the launch to confirm whether or not the new site performs as is intended. This performance could be based on conversions, personalization measures and other data metrics.

CASE STUDY: An example of the value of experimentation in the success of the redesign process is highlighted by a case study on Digg. Per reports from the company, Digg wanted to take advantage of the industry trend toward social networking in 2010, planning a redesign process that would involve the creation of a new backend, new UI and a new content algorithm to accentuate their company’s social media problems. Unfortunately, the company failed to infuse experimentation in the design process, instead resorting to focus only on the design aspects. On making the launch, the redesigned site backfired in a big way, especially with regards to the backend that couldn’t handle the site’s traffic. Resultantly, Digg lost a huge chunk of its audience–26% traffic decrease in the US and 34% traffic loss in the UK; something that could have easily been avoided had the company infused A/B testing and other experimentation measures in the redesign process.

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Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Every email marketer has wondered if their emails are making it to the Inbox, Spam, or Promotions folder, and my new tool shows you exactly that. Not only can you see where YOUR emails are landing, but you can also search and see where EVERYONE ELSE’s emails are landing. The Inbox, Spam, or Promotions tool is a free, public service that’s easy to use and fun to play with!

Getting Started

To get started, just copy the seed addresses at the top, and use any email marketing service (MailChimp, Constant Contact, GMass, etc.) to send your campaign to those addresses. Then watch the page over the next few seconds, and notice where your emails land. The emails will slide into the rows, each time an email account receives your email. You do not need to reload the page. The bottom of each box will have a tag labeled “Primary Inbox”, “Promotions”, “Spam”, or something else. That tag is where the email landed for that account. Additionally, you might see the icon for the email service that sent the email. Currently the tool identifies emails sent by GMass, Sendgrid, MailChimp, and Constant Contact.

The first time you use the service, your sender address will be assigned a color, so that you can easily spot which emails are yours. If that’s too difficult to keep track of, then use the Search box to search for your sender address, and then you’ll only see your results as opposed to everybody’s.

Use the Search box to see just the results for a particular sender.

Using GMass?

If you’re using GMass, it’s even easier. Just click the “Inbox or Spam?” button on any email, and the email will be sent to the seed addresses. You don’t need to copy/paste them from the top of the page. In time, we expect other email service providers to integrate with this tool and make sending to the seed addresses as easy as clicking a button.

Just click the “Inbox or Spam?” button directly from GMass to use this tool.

How to interpret the results

Each of the Gmail and G Suite seed email addresses has a slightly different configuration so you can see how your email campaign performs across different Google environments. Some of the accounts are simple Gmail or G Suite accounts, while others work in conjunction with a corporate spam filter. The corporate spam filters include:

Barracuda
Symantec
Mimecast
Sophos
SpamStopsHere
AppRiver

If an email address is using a corporate spam filter, it means that any email sent to this address first is analyzed by the spam filter, and then if it passes, it’s then sent to the G Suite account.

That means that if your email landed anywhere in a G Suite account that has a corporate spam filter attached to it, then hooray!–your email made it past that corporate spam filter–even if Gmail tagged it as Spam.

A note about timing. Emails will arrive slower in the accounts with corporate filters than the “naked” Google accounts, because the corporate filters do their own processing on each email before passing it onwards to Google. While your emails will likely appear immediately in the naked seed accounts, the ones with corporate filters could take a few minutes to arrive.

Whether Gmail categorizes the email as Inbox, Promotions, or Spam has nothing to do with what corporate filter is behind the account. If you see your email at all in the row for the account, then you know you made it past that corporate spam filter. If the corporate spam filter blocked your email, it won’t appear at all.

The labels in each box show you how Gmail tagged the message. The holy grail is the Primary Inbox. Your email will get less visibility if it lands in Promotions, and even less if it lands in Spam.

There are also several additional categories, such as Updates and Forums, which users must manually turn on in order for emails to be filtered here. Internally in Gmail, the label for “Updates” and “Forums” will get applied to relevant messages, but unless the user has actively turned these on, these emails will still show in the Primary Inbox.

A Gmail account by default has only the Primary, Social, and Promotions tabs activated. A user has to choose to activate Updates or Forums, and most don’t.

Below is a summary of how to interpret your results.

Primary Inbox — the most coveted place for your email to land
Inbox / Updates — Still in the Inbox, but for those users with the Updates folder turned on, it lands here instead. Most users do not have the Updates folder activated.
Promotions — Most big brand emails end up here.
Spam – ugh, sorry. Try to determine the cause.
Social — usually reserved for Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social network notifications
Forums — reserved for discussion-based mailing lists

Are the results accurate?

Email deliverability is complex, and you may have heard that deliverability is more about user engagement than anything else. “Engagement” refers to how a user interacts with your email.

Did they open it?
Did they click on any of the links?
How much time did they spend looking at it or scrolling down in it?
Did they reply to it?

It is widely accepted that these engagement metrics play a role in determining where an email lands. With our seed addresses, the emails are essentially never opened, so there is never any engagement with them.

That means that the engagement component of delivery becomes irrelevant. So what this tool measures is where an email lands when there is no prior engagement. It measures what happens when you send a cold email to a new recipient.

How to use the seed addresses

To get the most use out of the tool, we recommend that you add the seed addresses to your actual email list, so that every campaign sent to your list also goes to the seed addresses. That way, at any time in the future, you can go to the tool, put in your sender address, and see how your campaigns have been doing.

You can also use this tool to test your campaign BEFORE you send to your full list. If you find that the seeds are showing your email in Spam, you may want to make adjustments to your campaign to try to get it to land in the Inbox.

So the best practice is to:

Create a “Seed List” in your email marketing platform containing just the seed addresses, and send to this list while you are testing and refining your campaign.
Add the seed addresses to your main email marketing list, so that any major campaign goes to the seeds. Even better would be to spread the seeds across your main list so that they don’t all receive your email at the same time. For example, if your main email list is 100,000 addresses, and it takes your email service 2 hours to send all 100,000 emails, set it up so that the various seeds are sent to throughout the entire course of the 2 hours rather than all at once at the beginning or end.

Two of the seeds are my personal Gmail accounts

Two of the addresses, [email protected] and [email protected] are personal Gmail accounts I’ve had for years. There is a steady flow of incoming email to both addresses, including real emails to me! Meaning, even if someone isn’t doing a seed test by sending to all the seeds, these two addresses are still constantly collecting emails and therefore collecting deliverability data. The row for these two accounts moves faster than the other because more emails are arriving to these addresses than all the others.

But what about Outlook.com, AOL, Comcast, and other important email services?

This tool is strictly connected to Gmail/G Suite addresses, with the incorporation of the most popular corporate spam filters like Barracuda, Sophos, Symantec, and Mimecast. We are not testing cloud-based Microsoft Exchange addresses, outlook.com, aol.com, or comcast.net addresses. It is generally accepted in the email marketing community that Gmail has the most sophisticated spam filtering systems, and that if your emails are getting delivered (or blocked) there, then your emails are being treated the same in other places. So for now, we don’t feel the need to add these other addresses as seeds.

See how any email marketing service is performing

Feeling voyeuristic? Want to know where emails sent from MailChimp are landing? The neatest part of this tool is that you can see how other people’s emails are performing. Use the Search box to search for a particular brand, and see how that brand’s emails are doing. You can also search for a particular email provider. For example, search “mailchimp”, and you might see this:

Uh oh! Looks like MailChimp’s emails are landing in Promotions.

See how your competitors’ emails are doing

To monitor the email deliverability of your competitors, try searching your competitor in the Search box. Try the company name or the sender address from which they send email campaigns. If you don’t get many results, it means we’re not yet tracking that company’s emails. But there’s an easy fix to that problem. Just go to your competitor’s website and subscribe all of the seed addresses that you see on the page. If any of them require a confirmation link to be clicked, our software will automatically click them. Just be sure that if you subscribe our seeds to a mailing list, that you subscribe all of them, not just some of them. We want to provide accurate, valuable data and can only do that if the email is received by all the seeds.

After your competitor sends their next email campaign, go back to the tool and search for their emails. The tool will show you exactly where their email landed in each of the seed accounts.

So everyone can see everyone’s data? That’s scary!

We think it’s empowering rather than scary. For the first time ever, you can easily see how other brands and other email vendors are doing. You can make better decisions about your campaigns and what email vendor you choose. The only data that is public are your Subject Lines and where your emails are landing. We obfuscate your sender address, and the contents of your campaign are not viewable.

Are you a developer? Integrate your email marketing service with this tool

All developers of email marketing services, including MailChimp, Constant Contact, JangoMail, and others can easily integrate the Inbox, Spam, or Promotions deliverability testing tool into their service. A JSON list of the current seeds is always available at gmass.co/inbox/seeds.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

If you’re sending non-commercial, low-volume emails to an organically developed list, let our Support team know and we can apply a few settings to your account to give you 100% email delivery. Example scenarios include:

A school sending emails to parents of students.
A leader of a club sending emails to only members of the club.
A church sending emails to its congregation.
A production company coordinating schedules with its crew.
A couple planning their wedding and sending wedding updates to invitees.

If your emails are selling anything, you don’t quality for this, but you can certainly optimize on your own.

We can make the following optimizations for your account to ensure nearly 100% delivery with no blocking:

We’ll assign you our cleanest tracking domain, to ensure that there is no domain-based blocking.
We’ll connect your account to our Sendgrid SMTP service, so you can send beyond Gmail’s limits.
We’ll set your account so that bounces aren’t filtered from future mailings. This way, you can address each individual bounce with the actual person whose email it is. This is the “ignore bounces” setting under Bounce Management.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

Tired of the sluggish growth, meager revenues and limited user engagement from your website? In our vast experience, one of the ways you can change all that is by having a do-over in the form of a website redesign.

If done the right way, website redesign can catapult your business in the most impactful of ways, from creating a high-impact brand presence to reaching your target audience in a highly-effective and cost-efficient manner.

But like most design-oriented changes, users can react to the website redesign in a counterproductive way. So how do you ensure that customers react to the designs positively? How do you tailor the redesigns in a manner that meets the already-established needs of the website while being able to accommodate future needs? How do you facilitate clarity, ease-of-use and seamless adaptability of the new designs while meeting (or better yet, exceeding) the average industry metrics?

Well, the truth is that there’s no simple all-encompassing answer to all those questions, considering different companies and clients require different kinds of investments in money, time, human capital and risk mitigation for their website redesigns.

The bigger the company, the higher the investments (time, money and human capital) required to process a new design. And the more complicated a redesign is, the more risk-mitigation measures are often required to complete the process.

Fortunately, this guide will provide sufficient answers to the above-mentioned questions—and many more—by giving a multifaceted framework of how you can master your website redesign, whether you are dealing with a small or big client/company. Some of the key highlights in the guide include:

A comprehensive look at the process of creating a successful website redesign
An analytical look at the role of experimentation in the success of website redesign
Best-practice strategies for success in website redesign
Examples of companies that have succeeded/made mistakes in their redesigns

OVERVIEW OF THE WEBSITE REDESIGN PROCESS

In order for a website redesign to be considered as successful, it must tackle the specific web design problems (along with related business problems) that necessitated the website redesign in the first place.

This success can be assessed by mainly comparing the resulting metrics from the new design against those of the previous design while ensuring that the right design aspects of initial design are carried onto the redesign. Essentially, that’s the reason data-driven leveraging and design experimentation are heavily considered as the topmost components of the redesign process–given that you can’t measure any metrics without data and you can’t test or prove efficiency without experimentation.

More than that, the redesign process must be inclusively consultative, allowing for input from the companies that requested for the redesign, alongside user insights and the professional views of the website designers. Doing so will greatly help you avoid overlooking key aspects of the process while simultaneously mitigating unnecessary risks that would otherwise slow down the process or lead to unsuccessful redesign projects.

THE WEBSITE REDESIGN PROCESS

Different industries and companies seek website redesign services to solve different problems and serve different needs. Additionally, different web designers approach the redesign process differently. As such, plenty of consultation and assessment is often required in order to ensure that the website redesign process meets its intended goals.

Below is a comprehensive look at the steps involved in a website redesign process.

Discovering Pain Points and Setting Goals
This phase entails assessing the needs of your current website and then using those pain points to set goals for your to-be-redesigned website.

Discovering Pain Points
These points can come in a variety of ways. For starters, the goals could be based on the intuitive needs or personal preferences of the website owners. Moreover, you may find potential change points off negative feedback from your current customers regarding aspects such as usability, mobile-friendliness or even the load-time of the site. Then, of course, you could find solid change points from your website metrics i.e. making changes to ensure that your site meets or exceeds industry averages.

Setting Goals
Whichever goals you set here, the key guiding factor here should be that the goals adequately address the pain points you’ve discovered in the first phase. As earlier mentioned, different companies and industries have different needs, which means that the goals here can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be.

Some of the common website redesign goals that can be set in this phase include:

To increase page load time
To increase free trial signups
To increase time spent on the site
To increase checkouts after viewing of products
To increase engagements with your audience (i.e. through likes and shares)

Background Research and Input Collection

In order to discover the pain points of your site, you will obviously have to conduct research on both theoretical and analytical levels. As a limitation, though, such research is often very elementary. For a better affirmation of the redesign needs and goals, better research must be conducted—providing the crucial premise of this background research and input collection stage.

User and Industry Research: This can be done in a variety of ways, including talking to your customers, consulting experts in your industry and comparing your needs and goals against those of your competitors. Doing this not only helps to confirm your hypotheses for the redesign, but it also provides copious insights that can be used to strengthen your goals, experimentations and eventual designs.

Website Analytics Data Assessment: Use the analytics that you have been collecting on your site to validate your redesign goals and needs. This is important in helping you know how to prioritize your needs. For example, if the analytics data indicate that your website suffers most from limited time spent on the site, then you can ensure that your redesign process prioritizes on solving this problem.

Developing a User Experience Brief

Simply put, a user experience brief is a document that summarizes your current site challenges and goals for the website redesign in one place. This brief is what serves as a guide for what to do or ignore during the design process. Based on this important, it is fundamental that you take your time to put together an all-inclusive brief, spelling out all your pain points and highlighting your goals with clarity.

Developing a Visual Identity
In this phase, focus is on creating a visual identity for the redesigned website by deciding on elements such as mood and tone of your site. Also, you should ensure that other visual aspects like themes and icons merge congruently, and are tailored to suit the “feel needs” of your site.

If you are not able to do this through your in-house design personnel, you can outsource the services of other professionals who are vastly knowledgeable in identifying the visual aspects—like color palettes, textures, and UI component—that will suit your designed site in the best way.

Content Creation
Irrespective of the industry, content is always king, particularly if we are talking about web-based companies. At this stage, it is therefore exceedingly important that you identify the top content needs for each of the pages in your site, and then proceed to create high-quality headlines, subheadings, and other related content for these pages. Alternatively, you can create a content outline that will guide whatever it is you plan to put in the pages and the site, at large.

In some instances, you may be required to create more than just an architectural guide of future content or the headlines and subheadings. For example, in complex sites with diverse categories, the content creation stage may require you to choose category sections and types of content, which will need to be infused in the web design. Like in visual identity, you are at liberty to outsource professional help in this content creation stage.

Prototyping the Site
By the time you arrive at this stage, you should already have a good mental picture of how you want your redesigned site to look. To change that mental picture into a practical one, you will need to prototype the proposed design of the new site. There are many ways you can do this, but website redesign best practices recommend that you use wireframes or low-fidelity mockups to prototype the site. Besides the advantage of cost-effectiveness, wireframes can be produced quickly and they come with tons of important easy-to-use tools that ease the prototype process.

Advisably, ensure that you create a wireframe for each of your redesigned site’s pages, making certain that images, body copy, headings, site navigation and other relevant elements are highlighted properly. Once you are done with such elements, proceed to the stage of prototyping the key design aspects of your site, including textures, color palettes, and UI components.

If you notice any potential challenges with the redesigned site, make sure that you go back and change the designs up to the point where everything looks satisfactory. Leaving this stage with an untested prototype would create huge problems for you later, so do whatever it takes to ensure that you move on to the next phase with a good, experimented-on prototype.

Website Development
If you have a good design prototype, this phase shouldn’t take that long, considering it only involves coding the site. Of course, the scope of coding can vary widely, depending on whether you will be keeping or changing the technology that powers your redesigned site.

While the site is under coding, remember to include relevant analytics that will help you keep track of the metrics and data you’d want to analyze. Once you are done with coding, do a preliminary test to assess the functionality of the site (and make changes where necessary until you are satisfied that it is performing as expected).

Launch and Q&A
With everything in place, all that remains is for you to set a launch date and fire up the new site and enjoy the benefits that come with your hard work.

As a note, though, you should ensure that you have a plan in place for any unexpected bugs, performance challenges or other problems that might come up, given that new sites tend to come with such issues. A good example here would be having a rollback plan in place, or alternatively having your technicians on standby to address any arising issues.

Additionally, you should have some Q&As ready to help you in collecting data on how the new site is functioning, along with a checklist to help establish if your pain points, goals and objectives are attended to.

A good example of a website redesign project that followed all these steps and came up with a highly-successful redesigned site is Netflix’s streaming service in 2011. With the American entertainment giant looking to grow its profits, increase its retention numbers and accelerate its engagement rates; the management decided to take the bold step of redesigning its streaming interface. The company faced a couple of challenges, but thanks to the data-driven strategies and solid experimentation techniques that were involved in the consultative process, the redesign project was a resounding success, allowing Netflix to grow from 24 million members in 2011 to over 75 million members in early 2016. Additionally, Netflix saw a remarkable 2.5x retention increase and a 4.5x engagement increase during that duration.

THE ROLE OF EXPERIMENTATION IN WEBSITE REDESIGN

By infusing experimentation in the design process (rather than running the experimentations after the launch), you are able to test new designs, experiment with a variety of content and even decide on the best elements for your site.

What is experimentation?
Experimentation is design process that involves the multifaceted use of three processes—A/B testing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and personalization—to test a site’s elements prior to launch. With key consideration of these elements, you stand a great chance of avoiding a failed website launch or facing mega problems after launch that may lead to huge losses and even force a rollback to previous site design.

Here’s a look at the role played by each of the three components of website experimentation

A/B Testing
Also referred to as split testing, A/B testing is a process that involves comparing two elements of your web page, blog or app to establish the version that performs best. By using A/B tests, you don’t have to deal with guesswork, as the tests will clearly guide you on the best elements with regards to designs for your site.

Additionally, A/B tests help in risk mitigation by highlighting potential flaws during the design phase; something that encourages safety of the site before launch.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is a highly structured process that aims at improving and easing the flow of your website through your engagement or purchase funnel, and then eventually to conversion. With regards to CRO, conversion is defined as the target action by a visitor to your site; an action that supports your business goals such as making a purchase, making a download or signing up to your site.

By increasing conversions, your site’s ROI is increased without you spending extra money. As a process, A/B testing is one of the methods used in CRO. There are many other ways to increase ROI through CRO, all of them being largely dependent on the nature of your website and its targeted conversions.

Besides its value in ROI increase, different CRO processes can easily help you to discover challenges in the design process (i.e. areas where user get stuck), thus saving you a lot of headaches that would otherwise be hard to deal with after launch.

Personalization
Derived from the word personal, personalization simply refers to the strategy where website owners tailor their site to meet individual needs of specific visitors based on their motivations and tastes.

The more personalized your site it, the more you are likely to engage your visitors in an emphatic and lasting way, leading to desired conversions.

In the design process, we discussed “user and industry research” under the background research phase. The opinions collected from these users can form a good basis for your personalized designs, with your web designers ensuring that your site is tailored to accommodate the top needs of these users.

Infusing Experimentation into the Redesign Process

Below is a brief look at how you can infuse experimentation before, during and after the website redesign process to mitigate challenges while encouraging success and cost-effectiveness.

Before the Redesign Process
Before you commence the redesign process, you can use experimentation to determine the best types of changes that would be most impactful to your needs or conversion rates. Additionally, you can use customer feedback on your current site or incorporate expert opinion from industry leaders to hypothesize your redesign plans.

During the Redesign Process
This section pretty much entails following what we’ve described in A/B testing, CRO, and Personalization. While doing so, special attention should be paid to validating the redesign elements, conducting more qualitative user and industry research, and identifying potential areas for optimizing the redesign process.

After the New Site Launch
One of the best ways to do experimentation after the launch of a site is to use the Q&As you created during the launch to confirm whether or not the new site performs as is intended. This performance could be based on conversions, personalization measures and/or other data metrics.

An example of the value of experimentation in the success of the redesign process is highlighted by a case study on Digg. Per reports from the company, Digg wanted to take advantage of the industry trend toward social networking in 2010, planning a redesign process that would involve the creation of a new backend, new UI and a new content algorithm to accentuate their company’s social media problems. Unfortunately, the company failed to infuse experimentation in the design process, instead of resorting to focus only on the design aspects. On making the launch, the redesigned site backfired in a big way, especially with regards to the backend that couldn’t handle the site’s traffic. Resultantly, Digg lost a huge chunk of its audience–26% traffic decrease in the US and 34% traffic loss in the UK; something that could have easily been avoided had the company infused A/B testing and other experimentation measures in the redesign process.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SUCCESS IN WEBSITE REDESIGN

Clear and Targeted Goal-setting
The goal-setting phase is unquestionably the most important stage of redesigning a website, considering everything else in the redesign process if built off this stage. It is therefore very crucial that your goals are clearly defined and well-targeted to meet the objectives of the new site design.

To make certain that your redesign plans stay on track, ensure that your goals address all the key questions that drive the new design process. For example: What are the top design priorities by the site’s owners? Which success metrics are to be achieved by the redesigned site? What are the site’s main opportunities for improvement? Which industry trends can help take the site to the next level? What can be done during the design to increase customer engagement and the realization of conversions?

Allocate Your Resources Realistically
As has been detailed above, the website redesign process is highly involving, which means that you will most likely have to spend a decent amount of money and allocate sufficient time and human capital resources for the success of the process. Prototyping, website development and the experimentation stages are usually the most involving stages in terms of resources. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t allocate sufficient resources for, let’s say, the background research and content creation stages. Ultimately, each phase of the design process affects each other in one way or another, thus necessitating unbiased and realistic allocation of resources throughout the entire site design process.

Assemble a Balanced Team
Usually, product managers and web designers constitute the core team in the design process, and rightfully so. That being said, the success of the process calls for everyone to do his/her job properly, which means market researchers, users, industry experts and data analysts (among others) must all be involved in helping design the new site. Like the cogs in the redesign process, a single member of this diagnostic team can easily mess up the design process, so no one’s importance should be overlooked.

Build a Flexible Site to Allow For Future Changes
The world of online business is in a constant state of flux, with new technologies and trends emerging and changing every other day. As such, your redesigned website should be tailored flexibly to allow for potential changes in the future. This point is especially important to keep in mind when structuring the content creation part of your new site.

Plan and Aim High
There’s nothing wrong with starting small or budgeting small when planning for your website design. However, the ubiquitous nature of web-based business can easily lead to unprecedented huge growths, meaning the smallest of ideas can change into global sensations overnight. So rather than aiming and planning small in your current redesign plans and then having to incur lots of resources when you want to make upgrades; you’d rather plan big and save yourself all that trouble. Of course, best-practice budgeting techniques should be duly considered here.

Structure Your Metrics Accordingly
The key metrics to track in the design process vary from industry to industry, so we can’t say that there is one universal way for you to track the metrics and do your experimentation. Even so, studies conducted by various website redesign experts indicate that the following metrics should be given top consideration per their industries, more so in regard to experimentation:

Top E-commerce Website Metrics

Checkout rate
Add-to-cart rate
App downloads
Average value of orders
Average revenue per visitor

Top B2B Website Metrics

Accounts created
Free trial signup rate
Engagement metrics
Lead qualification rate
Average site visitors
Lead form conversion rate

Media Website Metrics:

Engagement metrics
Most popular stories and videos
Ad revenue from display and video
Video watches and video completions
Average number of stories read per visit

Continually Run Experiments (Even after Launch)
Launching a successful site is indeed a cause for celebration, but your work shouldn’t stop there. From data collection on how the new site is performing to measuring the metrics against your goals, to looking for new opportunities that can help you hit your conversions, to optimizing and refining components of your new site; there are plenty of things to do and avenues to exploit after launching your website.

It is only by looking into such avenues and making such improvements that you’ll be able to stay ahead of the rest of the pack in the highly-competitive global business world.

SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE REDESIGN AT A GLANCE

In recap, any successfully redesigned website should be able to incorporate aspects of the following key disciplines and elements:

Analytics
Content
Design
Engineering
Marketing
UX
Product Management

As far as your website redesign brief is concerned, your checklist should at the very least include the following elemental components:

Challenges with the current site
Goals for designing the new site
Research on user and industry insights
Experimentation structure and techniques
Desired results following the launch of the new site

In conclusion, it’s worth noting that website redesign is always a highly-involving process that calls for the convergence of several design elements, tons of data-backed insights and research, immense contributions from members of the design process and the use of solid experimentation techniques for the project to be a success. You are therefore not going to have it easy when redesigning your website. However, if you consider the guidelines and recommendations detailed in here; then your burdens will be lightened and your chances of launching a successful and masterful website redesign will be highly increased.

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

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If you have a non-Gmail address that you want to send a mail merge campaign from, you can still use Gmail to do so.

For example, one of my email addresses is [email protected]. I operate my own mail server for silicomm.com. Meaning, silicomm.com is NOT on G Suite, so [email protected] is NOT a Google account. However, I can still send a mail merge in Gmail from [email protected].

Here’s how to create a mail merge from a non-Gmail address:

Create a new Gmail account. For example, let’s say I create [email protected].
Next, I set up [email protected] as an alias address in my new [email protected]
account.
Here is the documentation from Google that explains how to do this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
Then, install the GMass Chrome extension from the GMass homepage.
Then log in to the [email protected] account and click any of the GMass buttons to link the account to GMass.
Launch a Compose window, put in your addresses in the To field, set the Subject and the Message. Now be sure to change the From Address to the alias you set up in Gmail. In this example, set the From Address to [email protected].
Once your campaign looks how you like, just hit the GMass button. (You may need to subscribe if you’re sending to more than 50 recipients.)

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.

How to Log Outgoing GMass Emails in Hubspot

Set up your Hubspot CRM account

Get your Hubspot BCC address

Compose your email in Gmail

Sending your campaign

Finding your new contacts in Hubspot

Mailtrack and Chrome extensions

The checkmarks on the iPhone Gmail app

But how on Earth did they do this?

The answer? Labels.

Hiding the Labels in the web version of Gmail

Summary

Here’s how to quickly send a mail merge using copy and paste:

Bonus: Personalizing emails that are in your Gmail Contacts.

What exactly is an “Add-on” anyway?

No need to reload

Baffling error messages

The Universal Actions are hiding

Want the user’s email address?

What’s in a name?

Can’t install Add-on in test accounts

Publishing problems

More publishing problems

Double authorization

Still confused?

Create Value-adding Content

Awesome Subject Lines

Straight to the Point Content

Aesthetic Appeal

Personalization of Content

Use Brand Ambassadors alongside Valuable Content

Tap into the Value of Preference Centers

Emphasize Focus on Email Deliverability

Monitor and Evaluate Your Email Engagement Metrics

Cleaning Your Email List

Pay special attention to High-Value Customers

Avoid Inorganic Mailing lists

Test Your Email Campaigns Before Sending

FINAL REMARKS

Provide Multiple Email Sign-up Opportunities

Home Page

Sub Pages

Welcome and Thank You Messages

Blog

Supplemental Leads

In Person Sign-ups

Optimize Your Sign-up and Opt-in Pages

Offer Incentives

Have a Clear Email Sign-up Section

Be Catchy and Straight to the Point

Transparency and All-Inclusiveness

Security and Legitimacy Guarantee

Send a Dazzling Welcome Email

Conclusion

Clear and Targeted Goal-setting

Assemble a Balanced Team

Build a Flexible Site

Allocate Your Resources Realistically

Plan and Aim High

Structure Your Metrics Accordingly

Continually Run Experiments (Even after Successful Launch)

Successful Website Redesign at a Glance

What is experimentation?

A/B Testing

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Personalization

Infusing Experimentation into the Redesign Process

Getting Started

Using GMass?

How to interpret the results

Are the results accurate?

How to use the seed addresses

Two of the seeds are my personal Gmail accounts

But what about Outlook.com, AOL, Comcast, and other important email services?

See how any email marketing service is performing

See how your competitors’ emails are doing

So everyone can see everyone’s data? That’s scary!

Are you a developer? Integrate your email marketing service with this tool

OVERVIEW OF THE WEBSITE REDESIGN PROCESS

THE WEBSITE REDESIGN PROCESS