Alexis Fogel, Hillary’s emails, and telling the truth at all times – VB Engage

This week, Travis and Stewart discuss Hillary Clinton’s biggest email mistakes. No, not those emails, but the thousands she sends to her supporters every day. Being fair-minded, we also talk about Donald Trump’s emails. Thanks to new research on both candidates’ email practices, we highlight three “yuge” email marketing lessons for your business.

We also interview Alexis Fogel of Dashlane, who explains how the security app managed to grow so quickly, and why being transparent helps with trust, engagement, and community management — something politicians could learn a thing or two about, no doubt.

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• Introducing VB engage 27 [00:04]
• It’s been half a year for VB Engage! [00:31]
• Travis recaps last week’s episode with Matt Asay: Episode 26 [01:26]
• We interview this week’s guest — Alexis Fogel (CEO at Dashlane) [1:52]
• Understanding how Dashlane manages to grow [2:38]
• The Cubs won the World Series, and we discover that goat-based curses have a shelf life of 71 years [3:02]
• We discuss Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s email marketing messages [4:27]
• Why both campaigns are awful and how business should use email marketing [4:43]
• According to Persado, both parties are doing the same things wrong [4:51]
• How to create content aimed at the people you care about [5:03]
• Analysis of 6,000 subject lines from Clinton’s and Trump’s email marketing [5:10]
• Clinton sends 900 percent more email than Trump [5:19]
• Most-used phrase by Clinton, “thank you.” Trump’s “approval rating” [5:25]
• Clinton’s biggest open rates are emails around merchandise [5:32]
• Clinton only sends 4 percent of those type of emails [6:05]
• Trump keeps pushing his book, The Art of the Deal [6:45]
• Future politicians should pay attention to emotional triggers via email [7:23]
• Lesson #1. Understand whether your audience wants to be sold to [7:47]
• Lesson #2. Use personalization [8:12]
• Lesson #3. Work out the emotional tone of your emails [9:20]
• Anticipation, Joy, Fear, Trust, and Pride are the five top emotions in emails [9:40]
• Pride and Trust are by far the most effective emotions for boosting open rates in emails [10:01]
• “Stop Trump” and “Crooked Hillary” are the top two negative phrases in recent political emails [10:40]
• Stewart and Travis are in Portugal this week for Web Summit [11:30]
• We are interviewing people live at Web Summit, including Alan Schaaf, CEO at Imgur [12:25]
• We’ll be interviewing Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Katia Beauchamp, Robert Scoble, Alexis Ohanian, Paddy Cosgrave, and many others – you’ll hear those episodes over the next few weeks [15:05]
• Intro to Alexis Fogel, CEO at Dashlane [15:35]
• Stewart fanboys out a bit on Dashlane’s password solution [16:20]
• How do we get our products and services out to as many people as possible? [16:35]
• It’s all about customer experience [17:15]
• The onboarding experience is crucial [17:56]
• Do lots of user testing! [18:31]
• Use data to guide your optimization [18:52]
• Test all of the experiences [19:04]
• Making the onboarding process longer actually increased engagement [20:15]
• How do you ensure security for your users? [21:10]
• Make yourself an unattractive target for hacking [23:24]
• Engagement with your community is a key differentiator [24:01]
• How does Dashlane educate and engage its community? [24:44]
• Build great relationships based on trust [26:31]
• Travis was global digital strategist for Symantec for Norton when security marketing was fear-based [28:57]
• Adding value and showcasing value instead of fear [29:47]
• Stewart makes a joke about passwords (it is funny, honestly) [31:44]

Thanks for tuning in this week, and be excited for next week when we interview the incredible Veronica Belmont.

And if you missed last week’s episode with Matt Asay of Adobe, which was an incredible episode full of massive knowledge bombs, listen to it right here.