In this episode of The Circle Sessions, Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications joins host Brett Johnson to share valuable insights on email marketing for 2024.

Tonnisha provides do's and don'ts for effectively reaching and engaging your audience through email. From providing incentives for subscriptions and utilizing targeted advertising to creating and managing email newsletters, she offers practical tips for successful email marketing.

Top Takeaways

1. Email marketing remains a powerful tool for reaching and engaging with your audience, regardless of the type of business, whether it's a podcast, videocast, or other endeavors.

2. Incentives play a crucial role in encouraging people to subscribe to your email list, and they don't necessarily have to be discounted; offering freebies, bonus episodes, or exclusive content can also be effective.

3. Avoid buying email lists, as it can lead to negative consequences, such as being marked as spam, potentially damaging your sender's reputation, and impacting your ability to use email marketing platforms.

4. Utilize email marketing advertising to reach new audiences, working with companies that can help target specific demographics, industries, or locations to ensure your email campaigns reach interested and relevant recipients.

5. Tailor your email marketing to specific audience segments rather than sending generic messages to a broad audience. Understanding your target listener or subscriber's preferences and creating customer profiles is crucial for effective email marketing.

6. Implementing an email newsletter, whether on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, provides an opportunity to stay connected with your audience, share helpful content, promote events, and maintain brand awareness.

7. Be mindful of not overwhelming subscribers by flooding their inboxes with excessive emails. Use analytics to understand your audience's preferences regarding email frequency, and provide options for subscribers to choose their preferred frequency.

8. Email marketing offers direct contact with your audience and provides valuable analytics to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Use this data to make informed decisions and continually refine and improve your email marketing strategy.

9. Politeness and respect are essential in email marketing. Treat your subscribers' email addresses with the same level of respect as you would treat their phone numbers, and seek their permission and preferences regarding email frequency and content.

10. Make use of available resources and expertise in email marketing to optimize your strategy, whether through consulting with experts, leveraging social media, or seeking assistance with analytics and audience segmentation.

Memorable Moments

00:00 Offer incentives for email marketing subscriptions, despite saturation.

05:53 Being marked as spam has consequences.

08:18 Company helps reach local lawyers with emails.

12:28 Analyze podcast analytics to target the audience.

14:18 Newsletter setup, content, engagement, and freebies overview.

18:22 Be polite in email communication, considerate.

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TJE Communication’s mission is to empower and educate small women-owned businesses and equip them with digital solutions to level the playing field.

IG - @tjecomm

TW - @tjecomm

LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonnishaenglish/

FB - https://www.facebook.com/tjecomm

Each week, one of The Circle of Experts talks about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, website design, and implementation of all of these to help you make the best podcast possible.

Have a question or an idea for one of our episodes? Send us an email at podcasts@circle270media.com.

The Circle of Experts are:

Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs

Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications

Don The Idea Guy

Brett Johnson, My Podcast Guy, from Circle270Media Podcast Consultants

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):

https://uppbeat.io/t/vince-mcgill/lemon-slice

License code: 2NRNUIV5VG7FU3K5

Copyright 2024 Brett Johnson, My Podcast Guy

Welcome to The Circle Sessions featuring The Circle Of Experts. The Circle Of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English Amamoo, TJE Communications, and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants. Each week, one of The Circle Of Experts joins me to, talk about some critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design to help you implement all of these together. So this week, Tonnisha is here from The Circle Of Experts. Tonnisha's on a mission to help small businesses level the playing field through digital marketing solutions. Tonnisha, thanks for joining me again today.

Yes. Of course. As always, happy to be here. Yeah. So let's talk about another big scope for what you should do and shouldn't do in 2024, email marketing. It's it's a huge topic, but at the same time, it's so effective to to reach your core audience, whatever it is, business, podcast, videocast, whatever it might be. It's just it's never gone away. It's still here, but the the results can be really good if you if done right.

So Yeah. You you kinda wanna talk about the do's and don'ts kind of whether it's a refresh or maybe some new things to really consider, as as you look forward to end of this year.

Yeah. Yeah. And I know that we've kinda briefly, you know, talked about email because it goes into so many other aspects of marketing. And some of you may not know this, but email does have the highest return on investment when it comes to marketing because you are able to be that direct line to your customer. So, yeah, let's just go through, like, 3 marketing do's and don'ts for 2024. There's so many, but I think that these 3 will be really great for anybody who either is not already doing email marketing or maybe you are. Maybe you're already in a group and you just need to kinda bump it up a notch. Mhmm.

So my first do for email marketing is do give incentives for people to subscribe to your list. A lot of us probably right now, my inbox has, like, thousands of unread emails, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person. We subscribe to things, or we somehow end up on these million links that we didn't sign up for. So we're all flooded flooded with information. So in order to give somebody that why, why should I sign up? A lot of people tend to do, you know, a 10% off, some sort of discount. Well, as podcasters or service providers, we may not have a discount in that way unless you have, like, merchandise for your podcast. Yeah. Yeah.

So other freebies could be so let's say you have a podcast where you talk about gardening. Right? So maybe you give a one sheet PDF about, you know, the 5 tips for beginning gardeners.

Mhmm.

Or, you know, maybe it's, like, 10 houseplants for the person like me who doesn't have a 3 a green thumb, and I end up killing every single plant that I've ever. Owned. So so think about, you know, what kind of incentives or freebies that you can offer, even, like, bonus episodes or if you do have a paywall behind some of your content, can you offer a 30 day trial? Yeah. Offer something that'll make people, you know, interested in subscribing to the list. Alright.

Well, I I'm I'm gonna be the first one to bring it up about Tenderfoot. We always talk about Tenderfoot TV. But you've talked you've talked about yeah. You've talked about how excited you've been of just getting stickers Yeah. From them. Yeah. That sort of thing. So it doesn't really the bar doesn't have to be necessarily that high.

It just comes down to, from what I'm gathering you're saying is, you know, maybe test the waters. Yeah. And kinda go, I yeah. Maybe it's just a sticker, or maybe it needs to be a little bit more, and you'll learn as you go.

Exactly. You'll learn as you go. You'll see what people like, what people don't like, and you can always change your incentives to kinda make it more exciting. That's something that I've been doing lately on my own mailing English. Or maybe I'll offer, like, a freebie, but it's only gonna be available for a couple months. And then I'll be like, okay. Last call for this thing, and then I'll change it to something else. So that's also something that you can do.

It doesn't have to be, you know, something that's the same every single time. However, for the busy business owner, if there's, like, a freebie that you can offer that, in the marketing world, we call it something that's evergreen. So, like, an evergreen tree is always the same all year round. So if you have some, content or some offering that's not fire or won't feel outdated if somebody subscribes in January versus June, then you can also just do that, set it, and forget it, and, you know, get people to sign up for your list.

Yeah. No. That's that's great. Yeah. So so what are some other Do's that you've got in mind?

Yeah. So I'm actually gonna go do and then the don't. Oh, okay. Cool. Don. So don't for email to get people on your list is do not buy email list. I know people are always so tempted to do this, but I have seen it go really wrong, because these people don't know you and they did not subscribe

or their email inbox cleaned

up, they may even mark you as spam. Or or their email inbox cleaned up. They may even mark you as spam because they don't recognize your email. And I don't think people, you may not know this, but if you're using, let's say, like, a Mailchimp or Constant Contact. If your, email address gets marked as spam, you know, so many times, lock you from Sessions, and you'll have to go through a process for them to reinstate your sending privileges. And, you know, it's not just, okay, I'm gonna if that happens on Mailchimp, I'll just go to constant contact. In some cases, I have seen, not all the time, but I have seen where if you are just moving to another platform instead of fixing the issue, you may even be blocked from a new marketing platform. I always tell people I would rather be unsubscribed from than marked as spam because you can get new subscribers, but the process of trying to, you know, remove yourself from being marked as spam can take a lot of time.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't sound like it's worth the effort. Plus, if if you think about it, it it it it it really doesn't serve a purpose. I mean, other than you just bolstering your numbers, but big deal. You know, really, if you think about it, if you're selling by the numbers, that's just a fake number.

Exactly. And, you know, I'd rather have 10 people that open my emails all the time so that I have a 100% open rate than millions of people and only have 10 people open.

Right.

Because you do pay for the amount of subscribers that you have. So these different platforms, like, I think Mailchimp might give you free a free account up to, like, 500 people or something like that. So once you go over that, you have to start paying. So if people are on your list, you wanna make sure they're there because they not only want to be there, but it's worth you paying for them holding that spot on your email list.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go for another do. Yeah.

Yeah. And now the way to reach new people without having to buy a list. So you can do some email marketing advertising. So I worked with a company, called LocalIQ. I believe they're owned by the same people that own the Columbus Dispatch. We're in Columbus, Ohio. And what you are able to do is, I have a guy over there. His name is Matt.

He's awesome. So what you're able to do is, let's say you're like, hey. I have a podcast, for lawyers, and I wanna reach, lawyers within Franklin County. This company can actually pull a list of lawyers in Franklin County. They do not share their email with you, but you can work with them to put together an email campaign. And maybe you're offering, you know, one of your freebies to them and a couple links to your podcast episode, and they're able to send that email out for you. As long as you I would recommend making sure that you do have a way for those people to subscribe to your mailing when you're going through that process.

Right.

But that is a way for you to advertise to people. It it I mean, there is a cost behind it, but I think it's worth doing that over, you know, buying a list and potentially being marked as spam.

Yeah. Well, at least that list is more of a warm list versus the

cold. Yeah. Exactly. Because the email is going to, appear to be coming from, you know, a company that they already recognize. It will have all of your information in there, and these people have already opted in to receiving these types of emails from LocalIQ because they want to be, you know, informed of upcoming events or anything that's going on that's relevant to them, so they're all down for it and good to go. They're also able to do some things as far as, like, geotagging. So if a person is in particular area, you may, you know, get on Facebook and see an advertisement that is, offering freebies for your mailing list.

Right.

So there are different ways that you can reach new people without having to, really be worried about the whole spam aspect. Yeah. I will say, though, along with that, I would not recommend just advertising. So this is the don't to that. I wouldn't recommend advertising to a general audience.

Yeah.

So if you are going back to the whole thing. I think the weather is, like, getting nice, so it's making me think about grass. But if you are a podcast that maybe focuses on, you know, outdoors things or planting and, you know, all of that, you wouldn't wanna just generically send out an email. Or I think about, I you you mentioned a podcast that you work with the the guys that it's like Furs and Paws or something.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a animal pet store not pet store, but, the for food. Yeah. Pet food. Yeah. Exactly.

So, you know, they may not want to advertise to people that hate animals. Right. Like to to these specific people. If they don't have those specific people, they'll tell you, like, no. We can't get that generic, but we can do this or try that. You just don't wanna be super general because this is your money that you're putting into this, and you wanna make sure you do get some sort of return on investment. So really think about who is your customer, what is your target listener, your target subscriber, and really build out those customer profiles. Yeah.

Put a name to it. Like, you know, when I worked at Justice, the little girl that we were marketing to, her name was Sofia. And, you know, with my business, the person that I think of my customer, her name is put a name to it so that Yeah. As you're really thinking about the characteristics of this person that you're trying to reach, really get down to the nitty gritty of who they are, what they like, what they're into. So when you are spending money on advertising, it actually makes sense.

Right. Yeah. Well, another piece of that too is, specifically for podcasting when you take a look at your analytics Yeah. Depending on your hosting platform, you can take a look at a lot of podcasters, their home city is not their number one city that they're reaching. And and and if you use this Yeah. And as analytics, you can actually, you know, take a look at, okay, I'm based in Columbus, Ohio, but maybe my audience is actually in Boston. Well, that's Right. Maybe that's the target city that you could actually try to bring up your newsletter is Boston.

Take a look at that market. So even if it's just that, you know, that granular, I guess you could say, of of look use the data you have at your fingertips to make better decisions.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So my last do is do create an email newsletter. This can be weekly, monthly, quarterly. It just gives you an opportunity to stay up to date with your audience or maybe even daily if you have a big enough audience or or a big enough, response that people wanna hear from you daily. And there are different ways you can look into, you know, the preferences of what your audience prefers. So I know, like, you know, big companies like Forbes or The New York Times, they may have daily emails that go out that kinda just curates the news for the day and things like that. So depending on, you know, the setup of your podcast or business, I would say for me, I'm more of a monthly, newsletter sender. Daily would be cool, but I I don't know if you guys can hear her in the background, but I have a Circle baby, so she probably would not allow me to send daily emails.

So monthly is what is where we are right now.

Yeah.

So just think about, you know, when it comes to the setup of your newsletter, what exactly will that entail? So for me, my newsletter is more, brand awareness. I offer, you know, monthly tips. I also include this podcast as well just, you know, also sharing some events that I'll be attending or ways that people can get in contact with me. So for your podcast, would you be featuring, you know, the top episodes of the last month so that people can catch up? Are you gonna be featuring new episodes, different ways for people to subscribe, the different platforms that people can subscribe? I think as long as you keep it fun and engaging, newsletters are always a great way to get in contact with people. And, you know, also to continue to share some of those freebies because once someone signs up for your mailing list, they're not gonna they may not try to sign up again to get some of those new freebies that you're offering. So something I'm you know, make sure that I do is if I do change up the freebie, that I also send it to the mailing list that's already there to make sure that they can get that information too.

Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to forget your past people because you you got them, quote, unquote. You know, they've signed up. They're ready ready to go. But but they still want the love as well too that they see the offer out there going, well, I didn't get a hold of it. It's the same as if, you know, you get your you get your deep discount on Spotify or something like that. And all of a sudden, you're paying full price, and then you see the the discount code out there again.

It's like, well, heck, I can't. I'm not eligible. You know, that sort of thing. So it's kinda keep in mind how you play with your current people, keep them happy, but you still only you know, you wanna bring in new people. You're right.

Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, my my don't to that one is do not flood the inbox. So using analytics to understand, you know, what your audience wants and what they need. If they're telling you, please do not email me weekly or daily, then please don't. But if they are more responsive to those monthly or quarterly emails, then that's what you keep doing. If you are looking to, you know, increase your sending frequency, then maybe you ask them beforehand. You can also create other, you know, levels to your mailing list.

So maybe you have a general list that gets something every month, and then you have groups of people that are interested in weekly versus daily, and you focus on building those different avenues of your mailing list differently. But giving people the option to say yes or no to to their frequency, will will surely keep people happy and hopefully on your list when you do it that way.

Yeah. I've I've had 1 or 2 newsletters that actually have added another newsletter, but the content is a bit more specific. Mhmm. And they automatically include you, but they're they give you way they gave me way ahead of time notice. It's saying, hey. It's coming your way. If you wanna unsubscribe, that's great.

You only unsubscribe to the new one. You'll still keep the old one.

So at least they're being extra. But they're kind of experimenting as well too. But I I like that that that, yeah, if you've got content that can be more specific in it rather than adding to the length of the newsletter you're already sending out.

Right.

Then it's partitions the interest of your peep of of your followers too. So yeah. It you know, the newsletter stuff can be a lot of fun. It just it's just like, you know, creating a podcast, putting that content together, and laying it out. And because it will it will start to become a rhythm then. And Yeah. Happen. You're right.

You're just looking at, you know, if it's news driven, daily or weekly, whatever. You know, it can be monthly too. It depends on how fast your news cycle is and what you wanna do. But but, yeah, it's gonna say whatever you decide to do, you're married to it.

Yeah. Exactly. Keep it up. And I love what you said about just being polite. I think that's the general, word for this whole podcast or phrase is just, you know, be polite because, you know, people check their emails, you know, multiple times a day, every day. Majority of us have emails on our phone. We're already getting tons of notifications from social media. So just think about that and, you know, make sure that if somebody is giving you their email, it's pretty much the equivalent of giving out a phone number these days.

Yeah. Yeah.

You you know, I doubt that you'd, like, pick up the phone and call, like, random people. I hope you wouldn't. Random people every single day or every week or whatever without their permission. So just keep that in mind, as you're building out your list. But email can be fun. Honestly, I prefer email over social media.

Yeah.

I think it's so much fun because it is that direct line of contact, and there's just so many different things that you can do to, you know, build it up and really make it work for your business.

Yeah. And and the analytics you get on the back end, you know exactly what did work and didn't. Yeah. You see the click through or they responded to this or, you know, Sessions the other. If they open it, would open the email altogether. You know? It it it can be. I think if you just learn from what's being told back to you with the analytics, you can build on and just tweak it here or there and just keep going with it. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, if the listener has any questions, they haven't started email newsletter or they have, but it's just not going somewhere, how can they get a hold of you? Talk a little bit more about this.

Yeah. Yeah. You can go to my web site, teachings.com, and schedule a free consultation. I absolutely love talking about email, so I'm always open to do that. And I'm also on social media as tjecom. That's tjecomm.

Sounds good. Yeah. And we'll have all that in the show notes for the podcast, obviously, too. And if you wanna talk to me about your podcast or, you know, even if you have a newsletter tied to the podcast, wanna explore that a little bit more, contact me. We'll get a hold of Tanisha as well. You know? So get that. You know, contact, either one of us will, you know, get you going in the right direction. Obviously, Tanisha talked about her newsletter.

I've got a newsletter as well too. It's a weekly, but it's a news focused, and we kinda regurgitate what's going on in the news just in case you miss some stuff. Guy to my website Circle 270media.com, and it's called my podcast guy newsletter. Until next time, Tanisha. Thanks.

Thank you for having me.