Email Marketing Lessons I’ve Learned from Hey

Hey is the newest email marketing service created by Basecamp folks.

Hey will compete with traditional Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook (Hotmail) and other email services.

The main difference of Hey compared to traditional email services are:

• It is not free, it costs $ 99 / year;

• Will not display advertisements.

Okay Demetrio, just another email service, why does this launch become a must-read?

Because Hey brings together several resources that will drastically impact how we deal with marketing automation, email marketing, as well as lead nurturing and everything related.

In addition, it is important to say that Hey is not the first paid email service that exchanges subscription for advertising. There are 2 good examples with ProtonMail and Tutanota (including open source).

The point about Hey is that they are reinventing the way we manage our emails, a task in which we dedicate 28% of the day.

I'm going to list the features that Hey offers that can impact your email marketing strategy.

But first, I want to make it clear that Hey will not affect anything (at least for now) in quantitative numbers in our campaigns deliverability.

After all, Hey costs $99 a year just for email while Gmail offers a whole suite for free.

I'm wondering if I'm going to keep demetrio@hey.com.

Not only for the price, Gmail and Microsoft are complete suites of solutions that the email marketing service is already fully integrated.

Hey will not dominate the world of email, but it is a spark.

A very influential spark by the way.

Basecamp, who is the creator of Hey, has as its founders, Jason Fried and DHH, one of the most influential guys in the business and development world.

His books are references in the market, including some bestsellers.

In addition to business books, they are also the creators of Rails, the most popular framework for Ruby (programming language).

The launch of Hey left his followers ecstatic. You can find thousands of comments like the one above on the CEO's twitter

Although I think Hey is great, the idea is not to advertise. But, understand the trend of its launch and how it will impact our life in Marketing Automation. Let's go to the most relevant features of Hey:

1º -Authorize the first email marketing

With Hey you choose whether to accept the email of a contact who sends you the first time or not. In addition, if you choose not to accept, you will never get any email from that contact again, even if you are, for example, in a sales email sequence in his automation software.

Hey says it is a different feature to mark as SPAM. These emails have already gone through anti-spam validators.

So, the goal is to block some situations like “1) Getting Newsletters that someone has subscribed you without authorization, 2) The first contact of a seller, 3) The friend of your brother's neighbor who discovered your email.”

This feature is in line with what we saw on social networks. You need to first accept the contact as a friend and then receive messages.

It makes perfect sense!

Therefore, I insist on reinforcing with our customers the need to create an initial email asking for acceptance, combining the frequency and the type of content that will be sent and making it very clear how to leave the list.

2º – Don't load the email marketing tracking

Hey blocks the tracking that is sent by the marketing automation software to capture whether the email was opened.

Several companies block the download of images in emails to block tracking. However, the bad thing about this is that it blocks all images from the email. Therefore some emails are ugly and have several missing images.

Hey it does different. They first download the images of the emails on their server and then the tracking will read from their server and not yours.

Even before Hey offered this feature, we already recommended using the opening metric as a trend metric and not as an absolute data.

The opening metric is flawed in all marketing automation software. Therefore, the click is always more reliable.

Not to mention that tracking on web pages is also being pursued, now it's Apple's turn to join Firefox in the fight against tracking.

So it is always good to encourage contacts to click, as well as respond and still add our contact as a contact in their gmail.

3º – Sender grouping

With Hey it is possible that all emails from the same sender – even with different subjects – are placed on the same thread (stack).

This feature reminded me those webinars that we received 30 reminders emails. It will start in 1 day. Within 1 hour. In 5 minutes. Holy shit!

All emails will be grouped. Therefore, all new emails from the same sender will enter the same stack.

This means the subject of the email – when grouped – will not be displayed. Thus, it will have no influence on the email opening.

Those “foolproof” formulas of how to get your customer to open email marketing all go down the drain.

Be Relevant! That's the formula that always works. Understand your customers' pains as well as send content that solves these problems.

Gmail also comes in that direction

Quickly switching from Hey to Gmail. Just to show that Hey’s new features show a market trend as well as being far from an isolated initiative.

The gmail feature that we show in the print above shows that emails that are not read regularly gmail suggests that you leave the list.

So, in the end, I think it's great that email marketing services create more and more resources to improve our experience.

If you want to send an email to demetrio@hey.com to see if it arrives, send a bullet;) That's it, stay safe and positive. Brigadeiro;)