KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• If you tell your list that you’re going to email them at a specific time, it helps give you accountability. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, if people know you’re going to be emailing them you will feel more encouraged to continue.
• Offering content and value that your email subscribers may not be able to find elsewhere is a great way to get people to stay on your list.
• Write your emails yourself. You want your content to come from you personally.
• If you have a product, newsletters may be the better option.
• Shorter emails are often better, however, there are no rules you should be following when it comes to length.
• Ultimately, how often you send out your email comes down to how often you want to send it. If you have enough content, weekly is a great starting point.
• Try the three-month challenge where if you do something for three months and it still doesn’t work, stop. Although it may be tempting to give up sooner, you need to give your email strategy enough time to develop.
• What you put in your email will depend on whether or not you’re sending out a newsletter or an email. If you’re sending an email, you may find that your content will be more focussed on events and updates that have happened since your last email.
• Your emails need to add value, meaning you need to spend as little time as you can talking about you and your products.
• If you’re looking for content to add into your emails, sharing other people’s content is a great place to start.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

A newsletter tends to be a HTML email with images, text and chunks of information. An email, however, is text only and more of a one-on-one conversation. People are more likely to engage with an email than they are a newsletter.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• My Email Journey – 03:40
• What is the Difference Between A Newsletter and an Email? - 08:45
• How Long Should Your Emails Be? – 10:40
• How Often Should You Send Your Emails? – 12:00
• What Should You Put In Your Email? - 14:31
• A Quick Summary – 23:00

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

• Sign Up for My Email List Here

Transcript below

Speaker 1: (00:32)

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Marketing That Converts podcast. How are you? So I'm glad to say that after an awful lot of travelling and then coming straight back to do a launch, I am now.. the cart is closed and I am now in a position where I can just chill out in the office, which is really, really cool. You know those times where it's like you've got time in the office or you can focus and tick things off and get things done. So I'm really, really excited about that and really pleased. I'm also super excited about my launch and how that went and all my new members in the academy, which is so cool. So I'm excited to get to know them better and to really start helping them with their business. So this week I wanted to talk about emails. Now I know we've done lots of different, talking about emails and we've talked about building email lists and I go on and on and on all the time about how important it is because basically we don't own our data.

Speaker 1: (01:25)

So the people who follow us on social media, we don't have their details. And if something, God forbid was to go wrong on social media, we've lost our following. So I've talked all the time about building lists and I've worked hard on building lists. My seem to have done a lot of talks recently about how to do it and step by step and that sort of thing. So we all know it's super important. But the one thing I haven't really gone into a huge amount is what you actually do with them. Once you've built an email list. And I know that this is something that is putting off a lot of people from even starting building that list. Because they're saying "It's all well and good building a list, but what am I going to send to them?" And if they're not producing lots of regular content then maybe they're thinking, "I haven't got anything to send to them." So that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this.

(02:12)

Also, I was inspired over the weekend. I received a few different emails, one from Ann Handley, which I always enjoy getting. She does one every other Sunday and has it always really well written and I like reading them and the other one from someone I'm not going to mention, but basically I received this email and it just was so focused on the person and on their own business and what they had achieved and what they had done that I just thought, "This is a really bad example of a newsletter or an email that you'd send out to your list" because don't get me wrong, I know there's an element where we're going to talk about things that we've done. I just started this podcast saying, you know, this is what I've done recently, but it's 30 seconds of it. And then hopefully we get straight into the value. So if you're doing an entire newsletter and that's all writing, every time people quite honestly don't care. And I know that sounds really harsh and I'm not saying I don't care, I'm just saying that honestly people don't care about us and our businesses as much as we do, what they care about is stuff that's going to interest them and be of benefit to them and add value to them.

(03:18)

So like I said, I took inspiration by receiving one really good email and one really not so great email over the weekend and I decided that I was going to record this episode and talk about what you actually do once you've got an email list or how you start sending those emails and what you can send in them. So let me just explain to you what I did, which honestly I laugh at myself all the time.

My Email Journey

Speaker 1: (03:41)

And I think I've talked about this before, but so as you know I was setting up my email list and I was running lead magnets and adverts and people were signing in. In fact this lead magnet I did, which was all about being proactive on social media. And the lead magnet went down so well and I ended up getting loads people on my email list and it was wonderful and I wasn't doing anything with them. Honestly. I like, I didn't take my own advice. I didn't take my own advice that I had to actually email these people cause I think in my head I was half like, well I don't want to bother them and I don't want to irritate them. But the truth is, and if you'll sit there thinking the same, the truth is they've signed up to your email list. So tick, that's number one. Number two, if they don't want to receive your email, they can just unsubscribe. It's not that difficult. They can just delete your emails. It's not that hard. So that's the first thing I think I needed to get over. The fact of people were on my list. And I was doing nothing with them.

(04:39)

So I had a word with myself, literally a serious word and myself saying, "Teresa, what are you doing? You've got this list and you're not emailing them." So my first decision was I was going to come out to the list and say, "Listen, I'm going to start emailing you more regularly now because I've made a mistake. I should have been doing that from day one and I haven't been."

(04:58)

The other thing I did, which really helped me and the type of person I am is I told my whole list every Wednesday, I will email you. It really gave me accountability because one thing I don't like doing is letting people down. I'm not very good at it. I really hate that part. If that ever happens, luckily touch word because I'm so, cause I hate it so much. I don't often do it. But if I do, I hate it. So by saying to people, every Wednesday I'm going to email you, I kind of held myself accountable and allowed them to hold me accountable as well. So again, it's a bit like the podcast. I wouldn't miss a Monday because this is what the podcast is about. So obviously I make sure, I mean this has been recorded and while before it's due out, but I make sure that obviously that I have the episodes recorded in time, so I've got something every Monday. So again, how hard could an email be? So that was the first thing that I wanted to really get over to my audience.

Speaker 1: (05:56)

The second I wanted to do was I wanted to say to them what it was going to be about. Aye, why they wanted to carry on getting my Wednesday emails after not hearing from me in such a long time. So I said to them that one, I was going to be giving them content and value in a way that I'm not doing it anywhere else. So I viewed my email as a completely different but a content. So I do my podcast, I do stuff on social media, and then I do stuff in an email that you might not get if you're not getting that email. So that was the first thing I really decided about what was going to go into the email, and obviously I mentioned this in the first email to my list.

(06:37)

The second thing I decided was that I was going to write the email. Now I've told you a million times before. I don't like writing. It's not my favourite thing to do, and I have used copywriters in the past for some of the things I've done. So for instance, my show notes, I'm very honest and said that someone else is listening to this and writing the notes for it because that's their zone of genius and not mine. However, I was really conscious of the fact that if you've signed up to my email list, you want to hear from me. Obviously I'm signed up to lots of different emails, for lots of different people and I can hear the tone of voice and I can tell when it's a copywriter and it doesn't sound like the person that I signed up to. So the person that I see on social media, the person that I might be in their Facebook group, or I might be on one of their courses, sometimes the emails come through, just sound like a real sales machine or a copywriting type exercise rather than something from them.

Speaker 1: (07:36)

You know, and I want to envisage a bit like Ann Handley's emails and I'm going to link up to Ann Handley in the notes, but just like I am, visit her, sat down, writing it herself. I wanted my community and people on my list to know that I was doing that too. And I was very honest in the fact of saying to them, I'm human and I don't enjoy this part of it. So if there are typos and mistakes, then I apologise, but you're going to know its me, that's done it and you're going to hear my voice from it. So that was really important to me that not only was I building a list and doing nothing with it, so I made the decision that I was going to do something with it. But the second thing that I viewed as different content that I wanted it to come from me in my tone of voice and me writing it. And also that I sort of committed to saying every single Wednesday.

Speaker 1: (08:24)

So what I wanted to talk to you about today is I wanted you to think about once you build that email list, what are you actually going to do with them? So I'm going to give you a few different examples. So I've already given you the example of me and how I do it. So I view it as completely different content. So when I come to do an email, I write it as an email. So I don't view it as a newsletter. So let's just clear up that first actually.

What is the Difference Between A Newsletter and an Email?

(08:47)

So what's the difference between a newsletter and an email? Well, in the traditional sense, a newsletter tends to be something where your, it tends to be html. So you know the ones you get from MailChimp, where you've got an image and links and texts and it looks nice. And then also it tends to have chunks of information in it. So it will be leading you off to something else. So the newsletter might have your latest blog post, it might have, here's a product I've just launched, so it might have here's me at an event or whatever, and it tends to be chunks or bits of information that lead to maybe your website.

(09:21)

Whereas the way I view my email is it's text only. So I did put a GIF in the ones where I did for the academy, but, and I might throw an occasional GIF in if people like it, but it's text only. So it literally is as if I am sending you an email from my own email or account directly to you. That's the way I view it. So I imagine that that one person is in my head and I am writing it to that one person. I'm talking one to one.

Speaker 1: (09:47)

Whereas a newsletter for me says more about, it is really more geared up to going out to a group. The other thing about the newsletter compared to the tech only email. If you're having a html email with all the images and things, as I've mentioned, then what you might find is that people know that's a newsletter and they disengage quicker. Now the other thing that you're going to have, which is the advantage on your newsletter is that you might have images and colours and whatever where, which I obviously don't have because I'm using text only, so that might attract people. And if you have a product then I would say a newsletter is the way to go. But for me, because I have a service and a lot of the things I do are online, the email style works much better for me and therefore, they tend to be longer.

How Long Should Your Emails Be?

Speaker 1: (10:37)

Let's just address that quickly actually. How long should they be? Well, how long is a piece of string? What have you got to say? I always intend on making mine short and somehow I always managed to make it really long and I don't mean to, and in fact I don't like reading super long emails, but sometimes it just makes sense to be the length that it is. So for me, it's kind of as long as you need it to be. The other thing that you want to do with all these suggestions I'm going to make now and in this podcast episode is obviously test it. So if people are not opening it or the open rates going down or the click through rates going down or one week you did an email and it when out and got really good click rate. What did you do that week?

Speaker 1: (11:17)

So the whole idea is that you want to be checking out what sort of things are working for you. So it's all very well me saying this is what I'm doing, it's because that's what I like. It fits with me and it works for me. So it's not to say that this is going to work for you. Like I said, if you have a product then I am 99.9% sure that you really need to do something html because you're going to want to put some pictures of your product in there.

How Often Should You Send Your Emails?

(11:43)

Okay. So I guess the second thing you need to decide on whether you decided you're going to do an email type email or a newsletter is how often. Now again, this is a question I get asked an awful lot and again it's kind of how often do you want to do it? And I, for me, I think weekly works. I quite like doing it weekly. I think monthly would be too long a time for me to be not dropping into people's emails. Also, I feel I've got enough content to email them weekly because if I didn't, I wouldn't. So if you're sat there thinking I can barely think of what to say in a month, then probably weekly is going to be a little bit too much for you. So like I said, weekly is great for me. I wouldn't go any longer than monthly and I would try and hold myself to a, you know, whether it's a particular day in the month or whatever, just so that you're keeping that consistency. Like I said, I need that accountability. I need to know that it has to go out on that day or otherwise it won't go in and it won't get done. So like I said, mine's weekly. You choose and I think over monthly, I just think probably not ideal.

Speaker 1: (