Aleksandra Korczynska, on the Power of Testing and GetResponse’s Email Strategy

How can you make email marketing work for your business? We know a few people who can answer this question – and Aleksandra Korczynska is one of them. We sat down with the Marketing Director at GetResponse and talked about:

• the three things that are at the core of great email marketing,
• powerful tactics to help you grow your email list,
• and GetResponse’s email strategy.

Aleksandra also told us about the biggest email marketing mistakes she sees and what a workday looks like for her at GetResponse.

Measuring, testing, and building a good email strategy

Aleksandra, does your typical day look like at GetResponse?

I start the morning by checking the high-level sales metrics from the day before (usually on my phone while still in my pajamas). Then it’s time for breakfast and coffee!

Next, I check the funnel metrics more in detail, and act on anything that needs to happen.

After that, I work on clearing my Slack and email inbox notifications. I do this by scheduling some tasks or reminders for messages that cannot be answered within five minutes.

What I do next depends on if I’m having a “meeting day” or a “deep-work day”.

If it’s a meeting day, I usually sit in many hours of calls (1:1 meetings, project updates/kickoffs, strategy planning, etc.). Then I go back to work for two or three hours to finish tasks that require deep-focus. I’m definitely a night owl and am quite productive and creative later in the evenings.

If it’s a deep-work day, I usually spend a few hours on a specific project, analysis, framework or strategies I’ll be introducing.

At this point it’s the afternoon. After seven to eight hours of work, I usually spending two or three hours on personal development. I enjoy boulder in-door climbing, playing the piano, or just having a seaside walk or run with my husband.

Did you know you can connect ZeroBounce to GetResponse and clean your email list much faster?

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see email marketers making?

These are a few of the biggest mistakes we see email marketers making.

#1. Not using segmentation and “blasting” the same email to their whole list.

#2. Not using personalization and sending generic messages. Even adding a first name to the subject line and the header works miracles!

#3. Not A/B testing their emails. It’s so easy to do and it gives you real-life, actionable data to support your hypothesis, rather than relying just on your gut feeling.

#4. Sending emails to unverified contacts or unengaged contacts that will eventually hurt their deliverability.

Don’t send emails to bad contacts – Clean your list first

Please share three things that are at the core of great email marketing.

#1. Knowing your audience

The better you understand who you’re talking to, the more relevant communication you can send. And the more relevant communication you send, the higher your email marketing conversion rate.

#2. Respecting your subscribers’ privacy

Collect explicit permission to send email messages, include unsubscribe links in your messages, and never purchase subscriber lists. Aside from this being the law in some countries, not following your own privacy policy may lead to deliverability issues and spam complaints.

#3. Testing, testing, testing!

Subject lines, copy, CTAs, color schemes, send days and times – anything that can be measured in opens, clicks or conversions should be tested.

I can’t stress this enough. Very often email marketers blindly follow someone else’s best practices or their own gut feelings for what might work well. Your audience is unique and what works for another business might not work for you. Testing is the only way to find out.

GetResponse guarantees a deliverability rate of 99%. What are some of the things you do to achieve that?

At GetResponse, we take deliverability very seriously.

Our servers send billions of emails from hundreds of IP’s every month. Sadly, there are some users out there who want to abuse our tool to send malicious emails which can harm our core reputation. We take many precautions to prevent this. Our Email Deliverability and Compliance teams take care of our email sending infrastructure on a daily basis.

In addition to that, we’re part of professional email organizations like M3AAWG and Certified Sender Alliance. To be able to join those organizations, GetResponse must comply with strict anti-spam and compliance policies. In return, we have developed good relationships with email service providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

While we maintain the highest-quality email sending infrastructure, deliverability depends not only on your sending solution. The quality of your list and your engagement level also play a role.

With a high-quality email list, you’ll be on the right track towards 99% percent email deliverability with GetResponse.

How does GetResponse keep spam at bay and ensure customers are using opt-in, valid email lists?

Stopping spammers from getting a return on their campaigns is the key here – we prevent and mitigate. The prevention part is run mostly through a threat assessing system we affectionately call Hydra.

Hydra takes into account factors based on user’s activity, list, and content. We developed it in-house and went a long way from basic heuristics to incorporating machine learning into Hydra’s heart, improving its accuracy over the years.

Preventing every bit of unwanted email from being sent is an impossible task. Therefore, we make sure to react quickly when we detect something that slipped under Hydra’s nose.

There are also many legitimate senders in need of a little help with solving consent issues. Our amazing and talented Compliance team helps users solve issues detected before and after the mailing is out. This is a part of our holistic approach to making sure emails sent with us are consent-based.

You’re helping more than 350,000 companies succeed with email. But how do you use email to market GetResponse? Please tell us about the types of emails you send and your overall email marketing approach.

Here is a little more about the types of emails we send and our approach to email marketing:

• We have moved away from using separate lists for the different categories of customers and adopted a very intricate segmentation structure within a few lists. It helps us avoid duplicates, it allows us to have more complete contact profiles, and keeps the account clean.
• We rely heavily on automation – not just for sending emails like our onboarding series, but also to move contacts between lists, to tag and segment contacts, to remove stale contacts from the account, etc. Automation is our best friend when it comes to list hygiene and management.
• We do everything we can to communicate with our subscribers in their own language – all of our emails are currently being sent in seven key languages in addition to English! It takes a lot of work but it’s worth it.
• Automated messages are used for almost anything you can imagine – welcoming blog subscribers, nurturing leads, recovering abandoned carts, reactivating inactive subscribers before removing them, onboarding new free trial users and paid customers.
• We use email newsletters to communicate promotions, discounts, special offers, and upcoming events like webinars.
• Email is one of the two channels we use to communicate product and feature updates to our customers. The other one is in-app communication for those who are logged in to the platform.

You’ve introduced several other features and tools in the past years. Which ones have gained the most traction?

It’s definitely the GetResponse Website Builder!

It’s amazing to see that the market category for website creators is three times bigger than email marketing and marketing automation, while the competitors’ density is much lower.

What GetResponse features excite you the most now?

For me, it’s still marketing automation. Marketing automation is the feature that connects all the other tools and enables marketers to leverage data, segments, and various channels to get more conversions, constantly.

What in your mindset has remained unchanged since the day you started in marketing?

You can’t improve what you can’t measure!

Lightning round: short, sweet, and the first thing you think of

The most effective way to increase email open rates:

Add “first name” to your subject line!

The most powerful tactic to grow your email list:

Here are two:

#1. Signup form with a powerful lead magnet (free ebook, free workshop, or a product discount).

2. Create an indispensable tool – one that saves your users a lot of time, makes their job a lot easier, and makes them feel like they’re cheating the system using it!

No. 1 email deliverability tip you can give us:

Don’t buy email lists!

A word you’re tired of seeing online:

“Funnel.”

The habit that makes you a better marketer:

Checking KPIs every morning before I start my day.

Your favorite place to work:

Arico, Tenerife (the best climbing area).

What do you wish you had more time for?

Testing and introducing new tools to the company.

Need a reliable email marketing platform that also gives you a CRM, a landing page builder – and more? See what GetResponse has to offer.

If you already have an account, make the most of the ZeroBounce integration and save time on validating your contacts.