This week is another interview episode ahead of the Christmas period. In this episode, the very lovely Jill Fanslau has joined us to talk about email marketing. As the owner of a Weber, Jill has lots of experience when it comes to email, putting her in the perfect place to give you all of tips you need to succeed. We talk about how you should collect emails, how you should collect them and what you should be sending your list once you’ve started building it. If you want to start building or growing on your email list, this is definitely the episode for you.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• You don’t own your social media accounts but you do own your email lists. If Instagram or Twitter were to go down in the next week, where would that leave your business? You need to be smart about how your channels work alongside one another and drive your social media followers to your email list.
• If you’re struggling to see results with your email list, you need to ensure you’re cleansing and segmenting it. If you need to, let people CHOOSE what list they’re on. Ask them what they want to see.
• Although building your list is important, you need to be sure you’re actually emailing them. If you haven’t emailed them in a long time, be honest.
• Don’t be afraid to talk to your email list. You don’t have to only email when you’re selling. You have to be able to provide and bring something to the table without asking something in return.
• Humans crave stories so if you can weave those into your email, people will connect with you on a personal level.
• When you’re onboarding new emails, you should use a seven-email strategy. The first email should be a welcome email that should arrive instantly. Introduce yourself and let them know what they can expect from you. Afterwards, you should follow up with a story email as it starts off the likability process. If you don’t want to write a story, shoot a video.
• Your third email should provide more value. Next, you should send and agitation email that hits their pain point. Although it will make them squirm, you want to remind them of the reason they signed up to your email list. This should go out right before you pitch someone a product or solution.
• Some people may need a little bit of help making a decision, so this is where you will need to send a proof email. Whether it’s a testimonial, a case study or a review – people will experience intense FOMO if they’re missing out. Once you have sent a proof email, you need to send an ask email.
• The seven-email strategy can take one month, two months or six months.
• The best way to determine how long your emails should be is to test. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing, it matters what your audience want.
• Think about whether or not people will be opening your emails on their mobile, rather than their desktop.
• Link shorterners can cause your emails to end up in spam.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

No matter how big your list is, write to one person.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Introducing Jill – 07:40
• Why Should You Use Email? – 16:00
• Is Honesty the Best Policy? – 22:30
• Emails Are Not Just for Sales – 30:10
• What Do You Say to Your Email List? - 34:50
• What Is A Seven Email Strategy? – 47:59
• How Long Should an Email Be and Should It Be Text Only? - 59:00

Transcript below

Hello and a really warm welcome this episode of the podcast. How are you doing? We are really close to Christmas so I should imagine if you are listening to this before Christmas, you are amidst of cards and present wrapping and decorations and all that sort of thing. As I record this, it's actually still the end of November so I actually don't know whether I'll be doing that myself.

I have to say that my husband and I joke that if we didn't have children we would quite happily not have Christmas which sounds really mean. Actually one thing that is really interesting, prior to me having my own business, I loved things like Christmases and birthdays and having dinner parties and doing all these lovely things but you know what happens? It is little bit sad and I do feel a little bit sad about it, but what happens is you have your own business and honestly my brain never stops thinking about business, working on the business, doing things, thinking I need to check this, do that. Sometimes it just doesn't feel like it has any more space for anything else so in all honesty, I find it much harder now to do things like Christmas and birthdays and plan them as well as I would want to. I'm one of those people who loves that sort of stuff and I much prefer I deal with other people's birthdays and giving to other people at Christmas much better than myself.

It's just really weird. Are you like that? I don't like my birthday so much. I much prefer to plan someone else's. I used to be really good at it. I used to make cards and I used to throw parties and I used to do really cool, thoughtful stuff and I would love to do that more. Maybe one day when the business is lots bigger and I can afford a bigger team that can do things more for me, my team is amazing as they are by the way, but obviously I would have them do way more if there was no budget constraints. Yeah, maybe one day that will come back and I can start throwing dinner parties again but at the moment, like I said, apart from having the children we would quite happily have no Christmas this year.

The other thing I should say is obviously as you all know if you've been listening to the podcast, I have a stepson and then obviously I have my daughter and she spends one week with me, one week with her dad. We have to take it in turns so Christmas is, one year she stays with me and she's here Christmas Day and wakes up on Christmas Day here and then in the other year she obviously does that at her dad's. It's actually that this year, she's at her dad's on Christmas Day herself, so she doesn't get here until Boxing Day so we will actually have a very quiet and non-eventful Christmas Day but then Boxing Day will be our Christmas Day. There we go, just giving you a back story on my Christmas because I'm sure you absolutely needed to know that.

This week, I'm doing another interview because I have been really good. I've batched so many interviews recently that actually I thought I would do two in a row and I wanted to do the solo ones over the Christmas period just in case you don't get a chance to hear them. Mainly because I feel bad like if you've come up to my podcast, and I'm not even sure this actually happens all the time but, of course Christmas and New Year I have seen a dip in the past in terms of downloads because people are busy, they're out of their routine, I guess if you listen to this one you're on the way to the office or if you do a morning routine or go for a walk or whatever. Obviously if you're not doing that on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve which are the two days the podcast comes out this year then that person is going to miss out if I've done an interview. That's why I've chosen to do solo episodes for those two because you can listen to me every single week so I'm not offended if you miss that week maybe. Obviously you might listen later so that's fine.

Anyway, I'm going to do an interview this week. This week we have got the very lovely Jill Fanslau and I'm hoping I said that right again. It is Fanslau? Yeah. She has been in marketing for twelve years and she works for AWeber. She is head of content marketing but she has done lots of other things and she's been published by some of the world-renowned brands like Men's Health Magazine, Women's Health Magazine, and National Geographic Society.

If you don't know, AWeber is a online platform that you can use to send emails. As you know, I have talked lots of times about systems that I use. I don't use AWeber and I have to say, because I get approached for people to come on the podcast which is super cool actually because it opens up people to me that I've never seen before, I might not know, I might not of thought they would want to come on, and it just kind of gives me a bit of variety and I'm really strict. I've had lots of requests for people to come on that don't fit with my audience, don't fit with you guys listening, and I really hope that people I do bring on do fit with you and therefore it's interesting and it helps you.

When I was approached by Jill and she wanted to talk about email marketing and what she can do on them and advice around coming up with ideas for sending out emails and that sort of thing, I was like, "Perfect, perfect, perfect," however, I don't use AWeber so I was really keen to make sure that when we do this episode it was really focused on the content not necessarily platform and she was great. She was absolutely brilliant, perfect. Obviously AWeber is used by lots and lots of people. It's a very, very good platform. It just is one that I haven't used so I will link up and only Jill in the show notes as always. I put all their links in there. I will also link up to AWeber so that you can have a look at that if that's something that you think you might be interested in.

Like I said, this episode is all about email. It's about how you should collect email, why you should collect email, why you should send emails, and then what should you be sending them? That, for me, is the question I get asked a lot because it's [inaudible 00:06:17] saving emails and collecting emails but if you don't actually email them, they're not going to be very warm when you do get around to emailing them. Normally, people only then email when they're trying to sell something or they need something. It all about how can you email them ongoing and going forward and what should you put in those emails?

We'll talk about that, we'll talk about onboarding as well in terms of when you do get someone onto your email list, how do you onboard them? What do you do? What kind of emails do you send them so that they get a feel of who you are and then you get to kind of have a conversation with them. Then, some tips around writing your email, how you write it when you're writing it for one person, so I really enjoy talking about this. Really enjoyed sharing my experiences with email as well. Hopefully this should be a really, really useful one for you and if you are looking to build your email list and you haven't yet started, please do so. Real exciting point there. You can get a free download that is five ways to build your email list that lots of people forget about, some simple, easy things that you can do. You can head over to Teresaheathwaring.Com/list building and you'll be able to get that here and there's a download like I said of five ideas there.

Anyway, I will shut up talking and I will let you carry on listen to today's interview with the lovely Jill. Here we go.

Introducing Jill

Okay, it gives me so much pleasure today to welcome the very lovely Jill Fanslau to the podcast. Jill, welcome.

Thanks so much, Teresa. I'm super excited to be here.

You know what, I'm really excited to be here because, I'm really excited to be here? I'm always here. I mean, I'm really excited for you to be here. It's been a long week and it's only Wednesday so we're in trouble.

This is a great way to kick this off. I love it.

Always, always. It's like and you know what happens, this is now going off [inaudible 00:08:09], I hardly ever edit these things out so my audience is more than accustomed to hearing me get it wrong and fixing it all live in the podcast. I'm sure they won't mind.

Yeah.

Very off [inaudible 00:08:21]. [crosstalk 00:08:21]

We did not practise.

Yeah, if anything I am authentic. I am super excited to have you here because we're talking about something that I really love to talk about and it's a little bit old school in marketing sense, but we're talking about emails. It's actually a question that I get all the time in my academy about, how do we get better open rates? How do we structure an email? What do I say to them every week? How often should I email them? How often should I do all these things? There's so many great questions that we're going to address and you are really the expert on this so I'm really, really excited.

Jill, just so my audience can have an understanding, can you just briefly tell them who you are and how you got to do what you're doing today?

Yeah, no problem. I'm super excited to talk about email. As you said, it's such an old school marketing tactic but yet people are still learning new things every day about it and it's changing at a faster pace than I think it's ever changed before so I'm really excited to dive into that. Yeah, just some background on me. I got started in print journalism and I got started right around the time that newspapers were declared dead.

Perfect timing.

It was great, yeah. I was like, "Great. I'm glad I spent all this money on my education and coming out to a horrible job field," I think there was a 20+% drop in newspaper ad revenue the year that I graduated. [crosstalk 00:09:50] Nothing to do with me. I was really lucky and actually got a job at the National Geographic Society, was still able to go into journalism, which I think has given me a really great background in how to create content for people and do so in a really service-filled way. Giving people actionable tips, expert advice, statistics, research, data, and implementing that into marketing materials.

I started out at National Geographic, quickly saw the writing on the wall that magazines and newspapers weren't going anywhere anytime soon, and I pivoted and went to digital marketing, digital journalism. I got my degree at night for that in grad school and then hopped over to Men's Health Magazine, started out as a senior editor, and one day my boss said to me, he's my mentor as well, he goes, "What is it that you want to do at Men's Health? What's your dream job?"

I was like, "Fitness editor," and he looks at me he says, "Okay."

I'm like, "I know, it's impossible, I'm a female, this is Men's Health, I can't be the fitness editor," and he goes, "I don't care if you're purple, green, male or female, if you are the best person for the job, you get the job."

I got the job. The next thing I know, I'm fitness editor and then I moved up to director of the website, which was really cool because at that point I was doing journalism but you're doing marketing hand-in-hand. You can't run a digital website and not be doing both. We were slicing and dicing content and putting it up on social media, putting it on the website, YouTube, we were everywhere. At the same time, we were also selling products and services. Every piece of content that we created was high-quality, education-based, service-filled, but also was pushing a product or a service to someone that we thought they could get value out of. It was a really cool mix at that point of digital marketing, journalism.

Then I was up for a new challenge and hopped over to the Sass tech industry and here I am at AWeber which is a Sass email marketing platform and it's been around for 20 years. Our founder Tom Kulzer actually created the email auto-responder in 1998 so we're like the [crosstalk 00:12:11] we're like the OG godfather of the email marketing business.

Here I am, I am head of content marketing but I do a tonne of demand-gen strategy as well so driving acquisition, paid advertising, SCL, webinars, all of that fun stuff.

Amazing.

Yeah.

I love hearing the stories of how people got to where they were and the skill sets that people gain in order to direct them into certain ways. Actually it must have been really nice to come from a journalism background because I've always said for a really long time, I've worked in marketing for 15 years and people got marketing and PR confused and I always used to say to people that sort of came to me and said, "Can you do PR," like it's a really specific thing and you write in a very specific way and I can't write like that. That's not a way I've been taught to write or a way that I do write.

For you to come from that direction where actually the story-telling, the getting to the punchline, the key messages, the current thing that's going to draw someone in is such a good skill in order to then go forward and use that from a marketing point of view. It's kind of fascinating really. Also the content creation and then luckily doing the sales bit because as I sat there and listened to what you were saying I was thinking, "I wonder what it's like to create content and not have or want to just get a sale at the end of it," and obviously you have that element which was great because then it gave you all of those skills really, didn't it? That's awesome.

Obviously what we want to talk about today is how we go about these emails. We joke that it's old school and lots of people think that because social media is here that we no longer have to do that sort of thing. However, one thing that I teach and one thing that I talk about all the time is that we don't own our social media. We're marketing on borrowed ground. Therefore, if something was to happen to our platform, if Twitter decided tomorrow they were done or in fact I have a horrible but very powerful story of someone that I know personally so I know it's very true who had a huge Instagram following, hundreds of thousands, and she built her whole business using Instagram and she'd done a bit of an email list but it wasn't her priority because she was getting so much traffic and so much stuff direct from Instagram. Built an online business, selling an online course, and basically someone hacked into her Instagram, wiped it, and it went.

No.

Literally overnight. All those files.

Oh, that's horrifying.

Isn't it? She said that the followers were bad enough, that was awful enough, however for her the thing that really upset her because she was doing a business where she taught people how to be creative with kids and their children and it was all about doing these amazing creative activities. For her, the content that she produced and had only on Instagram, and it went literally she lost everything. Of course, she got in touch with Instagram and not that they don't care or not to say that publicly, but they're a big company, they deal with big accounts, and obviously hers even though it's big maybe to the rest of us listening, to them she's not Kylie Jenner. I think if Kylie Jenner had something happen they might help her out but unfortunately they didn't help her out and that was it, start from scratch again.

Why Should You Use Email?

For me, email is so important but of course one of the reasons I wanted you on and one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, how we should look at writing our emails, is the fact that the open rates are still pretty low and how do we really make the most of that? I feel like I'm just throwing every question at you all in one go. I'm just like, right, you go and I'll tell you when to stop. Where do you want to start with this? What's your thoughts in terms of rate? Where do we start with this beast of email marketing?

Yeah, so it's interesting that you brought up social media because people say that to me all the time, "Well, I need to focus on social media," and I will be the first person to say this, yes, you have to be on social media as a brand. There's no doubt about that but to your point, if...