Is email marketing broken? Why are your subscribers ghosting you? And why do you feel like you’re yelling into a void every time you hit send?

It’s not your fault, and no, email isn’t dead. But the game has changed, and most people are playing it wrong. If you’ve ever run out of steam, struggled with ideas, or watched your sales slump despite your best email efforts, this is your wake-up call.

The old ways? They’re done. But there’s a new way forward, and this guide shows you exactly how to take back control.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

00:00.00

Speaker

Most business owners know the huge value of email marketing in terms of bringing in sales, scaling your sales, and making your sales more predictable. But most people who start email marketing run out of steam.

00:10.86

Speaker

They start with the best of intention, maybe you can relate to this, and they run out of steam, run out of ideas, they get busy. So today I wanna share with you exactly why that happens and what you actually do to overcome it.

00:22.56

Speaker

Hi, it's Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, cat dad, and your guide to making more money from your inbox. Every email marketing Wednesday, we'll dive into strategies that have your subscribers throwing cash at you faster than you can hit send. If you're a coach, expert, or entrepreneur who's ready to turn those emails into cold hard cash, stick around. Welcome to the email marketing show.

00:46.60

Speaker

Over the past few months, you might have noticed that people are taking longer to say yes to buying from you. People have got more questions before buying. Launches and cart opens are just less of a surge than they used to used to be like, you announce something people go crazy and excited and start buying stuff pretty much straight away.

01:06.04

Speaker

And that launch closed, the last day of a launch, used to like make you a gazillion dollars and now it doesn't have such a surge. The market's changed, the world's changing. And it's all kind of derivative from AI, but we're not really going get too much into that.

01:20.45

Speaker

But this is where the real problem comes out. I call this the timeline problem. So this line on this chart here, but this shows you of all the people who are going to buy within the next six months from your business, when they're most likely to buy. The bottom left-hand corner here, that's today, the first day to join your email list.

01:39.60

Speaker

And on that day, three to five percent of people are actually ready to buy at that point. The rest of the people who are actually going to buy from you are going to do so over the next six months. The problem comes with this line.

01:54.09

Speaker

This line represents the likelihood that you will still be emailing them, still be in contact, still building up beliefs, that you're actually go to be there when they're actually ready to buy. And those two numbers, those two lines, are actually fighting...

02:08.65

Speaker

Again, as that, they're contra to one another. So what do we do about it? Well, there's four reasons that most people are what I call email marketing dropouts.

02:19.30

Speaker

Okay? That's what I call them. Email marketing dropouts. Four reasons that happens. Once you understand these... You'll actually be able to hack your own psychology and your own your own neurology in your brain to help you to be there when more people are around to buy. Because getting more people onto your email list is expensive, so actually selling more to people you've already got That's the cheapest way of making the most profit in your business. And this works great, by the way, whether you're selling B2B or B2C, high ticket or a low ticket, recurring or one time.

02:51.77

Speaker

I work with clients in all kinds of niches who are doing this with products of all types of price point, and it works an absolute treat. The first reason that they fail, that they they give up, they run out of steam,

03:03.40

Speaker

is because they're not planning what they're actually promoting. What I mean by that is if you take a look at your brain, what most people are trying to do is three different actions at the same time. They're trying to plan and use decision-making parts of your brain at the same time as the creativity and writing part of their brain, at the same time as the practical doing of using your email marketing platform, choosing who to send to, how do you put it into a blog, how do you fix the text?

03:31.37

Speaker

That's three parts of your brain, which you're basically working at 33% power each instead of dedicating 100% power to just one of them. And it's no wonder when we sit down or try and write an email, we feel overwhelmed. We feel a lot of resistance against doing that.

03:48.64

Speaker

Simply because we're not using all the power of our brain to actually do what we need to do. So how do we fix it? Well, we're going to just do the planning bit first.

03:59.35

Speaker

And we're going to just do this a month in advance. For entrepreneurial people like us, yes, we should be planning maybe in an ideal world a quarter ahead and six months ahead and have a 12-month plan for our business, our goals, and things we to do But terms of like specific promotions, we like to have...

04:15.86

Speaker

the kind of flexibility to change our minds, to change direction. So what we want to do is just plan our promotions, what we're going promote for a month or just a month in advance.

04:29.45

Speaker

So I just take a simple... Google Sheet, honestly, and I just plan out what I'm going to promote throughout the month. If I'm going to do a particular promotion, let's say I'm going to launch an offer and it's a four-day promotion, I'm going to pop that onto that Google Sheet.

04:44.51

Speaker

I'm going to I'm going to promote it from this day to this day, from Monday to Thursday. Lovely stuff. And then I might do another offer later on in the month, maybe a smaller offer, and I might spend four four days doing that.

04:55.88

Speaker

I kind of know what my month's going look like. The problem is all of these days, these are money black holes. These are profit black holes. These are the moments that we're literally planning to not make any sales. When you say it like that, it kind of is pretty it's pretty confronting, right?

05:15.58

Speaker

So what we're going to do for this month in advance is we're going to put stuff on each of these days. Not every single day. If you don't want to email every single day, that's totally fine. And you're going to decide what thing you can mention.

05:28.81

Speaker

Maybe not as a start to end promotion campaign, but like in just like a more of like an email newsletter type sort of way in in those emails. And you'll notice that the That turns some of the days that were black holes into green money days.

05:43.88

Speaker

Yes, there's still some days I'm not planning on promoting anything. And there's still some days when I'm planning on telling people about something which has no monetary piece, like ah a YouTube channel in my case, or your podcast or your blog, or ah or some kind of content that you have have created.

05:58.61

Speaker

We've now just increased our opportunities to make sales from the email list. But not only that, is we've planned what we're going to talk about that day. Which means we're not going to sit there on that day and go, what should I promote?

06:12.38

Speaker

What should I talk about? That decision making was already made in advance, right? So future you is definitely going to thank you for making those decisions. So all I do is I literally, like I said, I pull up a Google sheet and I just write in to each of the days of the month what I'm going to be having as my call to action.

06:32.04

Speaker

What's the thing I'm going to direct people to from the email that I'm going to send on those particular days? So you can see in this example, I'm going to spend the first six days of this month talking about a webinar, then not email anything, then send people about my YouTube channel, The Email Marketing Show.

06:47.86

Speaker

Then ah take a day off, a bunch of days about a mini course and so on. Talking about my challenge, my YouTube channel, my flash sale and my YouTube channel again all the way through the month. You can see that looks like, oh, great. I've created a lot more opportunities to make some sales.

07:03.36

Speaker

So here's an interesting thing. Tony Robbins, if you know this guy, right? Tony Robbins said, it's not the lack of resources. It's the lack of decision making that holds most people back. So what you're actually doing here is making decisions in advance.

07:17.52

Speaker

You'll say, these are the things we are going to do. So I don't have to think about that when I'm sitting and starting to write an email. You already know what you're going to promote and how you're going to do it, okay?

07:28.06

Speaker

So you're then going to measure the plan. We're going to feed our brains with oxytocin and dopamine in particular. We're not getting into the science too much of that. I've already done that and applied it to what we're doing here.

07:39.53

Speaker

What that basically means is... In this area here of this Google Sheet that I made, I can see using this little bar that fills up what percentage of the month I'm actually planning on sending an email that could make me money, that could make us sales in the business, bring in customers.

07:58.23

Speaker

And what's amazing is you look down that left-hand side at how many days it looks like I'm planning on promoting. It looks like a pretty busy promotional schedule, right? But it's not because you can see from the facts, not the feelings, but the facts of that little meathead, that's 67% of the month.

08:13.62

Speaker

I'm planning on sending an email, which means I'm basically leaving around 33% of the month that I'm planning on not making sales. I'm planning to not do anything to bring in sales and revenue and customers into our business and top up the bank account.

08:29.53

Speaker

When you are faced with that cold hard reality, that truth right in front of you, it's easy to think, you know what? I'm gonna send some more emails, because I don't wanna be leaving a third, in this case, of the month where I'm just not planning on making any sales, not making any offers at all.

08:48.15

Speaker

So then what we're able to do to maybe really face this cold, hard reality is look at this number here, where you can see that I'm planning on spending 20%, ooh, I've dropped my little clicker, on 20% the month the month on promoting my YouTube videos.

09:04.01

Speaker

Things that don't make me money, they give value, they share my expertise, they deepen relationships. It means I can help people who perhaps can't afford to invest yet. They satisfy me in lots of different ways emotionally and and through also bringing in some new leads, but they don't bring in actual sales. They serve a different purpose.

09:21.87

Speaker

But I'm actually planning on spending, I'm actually planning on spending like 15% of the month doing a flash sale. Less time in the month promoting my flash sale which does make money than I'm planning on spending all month on promoting my YouTube channel.

09:39.74

Speaker

When you face that cold hard reality you get to see why is my bank balance not growing. It's because of these numbers that you're actually tracking not with feelings and emotions but with the cold hard fact.

09:52.46

Speaker

The second reason people are email marketing dropouts, sorry for the singing by the way, um is because they're not measuring what they do. So the first piece is planning it, then we're going to measure it.

10:04.23

Speaker

Look, if you are walking around, if you're dropped in the middle of a desert, you're wandering in circles, you can't see any civilization, it's very demotivating. It's very demotivating when you're just sending emails and you don't know if they're having an impact. You don't know if you're making any progress, especially if they're not making any sales. It's very difficult to start thinking, am I doing anything good? Are there any other numbers I should be looking at, which represent that you might be making some progress.

10:28.40

Speaker

Whereas if you walk around the desert and you see civilization, you get an extra boost of energy and you start charging towards that civilization. You'll get more energy. You'll stay more focused and you will actually stay the course.

10:41.10

Speaker

So how do we do that? So back on this thisledless planning and accountability tracker, this is the June example from back in June. from So here we go with what we're going to do here is we're going to check off every single email that we send.

10:55.97

Speaker

When we do that, that tells our brains, ah I'm a person who does what they say they're going to do. This is feeding your brain with oxytocin and dopamine, which excites us. I'm going do that even more in a second using some more simple techniques that we're building into this sheet.

11:13.10

Speaker

Another thing that we're going to do which feeds that is we're going to have this little meter which as we check each thing off it is telling us how much of what we said we're going to do we've actually done.

11:25.14

Speaker

What percentage of the emails we said we're going to send have we sent. In this case by doing just four of them that's just 20% of what we said we were going to do. And then we're going to take a little idea from the biggest games in the world, things like Wordle, use this to become one of the biggest selling, biggest used games in the world, got sold to the i think New York Times or somebody and for a lot of money, millions of dollars, because pretty much this feature addicted us all to that bloody little simple word game.

11:57.11

Speaker

and And it's the same thing that's used by Duolingo, by the way. This is what they really um ah credit with why it worked so well. Because of the way that it feeds our brains with positive chemicals.

12:08.69

Speaker

And that is what i call a dopamine streak. Every day that you check off one of those emails that you said you were gonna send, you build your streak. But, If you miss a day, you lose your streak and you start back from one again.

12:23.06

Speaker

And that will make your brain unhappy. What we're actually doing here is making ourselves happier by doing the email marketing rather than unhappier, which is what most people are doing at the moment.

12:34.16

Speaker

How do you make your brain actually happier and feel better for doing the activities you really want to do that are going to make the biggest difference. And email marketing is the thing for sales and marketing of a business that makes the biggest difference above everything else, bar none.

12:49.84

Speaker

So the third thing is actually using the same email formula. So, every time you use the same email formula of always starting off with, in my case, if I was just left to my own devices, I would always be like some outrageous statement, then I'd tell a story about it, then I'm weaving some kind of lesson, and then I give a call to action. If I do that every single day, that really is killing your email deliverability, it's it's killing your readership, and actually it's hurting your ability to want to to keep sending emails. It's damaging in lots of different ways.

13:23.75

Speaker

It becomes predictable. your audience actually gets bored and sick and tired and not... feel like they don't need to read your emails and you get bored so you're less likely to actually email them in the first place to send those in those emails.

13:36.50

Speaker

So that's why i use lots of different email formulas. Take a screenshot of these four frameworks. They'll work an absolute treat for you. And each one of them resets your attention as the writer of the emails, and it resets your audience's attention because they've got no idea what you're goingnna do and say next, which is another reason for them to tune in.

13:56.75

Speaker

Same as TV shows. If you know what's going to happen every episode, you're probably not going to tune in. If you're like, this is so unpredictable, like White Lotus, very difficult to predict. Hacks, very difficult to predict. Two of my favorite TV shows...

14:10.25

Speaker

because they're so unpredictable and that's what keeps our attention, okay? And the final one is writing from scratch. One of the biggest reasons people stop writing emails and run out of steam before people actually buy is because they are writing an email from scratch. Looking at that blank email thing and that cursor blinking at you, which is basically that cursor is a bully, right? It is a bully and it's intimidating and it's talking you down.

14:35.58

Speaker

So we're going to overcome blank page procrastination. Where we're going to this is you're to train simple GPT or Claude, whichever platform you prefer, on what your offers are.

14:47.66

Speaker

So it knows what all of your offers are, your products and your services. And you're to train it on your voice so it actually sounds like you. And you're going to paste one of those email frameworks. I mean, I use like 30 different ones every single month, but given you four just before you paste one of those frameworks in and it's going to be your first draft of your email is done.

15:10.39

Speaker

There's no more intimidating blank screen. And that is how we bring all of these things together because starting anything from scratch is really, really difficult.

15:21.63

Speaker

Hey, and if you want my email frameworks, if you want to get my planning and accountability sheet, the Google sheet that I just shared with you, which has all that stuff already optimized, already built in for you,

15:33.67

Speaker

And you would like to receive a brand new package of email frameworks every single month. Check out the link right below and check out my Email Hero Academy program where that's exactly what I hand you every single month as well as some coaching and some other amazing stuff.

15:51.81

Speaker

The link's right below. I'll see soon.