We revitalised our Twitter polls in October last year. Have you engaged with any of them? Some of the data we’ve gathered has surprised us and may surprise you too. Here are seven interesting things our Twitter polls reveal about our followers and what you can do about it if the results apply to you.

Design Learnings

People Want to Send GIFs in Email

In December 2018, we launched a really cool feature in our product – rotating banners. These display in most email platforms (even some versions of Outlook) as animated GIFs in email. So, we asked you about it:

Interestingly, most people don’t know how to make a GIF, so we published one of our best-performing (and most fun to research) blog posts: How to Create Email GIFs. Read it for tips on creating GIFs for email using Everlytic, Photoshop, GIPHY, Boomerang, and LICEcap.

Landing Page Design is a Thing

We published this poll as part of our landing page blog series in April and the results weren’t that surprising…

What we did find surprising was the level of interest our followers had on the content – they loved it! It seems people just didn’t know how to make the most of the landing pages they were using or possibly didn’t know where to start altogether.

Are you one of these people? Read part one of our two-part blog series How to Get the Most Out of Landing Pages

Content Learnings

A Case Study Can Go a Long Way

When we published our Most Viewed Everlytic Content from 2018 in January, we assumed people wanted easy-to-consume content like quick, punchy blog posts and infographics. The results surprised us:

Interestingly, when analysing our SEO, we’ve also found that our case studies are high-performing content. Do you share case studies on your website / social media? Do it more. They even work well in your emails.

Want to find out how social proof like case studies can be better used in your emails? Read our blog post: Boost Your Email Marketing with Social Proof. Here’s How.

Engagement Learnings

People Aren’t Optimising Engagement

When we published our blog post on Why People Unsubscribe & What You Can Do About It our Twitter poll revealed that half of the responders usually unsubscribe because they receive too many emails.

But when we asked email marketers what their email unsubscribe rate was for our 2018 Email Marketing Benchmarks campaign, we discovered that most responders don’t measure their unsubscribe rate.

Plus, a whopping 72% of the following responders don’t know anything about The Basics of A/B Testing Your Emails – a priceless feature for optimising email engagement.

This is a problem, because low email engagement can seriously damage your email delivery.

To address this, read our Guide to Effective Email Marketing – The Basics – especially the guidelines from page 14.

Automation Learnings

People Don’t Know How to Automate Email

In January, we published the following poll in the lead up to our blog post on Our Favourite Everlytic Features from 2018. And the results we interesting…

But in May, it really surprised us. Why? Because our followers love the idea of using email automation in their businesses, but a huge portion of them don’t know how to.

If you’re one of these people, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s what we recommend:

Don’t know what marketing automation workflows are? Read Optimise Your Marketing Automation with Workflows.
Not sure why you need email automation? Read 10 Signs That You Need Marketing Automation.
Work in hospitality? Read Email Automation for Hospitality.
Want to nurture your leads for better conversion? Read Lead Nurturing with Email: An Infographic.
Need some examples to get the ball rolling? Read 7 Ways to Use Marketing Automation Workflows.

Do you have an email automation question that we haven’t answered? Email our marketing team. We’ll plan the answer into our content. ????

Delivery Learnings

Few People Understand Email Delivery

Getting your emails to your reader’s inbox is a critical first step in email marketing. To do this, your emails must pass multiple spam checks to make sure they’re legitimate – something that can be improved by adapting your content and adopting various best-practice elements.

But, surprisingly, nearly half of the following responders don’t use any of these best-practice delivery elements in their emails and only about a quarter include an unsubscribe link – a big red flag for spam filters.

If you’re baffled by any of these elements, or would like to learn more about them, we insist that you read 10 Ways to Remove Spam Elements in Email & Improve Delivery.

Compliance Learnings

Many People Aren’t Ready for POPI

Despite data privacy legislation’s presence in the news, our Twitter poll and other researchers have found that many organisations still aren’t prepared for the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI). Almost a third haven’t even heard about it before.

If you collect any personal data, like names, email addresses, ID numbers, etc., we recommend familiarising yourself with these laws and any others you may be exposed to (like the GDPR). Feel free to get started with these blog posts:

For a more in-depth look at POPI and the GDPR, get our whitepaper: POPI & GDPR: How They’ll Impact Your Business

We’re excited and surprised by the outcomes of this Twitter-poll analysis. Watch this space to see what we do about it. Or sign up for our monthly byte-sized newsletter – it’s always full of juicy email, SMS, and general marketing tips like this.