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As marketers, the gospel of “value” is drilled into our heads before we write our first blog post. Providing value to site visitors, prospects, and customers is the cornerstone of inbound marketing, but it’s easy to forget about transactional emails.

As consumers, we receive transactional emails constantly, and frequently read and interact with them, so why are they ignored by so many inbound marketers? While promotional emails seem to drive the most traffic and results, odds are you are missing out on a great opportunity to improve your transactional emails by making them more personal.

Wait, what are transactional emails?

Most marketing emails are either promotional or transactional. Promotional emails are usually tied to specific campaign goals and are custom built for targeted delivery to promote a specific product or service from your company. For a B2B company, a promotional email could share a new ebook you’ve written or service you’re offering. For B2C ecommerce companies, a promotional email could be announcing a sale or new product line.

Transactional emails are received automatically after certain events through your site. Emails like order confirmations, shipping notifications, password recovery, and event reminders are all examples of transactional emails. We all receive plenty of these types of email, and it’s easy to overlook how integral they are to a great user experience and how making them more personal can go a long way towards retaining current customers and gaining new ones.

Shouldn’t I spend my time on my promotional emails?

While you may be tempted to focus all your energy on your promotional emails, the fact is that transactional emails are always going to get opened more. From Experian’s Transactional Email Report: 

“Customers engage with transactional emails such as order, shipping and return/ exchange notifications at a much higher rate than they do with promotional and branding-focused campaigns. It is clear from the total open rates that customers open transactional emails repeatedly. The exceptionally high open and click rates underscore the opportunity for companies to cross-sell products and services to highly engaged customers through transactional emails.”

When you order something from Amazon, you might open your confirmation email a dozen times while it’s being shipped to check on its progress. Just think about the opportunity that level of open rates and interaction gives you to provide personalized value to the reader.

While promotional emails are great to jumpstart interest in something new from your company, because people are expecting transactional emails after they sign up/order/request something, they are much more likely to open them, giving you a great chance to optimize and improve that experience. 

So what are those seven tips to make my transactional email more personal?

1) Actually personalize the email

That means it includes the recipient’s name. It’ll help your email actually get delivered, and who doesn’t like seeing their name? If you’re sending an eCommerce email, it’s easy to get the name dropped in from the order. If you’re sending a B2B automated email, make sure your submission form is capturing the full name and adding it to the email. 

If you’re sending an ecommerce email, make sure the sender name is your brand, and it’s from an email that people can reply to and ask any questions about their order. For a B2B email, send it from a real name and an email address with a real name. People are much more likely to interact with an email that seems like it’s from a person than a bland “marketing@abccompany.com” type of email.

2) Provide custom suggestions for next steps

We’ve all seen this from Amazon, where they suggest other products you might like based on what you just purchased. This is an easier task to accomplish for ecommerce transactional emails, where you have more data on who the purchaser is and what they might also be interested in.

For B2B emails, every single one doesn’t have to be uniquely customized but treat each email like your drip campaigns. Give the reader a blog to read and share, give someone a primer if they just signed up for your service, or offer a consultation if they just downloaded some information on your product. This can take some A/B testing to get right, so be willing to revisit your email and tweak it down the road.

3) Make sure the reader knows they can reply to your email

It’s always so disappointing to see B2B emails from a “no-reply” where they want you to take extra steps to get in touch with the person or company who sent the email. It’s like they don’t want your business!

Make sure people have no hoops to jump through if they want to ask you questions or get more information. If you are sending an ecommerce transactional email, it’s okay to want to keep those organized and not all replied to, just make sure to provide a nice obvious call-to-action where people can check on their order, read FAQs, or get in contact with customer support.

4) Give people the info they are looking for

You’ve got access to the traffic certain pages on your website get, so use it! Don’t make people search around through your site after they’ve received an email when you can see what they are likely to want to know.

It’s easy to include an email footer with quick links to the pages people are likely to need, or to place big, bold, calls-to-action that address their most likely needs based on the type of email they are receiving. Being proactive and anticipating what your reader is going to need is a great way to provide personalized value.

5) Make it fun

So many transactional emails are very dry and boring, but you can provide a dash of brand personality that will help people connect with your company, product, or service. Don’t sacrifice the value you just spent time providing, but you don’t want to waste a great opportunity to tell your brand story, even if it’s just through your template design and a couple sentences. One of my favorite examples is from Seamless, a staple food delivery app here in New York City:

I appreciate that they assume I am doing something interesting and awesome and not just binging House of Cards on Netflix. It’s simple but fun and gives you all the information you need while having a little personality.

6) Consider new types of transactional emails

While many transactional emails are passive responses to some interaction a user is making, you should also consider how you can use transactional email to reach people based on what interactions they aren’t making.  Different user behaviors (or lack thereof) give you the opportunity to reach out to them with a whole new transactional email style, not reacting to anything other than their lack of engagement. 

These types of triggered transactional emails can do very well, and it’s worth testing out. Obviously, there’s a limit to the number of emails you should be sending people, and triggering an email because someone hasn’t logged onto your app in a week may say more about your app than their usage. But finding non-intrusive ways to reengage users with quality content that is relevant to what they’ve been interested in before can be a good personal use of transactional email that can bring people back into the fold.

7) Write right

Sometimes it’s easy to think that copywriting is something for advertising and not marketing, but taking a good hard look at what you’re saying and how you’re saying it in your emails can reap rewards. Consider how your brand is viewed by your customers. Don’t make your emails too formal if you are a casual company, and don’t use overly familiar copy when you’re providing professional services. 

This ties back into who you are saying the email is from. If it’s from your company, that doesn’t mean it has to read like it’s from your company, but it should mirror the copy you promote through your other emails, your social media, and your website. If your email says it’s from a real person with a real name, experiment with the copy and see if a more relaxed copy style can make it more relatable and create more clicks.

Don’t write another robotic email that you yourself wouldn’t read. Think about what value you can bring through your copywriting and how you can make your email more personal through the tone and style of your writing.

Okay, so what’s a good transactional email look like?

Glad you asked.

This Amazon email hits almost all the criteria you want in a transactional email: personalized to me, gives me big CTAs to check my shipping and order info, and provides suggestions based on what I ordered. I opened the email and clicked through several times, so by providing a good transactional email, Amazon maximized the potential they had to connect with me.

Because you don’t know how much your ride-share trip with Uber is going to cost, their transactional emails are incredibly important and specific, breaking down the cost, mileage, route, and total time for you. Asking for a rating could be a little larger, but they ask you to do that before you take your next ride through the app, so that’s acceptable. 

Anything else?

That’s it! I definitely encourage you to dig in on your automated transactional emails with a critical eye and find areas to improve. While marketing automation platforms like HubSpot have great emails to begin with, I guarantee there are ways you can make them more personalized that result in better open rates, more click-throughs, happier customers, and more business. Transactional emails don’t get a lot of attention, but by making them more personalized, you’ll improve your connection with the reader. 

We are creatures of habit, especially when it comes to buying behavior. We know the location of our favorite products in the store, and we trust that they’ll work year after year. In fact, research shows Americans buy the same 150 items, which accounts for 85% of household needs. 

People don’t like change. It’s a battle to get someone to switch to an unknown brand.

When a client wants to launch a new product, get into a different market, or open a new store location, the odds are stacked against him. Consider this: Only 3% of consumer packaged goods exceed the sales goal benchmark of a successful launch.

Check out HubSpot Research here for even more market research resources.

In part, we can blame lack of research for why there are so many unsuccessful product launches and ill-conceived new feature additions. Founders and brand managers “know” it will be successful — they run on their instincts, not the facts. (It was this instinct that led Clairol to release Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, which some people thought was a breakfast food option.)

Finding out if a product will be successful beyond the initial curiosity is just good business. With market research, you determine if the opportunity exists, how to position the product or service, or what consumers’ opinions are after the launch. 

If you’re sensitive to the high costs of failure and need to gather facts and opinions to predict whether your new product, feature, or location will be successful, start by investing in market research using these tools and resources. 

17 Helpful Market Research Tools & Resources

1) Think With Google: Marketer’s Almanac

Price: Free

Wish you had information on how consumer behavior changes in relation to the seasons, holidays, and other special events? Think With Google’s Marketer’s Almanac offers interesting insights on how people browse and buy.

2) American Fact Finder

Price: Free

American Fact Finder is a resource for searching U.S. census data. You can filter by age, income, year, race, and location.

3) County Business Patterns

Price: Free

County Business Patterns provides information on the areas of the country with large numbers of certain types of businesses. 

4) Business Dynamics Statistics

Price: Free

Business Dynamics Statistics takes census data and allows you see economic data on job creation, startups and shutdowns, business openings, expansions, and closures. 

5) FedStats

Price: Free

FedStats provides an up-to-date forum for finding data released by federal agencies, including agriculture, education, transportation, and energy. 

6) Nielsen MyBestSegments

Price: Free

Nielsen’s MyBestSegments provides researchers with tools to understand an area’s demographic information and lifestyle habits. You can find out which areas would be most receptive to a campaign or launch, which competitors are located nearby, and trends in the area that have shifted. 

7) SurveyMonkey

Price: Free for Basic, $26/month for Select, $25/month for Gold, $85/month (per user) for Platinum

SurveyMonkey is a powerful tool for creating in-depth surveys that will help you understand the market and consumer preferences. (Learn more about crafting a survey for market research here.)

8) Typeform

Price: Free for Basic, $35/month for Pro, $70/month for Pro+

Typeform shows viewers one form field at a time, and you can include multiple choice image options. It’s an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that’s great for gathering feedback. 

9) Survata

Price: $1/respondent for Basic, $2.50/respondent for Extended

Survata is another form-building option, but you can determine a target audience. It also employs people who will review your survey questions, so even if you are not a trained market researcher, you can get quality, actionable answers.

10) Loop11

Price: $158/month for Micro, $410/month for SMB, $825/month for Enterprise

Loop11 is a usability testing service that allows you to test even your competitors’ websites — any webpage, basically. You can create a form and recruit people to take the test through your own website or by using a partner service, such as Cint.

11) Userlytics

Price: Variable (starts at $2,900/year for one session)

Userlytics provides a platform for doing user testing of mobile apps, videos, display ads, and more. It performs both a webcam and a screen recording, and you can compare the user answers with their reactions on video to understand how people are really interacting with your creative. 

12) Temper

Price: $12/month for Hobby, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, $199/month for White Label

Sometimes you need a no-frills test to take the pulse of consumers. Temper allows you to add a question, grab a snippet of code, and pop it onto your website. The smiley face, “meh” face, and frown face make it easy for viewers to make a snap judgment.

13) MakeMyPersona

Price: Free

The MakeMyPersona tool is an interactive web tool that generates buyer personas for you once you answer a series of questions about your ideal customers. The tool provides plenty of guidance throughout the process, making it really easy for you to sort through the information you have about your ideal audience. 

14) Ubersuggest

Price: Free

Ubersuggest is a simple tool for doing keyword and content research. You can input a phrase, and it’ll spit out a long, alphabetized list of additional keywords.

15) Pew Research Center

Price: Free

From economic conditions, to political attitudes, to social media usage, the Pew Research Center website has a ton of free research that you can use to better understand your target market. Best of all, the site has a sleek UI and interactive charts that reveal more granular data as you hover over certain elements.

16) Social Mention

Price: Free

Social Mention is a real-time social media search engine that can help you understand what your prospective customers are buzzing about online. Search for a keyword, and Social Mention will show you recent social posts that contain that keyword, along with a list of related keywords and other insights.

17) HubSpot Research

Price: Free

Want to see how website traffic varies by industry, or how effective advertising is in different regions around the world? HubSpot Research has got you covered. In addition to checking out our free research reports, you can use HubSpot Research’s  presentation-builder tool to easily compile stats and charts into a customized slide deck.

This post originally appeared on Agency Post in March 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

What are your favorite tools for market research? Share them with us in the comments below!

 

Often times, the greatest challenge marketers face when creating content isn’t the actual writing, publishing, or promoting. Instead, it’s the other related tasks — brainstorming, scheduling, and coordinating moving parts — that proves difficult.

This is where tools like Trello come in.

We’ve talked about Trello before, like in this post on tools to help you organize, develop, and share your ideas (see #3). And why shouldn’t we? Here at HubSpot, all different teams have used it for years for everything from project management to our blog’s editorial calendar. It’s worked very well for us, and we want to share the love.

There are a ton of different ways you and your team can use Trello for work, and what works for you may not work for others, and vice versa. That’s why we’ve rounded up eight useful ways to organize your Trello board. 

What is Trello?

Trello is a well-known app that’s especially good for tracking and visualizing progress. Using their card-based layout, you can create a card for every idea, blog posts, piece of a project, and so on. Then, within each of these cards, you can jot notes, assign them to others, organize them into categories or lists, create task lists and checklists within cards, color-code them, attach files … the list goes on.

While boards can be organized in many ways, here’s an example of what one looks like:

Image Credit: Trello

Once you click into one of those cards, you can label them, add a due date, add “members” to the card to assign tasks, and so on.

Image Credit: Trello

Another great feature? The calendar. If you enable the free calendar “power-up” (much like Labs in Gmail), then you’ll be able to assign everything in a calendar view that makes organizing due dates much easier. (To learn more about Trello’s capabilities, you can take the tour here.)

For now, let’s move on to some different ways you can structure your Trello board.

8 Creative Ways to Manage Your Tasks & Projects Using Trello Boards

1) Organize Your Personal To-Do List

There are a lot of great tools out there to help you manage your personal to-do list. If you tend to be a more visual person, Trello could be a great choice for you.

Why? Because it lets you drag, drop, color-code, and manipulate to-do list items in a way that many of the other tools don’t. For your day-to-day list items, you might keep different lists for projects assigned to you by different clients. Or, you could organize them based on priority, as in the example below:

Image Credit: Cloud Coach

For all you bloggers out there, I use the drag-and-drop feature to track blog post ideas and progress. To do this, I named columns things like, “Idea Backlog,” “In Queue,” “Research/Interview Stage,” “Draft in Progress,” “In Editorial,” “Scheduled,” and “Published.” (Okay fine, the real name of last column was “DUNZO.” To each her own.)

If you’re hoping to access your to-do list from your mobile devices, Trello has apps you can download for iPhone, iPad, Android phones, tablets, watches, and Kindle Fire tablets.

2) Manage an Ongoing Project

Trello markets itself as a collaboration tool — and that’s probably what it’s best for. If you’re managing a project, it’s an awesome tool for organizing all the moving parts of a project, including people, due dates, and progress tracking.

In Trello’s extensive free product, you can invite as many people as you want to your board. To divvy up tasks, all you have to do is add members or drag-and-drop people to cards. Everyone can see the whole board, but folks who are added to cards will be notified of their assignment.

Image Credit: Trello

You can also start discussions using comments and attachments within each card. So if you want to add a quick note (or a not-so-quick note), then you can write ’em in there — and even mention another member to make sure they get notified. Add files by uploading them from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive.

Plus, Trello works in real-time — so when someone moves a card, it’ll move on your own board instantly. This means you never have to refresh your browser to see the latest updates.

If the project’s top secret, all you have to do is put the project’s “board” on private. All the information and data you put on there is guaranteed private and secure — and the folks at Trello keep encrypted, off-site backups of all the data in case something crazy happens.

3) Reflect on Lessons Learned

Once a project — or even a week at work — is finished, you and your team can always benefit from reflecting on what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what you can do to improve the process going forward. This is sometimes called a “retrospective.” It’s all in the name of continuous improvement.

While many people choose to take notes during these retrospective meetings using a good ol’ whiteboard, Trello can actually be a great digital tool that’ll eliminate the need to type up and send out disjointed notes later. It’s also convenient for folks who have remote teams in different cities and time zones because it allows you to make the feedback visible to everyone, at any time.

That’s exactly why Mitchel Seaman used Trello for retrospective meetings for his remote team, which he wrote about in this post on Medium.

Image Credit: Mitchel Seaman

His system involves voting: Throughout the week, members of the team can go into the board and post cards denoting what’s going well and what’s going poorly as it happens. Then, folks can go in and vote on things to talk about during a weekly retrospective meeting, discuss them, and keep track of action items.

While Trello does have a voting feature (which you can enable by going to Menu > Power Ups > Voting), it requires people to click into a card, and then click the Vote button. To make it so folks don’t have to click into a card, Seaman uses stickers instead — which, he says, also makes it “way more fun.”

Image Credit: Mitchel Seaman

Before the meeting, whoever’s running it will drag the top-voted items to the top of each list. During the meeting, each top-voted item is discussed one-by-one. Cards that are actionable can be moved to the “Action Items” column. That “Action Items” column never moves, and you can even assign people to it and give due dates.

Once the meeting’s over, the lists are archived and a new one is created for the coming week. (Note: Even when you archive a list, it’s not gone forever. You can still search for items within it and retrieve entire old lists when you want to.) You can read the whole article here.

4) Brainstorm Ideas

Coming up with fresh, new ideas isn’t easy. And even if you take the time to brainstorm, it can be tough to get started. Where do you begin? How do you create enough ideas? How do you sort the great from the good from the bad when you’re done?

Trello just so happens to be a great tool to help you brainstorm — and then organize your ideas once the brainstorm is over. Using their card-based layout, you can create a card for every idea and even jot additional notes in there, attach files, and so on. 

Once the brainstorm is over, you can color-code them based on priority, like using green for high priority, yellow for medium priority, and red for low priority. If you want to use that board to assign topics to content creators, you can add members to each card to assign it to them — and attach due dates, too.

5) Keep an Editorial Calendar

Your blogging team could be one person, it could involve tens of contributors, or it could be somewhere in between. No matter how many people are writing for your blog, it’s crucial to have an editorial calendar to keep track of which blog posts you plan to publish when. 

In fact, here at HubSpot, we use Trello (among other tools, like Google Calendar and HubSpot’s built-in content calendar) to organize our own blog’s editorial calendar. And we aren’t the only ones — news sites like Mashable, ReadWrite, and The Changelog use Trello as an editorial calendar, too, according to Trello’s blog.

You can create a Trello board for your editorial calendar in several ones. One way is to create columns based on a single post’s progress, like in the example below:

In this example, each card represents a single blog post, and you can move it along the progress bar by moving it from “Article Ideas” to “Researching” to “On Hold” to “Writing” to “Editing and Graphics” — all the way to when it’s published. While it’s in progress, you can add notes into each card, assign writers by adding members, and so on, until it reaches that “Published” list.

Another way to organize blog posts for your calendar is by creating columns based on post type. If this is the way you like to brainstorm your blog posts, you can simply brainstorm in the Trello board, assign writers and add notes as needed, and use the “Calendar” feature to plan out the actual editorial calendar.

To add the “Calendar” feature, simply go to Menu > Power Ups > Enable Calendar.

Image Credit: Trello

Once you’ve enabled the calendar, you can view it by clicking the “Calendar” link in the top right of your board.

Image Credit: Trello

If you want to use an editorial calendar, but would rather not use Trello, download our free editorial calendar templates here.

6) Plan a Promotion or Launch

A lot of moving parts go into launching a new marketing campaign, and usually, a lot of people are involved — sometimes from different teams and even different time zones. If you’re not totally organized for the launch, this means a lot of opportunities for things to slip through the cracks.

Trello is really good for keeping track of all those moving parts for a launch. When you create a new board for your promotional plan, you can create lists to categorize each part of the plan. Then, you can put cards under those lists and fill them in with things like blog posts, kickback emails, creating click-to-tweets, and so on.

You can label each of these cards “Pre-Launch,” “Launch Day,” or “Post-Launch,” add members, set due dates, and use the notes within each card to give details, update members of your team, start discussions, and so on. It’s a great way to keep track of what’s going out when, and who’s responsible for it.

7) Do User Research

If you’ve done user research before, you know that all those user interviews usually end up in a series of unorganized notes that are tedious to sift through, organize, and find patterns in later. One innovative way to organize these notes and find those patterns faster is by using Trello. 

I can’t take credit for this idea: I came across this post on Medium from David Ghent, a product designer at Pivotal Labs. Ghent uses Trello to synthesize user research and minimize the time spent organizing Post-It notes onto a board. If you use Trello cards instead of Post-It notes, he says, you’ll come out with a digital version of your user research that’ll make skimming, referencing, and sharing your learnings later much easier.

Here’s what it looks like. (You can see the larger version by opening the full article.)

Image Credit: Product Labs on Medium

The process starts with setting up a Trello board before your very first user interview. The first column will be your list of users, and you’ll attach a specific color to each user. That color will be used to mark their comments throughout the board.

Then, you’ll label each column based on your area of focus. “If it’s an interaction test, each new column title can be ‘Page X,'” he writes. “If you’re at more of a generative stage, then each column could be titled ‘Stage X Behaviors,’ and so on.”

When you get into your interviews, you’ll type notes directly into cards on the Trello board (under the right column if you can, although you can always do it later) — with the right color label added to show which user said it.

After each interview, you can sort your notes into the correct columns. As you do this with more and more interviews, you can start grouping commonalities by dragging the different cards into the same columns.

“You’ll start to see stacks of cards with multiple color labels show up in the same spot. Viola! Patterns.” You can read the whole article here.

8) Organize a Scrum or Sprint

If your team operates using the sprint or Scrum philosophy, Trello is a pretty decent free option to help you and your team move through tasks more quickly with greater agility. (Learn more about the Scrum philosophy here.)

The team over at internet marketing agency The Magistrate uses Trello to organize their Scrum workflow better and faster. To make Trello work for the Scrum, they create one board per client, which they share with that client.

Then, they use the same, general framework to start off each project. The framework consists of six columns: “Resources,” “Sprint Planning,” “Current Sprint,” “Blocked,” “QA,” and “Done.” Here’s what it looks like:

What do each of these columns mean, exactly? Here’s how they define it, according to their blog:

• Resources: Assets that will be used in the execution of client deliverables/tasks. As well, we will store our recurring items in the resources list. Recurring items may be assigned a due date.
• Sprint Planning: This is the column where we all begin planning for the next sprint* without interfering with current sprint activities. More detail can be gathered and applied and projects can be broken down into their final, pre-sprint format. Sprint planning items will be sorted in two ways: 1) From top to bottom, highest priority to lowest. 2) By color. Green = Approved, which means planned and ready for an upcoming sprint. I will explain Trello labels soon.
• Current Sprint: The Current Sprint is the work that needs to be done right now, or by the end of the sprint, which for us runs 7 days from start to finish, Friday to Thursday.
• Blocked: Some force (external usually) has made it impossible to continue with this task. We will move it into blocked, until the blockade has been lifted, or the next sprint.
• QA: Quality assurance (sometimes called QC or Quality Check). Once the task has been completed, the card will be dragged from current sprint to QA. It will be reviewed, and dragged to done when confirmed indeed done.
• Done: Done means delivered and working (bug free, ideally). If it were a car, it would be ready for driving. Be strict about this.

Here’s a video to show you what it looks like in action:

They also share their Trello boards with their clients to hold themselves more accountable while encouraging transparency.

“Together, Trello and the Scrum framework help our internet marketing agency stay organized, and provide a level of transparency and accountability to our clients that I haven’t seen anywhere,” CEO Adam Steele told Trello.

How do you use Trello to organize yourself or your team? Share with us in the comments.