Do you automate your emails? Did you know you could (unknowingly) be making these very common mistakes with your email marketing automation?

We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and today we're going to share what you can do better with your automated email sequences.

Ready?

Let's go.

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(1:06) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. 

(1:31) Check out our sponsor - Zerobounce! 

(4:51) Not showing your personality. 

(9:03) Not sending emails out 'live' first. 

(11:55) Not checking the data. 

(13:31) Having too many offers in your automations. 

(17:43) Spending too long creating your automations. 

(18:58) Subject line of the week.

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Want to connect with Fifi?

Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people - those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.

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Unknown 0:15

automations automations automations everybody's talking about the fact we want to automate basically, our entire lives. And that includes our email marketing, we want to email marketing automation. So there's a lot of things that we get questions about and we see mistakes happening with regard to automations. And that's what we're gonna talk about. On today's show.

Unknown 0:34

Email marketing Wednesday, already heroes and this is the email marketing show. It's time for a no bullshit book and how to make more sales from that email list of yours.

Unknown 0:51

Welcome to the show, I'm thinking Mason from mason.com.

Unknown 0:55

And I'm counting from your marketing heroes.com. And that means yes, I've got a new co host for a new season. My friend Fifi, hello. I'm so pleased to hear me.

Unknown 1:02

I am really excited about this. I know it's gonna be fun. It's

Unknown 1:06

gonna be a lot of fun. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And by the way, if you're listening in, I want to make sure that you are picking what we're going to talk about on today's show and put it into practice. So make sure you bring your questions, your ideas, all that sort of stuff over to our free community that we created just for you head over Facebook, search for the Email Marketing Show community, it's free to join just literally search Facebook for that email marketing community, and we're gonna see you in there. You've probably noticed that a lot of email marketing platforms are putting their prices up, and the more subscribers you've got, the more you pay. I've made a quick free video to show you what you can do to save a pile of money before your next bill goes out. Go watch it for free at email marketing heroes.com/cleanup Email Marketing heroes.com/cleanup This episode is sponsored by zero bounce the email cleaning and verification service. Sophie, we've been friends for a couple of years.

Unknown 1:56

Yeah, good. Good couple of years now. Yeah, basically

Unknown 2:01

people will know this but we have like a sheduled appointment to catch up. Every week, every single week, every single week and we talked business and life and all kinds of shenanigans and

Unknown 2:12

a good word for it.

Unknown 2:16

It definitely definitely is so people don't know you. I know we had you as a guest on a previous episode of the show but now as my co host in the warm co hosting seat. Tell people a little bit about who you are what you do in case anybody doesn't know you. Okay,

Unknown 2:27

yeah, so I have a personal brand and visibility coach, and I work primarily with introverts, introverted coaches and impact makers. Those who are more quiet who have ideas they want to share with the world but really struggled to put them out there and finding a way to do that, that aligns with who they are. So it is my passion, my mission, it's become my life, I suppose. I feel really drawn and really passionate about it. So that is, yeah, that is what I do. I love it. I love it. And what you what you're working on? Well, right now I am working on my next virtual Summit. This is my fifth annual summit, and I'm interviewing speakers and I'm getting ready to launch in the next few weeks. So I'm really excited for

Unknown 3:14

that. Yeah, that sounds really good. It sounds really good. How many speakers do you have at your Summit? When you do? I

Unknown 3:17

have 25 speakers? So lots of

Unknown 3:21

that is a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Yeah.

Unknown 3:24

What about you?

Unknown 3:25

I'm just finishing up and making our new list building course, which is called freemium list building. Good buddy. I'm known as the person who can like as good names for everything right. But that comes with additional pressure of like, not having a ship name is me. And could our hell come up with a new name for this new course. And the whole point of the course and I've got the name is called freemium list building. That's the name love it. I hate to have to just like go right after just get over myself. I thought it's cool. That's it, but don't, it's published. But the whole point of the course is methods of building your email list with premium people the exact size you want you want to work with and who can work with you, but doing it low cost and no cost because honestly, we can all like, go into spending a zillion dollars on advertising if you want to. But most of us don't have that luxury. So I've been really, really good fun at preparing that put that together and that the feedback we have to be amazing. So let's get today's episode, we're talking about automation specifically, and everybody talks about automations I think everybody wants to automate their entire lives. That's your thing that's been perpetuated in the entrepreneurial space like you know, why don't we automate everything? First of all, I don't think we should automate everything. I think there's a place for like the human touch, especially in a world of chat GPT and AI and all that sort of stuff where we're sort of losing the humans.

Unknown 4:28

Yeah, I do feel like there's a lot more of that and it is quite obvious as well, when people use AI to write.

Unknown 4:35

Go discover. Okay, chatter.

Unknown 4:39

I started making a list of words that people like can clearly see when it's AI and some of the words or words that we might have used for a long time, but because they're so overused down by Jack deputy, it's like you just gotta avoid them.

Unknown 4:55

Like, you were using them legitimately what's the what's gonna come to you when we accidentally start going, Oh, shit, I'm writing like church. Like it's all come full circle. It's supposed be learning from us and now we're learn from it. And oh, my god, we're gonna end up like, sort of kind of amalgamation.

Unknown 5:09

Yeah. So I think it's really important to actually have a bit of personality in there. That's key, for sure. Yeah, I

Unknown 5:14

think so. I've had that lead with that. I think that is a huge mistake. I think a lot of people know that when you write an email, you sit down, you write your email the day or whatever, and you send out all the people try and put some kind of personality into it. And that might be a sweet personality. It might be a sincere person. It might be all wacky personally, whatever the person it might be being funny, whatever. It doesn't matter. It's your personality. Might be boring. Like if you're born like just be boring. Don't work on a boring person. Try to be funny. Everyone gets that sort of toe curling ache of watching their dad on a dance floor. I mean like stuff first thing I ask sit down, stop it. It's horrible dad jokes. But whatever your personality is, I think people kind of do that in their live newsletters much more than they do in automations. Have you seen that where people write an automation you go with your personality? Go take the day off.

Unknown 5:56

And it's so obvious that it is an automation and I think that it's really important to actually be more conscious that you've got to put more of yourself in there. So it's obvious that it's not an automation?

Unknown 6:05

Yeah. What kind of things do you do when you're writing something whether it's an email or any copy that allows you to put your personality into it? Is there anything you tend to like gear towards you got I'm going to sort of do this and I might not be like, exact phrase or whatever. It's, I think you'd say lean. So lean on. Yeah,

Unknown 6:18

I find that when I'm writing an email I write the way I think first I just write the words that are going through my head and then perfect after that. I think that's the easiest way of doing it. Then you use the words that you use yourself because

Unknown 6:31

like no filter, just direct download to the page. Yeah, basically

Unknown 6:34

write as much as you can, just as you're thinking it, and then you can go back and perfect it yourself afterwards. Yeah,

Unknown 6:40

I like that. I like that. Yes. I think a big mistake that people do make is forgetting the personality also needs to be in those because as you said, it's like, well, suddenly you realize when automation was it has a very different vibe to it. And I think it's easily done. It's so easily done because you write your automation, generally writing a bunch of emails in one setting. Or like, even kind of writing them more condensed than you would maybe like a weekly newsletter or daily newsletter or whatever. Usually sitting down writing the whole campaign. It's so easy to go write this email needs to be about scarcity. So you gotta go Hurry, rush, run, don't walk and you go, Oh, can I turn into a marketer instead of actually having a personality and you go wow, just slow down. And I like that idea of just writing how you're thinking or how you speak is how I sort of think of it. Yeah,

Unknown 7:18

the thoughts that are going through your head. I often start with just a thought it could be like a question or something that I've thought of, and then it becomes part of the email in some way as well.

Unknown 7:29

Another thing I see people doing is actually just writing automation and putting it into an automation straightaway. And that sounds kind of weird, but what I think we should all be doing is writing a campaign a sequence of emails that said six emails long, right, something like that. And instead of like writing off six emails and then putting it into your automations that all new subscribers come through it or all new, whoever's go through it. What I think is way more effective for a bunch of reasons is to send that automation out live before you actually automate it. So send those emails out live as the thing you're doing this week, because I'll let you do a couple of things. The first thing that you do is check that you haven't cocked any of it up like how many times have I personally sent out emails where the link wasn't there? I didn't even put the link that wasn't broken. I just didn't put the link. I was like, click here to find out more. No link cuz I was copying and pasting from the Google doc like, I've done that turns. I didn't recently like, it's embarrassing, but it's true, right? It's embarrassing, but it's true. So you want to make sure that when you're sending emails out, but you'd want to automate something that's not dialed in. The whole point of automation is you've got lots to go through. I think that's refined and convert. We need to make sure it's refined the converse before you actually put people into it. For example, a bunch of years ago, maybe four years ago, I realized one of the emails one of my automations in our ouverture email campaign was like a sales direct sales campaign just wasn't getting any clicks at all. And if I hadn't gone in and looked at that data, that yeah, we'll continue to underperformance and go in tweak a few things like change the subject line, change the call to action, do a few things. Then immediately within the next week saw really good uptake and results, clicks and sales. So I would say what are you going to create a new campaign? Yeah, right. I always want my campaigns or my emails into a Google doc first. I'm not then worried about the subject line going to be which segment once I got all the technological shit that you don't need to deal with at that moment, right into Google Docs. All we think about is the words then send those emails out to your live list to your actual list and see how well it goes. And if it goes, well, that's the ones to automate. But we want to automate everything because that promo that didn't work and we've all had them and we'll all have more of them. You don't want to make that one because I was sucked, right. So always from me, always be sending them out live first. And then when it works, dial it up a little bit, tweak little bits and pieces, anything you could do better and then automate. So it said live first then automate. Yeah, that's

Unknown 9:31

a great one, but I have actually been guilty of like, I'll just schedule this on me. And I haven't checked it but I do send them why first, and then be sure to add them to an automation of some kind. Yeah, I've fallen foul of that. Realizing that I didn't check the data.

Unknown 9:45

Yeah, I think well checking the day as the next thing really, isn't it? It really is, yeah. You've got to go back to your automations periodically, you don't babysit them. You know the watch pot never boils and all that but you want to make sure that the first week after you put in your automation in you are watching it pretty closely. You want to be checking that the clicks are happening, that the opens are happening that people are not getting stuck at some point for some reason, either your fault or because technology happens you know all the systems have glitches at some point. And then every debate on the volume of leads run through them. I think you should be checking these automations every three to six months just to make sure nothing's changed or stuff changes as well. So as you would tell a story you go, bloody hell, I've told a story about that celebrity and that celebrity is not cool anymore.

on that on that one? Yeah, I find that if I'm adding more things as well, especially if you're building your engine, and sometimes it doesn't make sense. So if you don't go back and review what comes before it or after enough, it wouldn't make sense to go to it. So I think reviewing what is the content and then the data as well. Yeah.

I think what you said there's something it's not just the content, but the context like where is that something like Have they just come up with what you've said, this is the last time I'll ever talk about this. And then you're like, I'll put on your automation after that now looks a bit like a knob because you've like you've basically lied inadvertently, you didn't mean to at the time it was the last time but now you had a crazy idea. You've grabbed a lot of our campaigns and put it in. So I think context is important. One

thing I have noticed from my clients, so is that they have too many offers in their emails. So they have lots of different things that they are trying to get people to click on and go to within that. automations

Yeah, I think there's probably two bits to that. I think there's one of how many offers are in that single email like if you've got an email, which is like, Hey, I've got five things going on the minute you can do this, and I've got this going on. I've got this course I've got this program and I've got this mastermind you pick which one everyone's like, I can't quite from like three or four lines or even lots of texts. Every three or four lines as not enough information. We don't stand on what were the ones I don't know, if it's really long. I'm going to be overwhelmed from that email. So that doesn't work. So I think the rule of one is really good. There is no of like, okay, this email is about one thing, it's about one offer. And it's about one angle within that offer. So it's about our email hero blueprint, but it's not just about that. It's also about this one point which is speed. That's the angle. So all I'm allowed to talk about in that email is speed and email hero blueprint. I can't say Oh, another way of being faster is user accelerator program. If you want to really speed things up, just listen to podcast on the way to work. Like that's like, oh my god, too many things, too many things. So piggybacking on what you said there about having too many offers, is I think a lot of people will go I've got this one thing so I see our email here a blueprint builder with automation for that little great I've written an email campaign for that, you know, Hero blueprint lovely. And that'll go right into the automation. So I'm going to pick premium list building and the program of ours. I have another automation about that. And that sounds sensible. I think an old school email marketing that was pretty sensible. But because we all buy we now understand a lot more about human psychology than we ever did in the history of time. We now know that people buy for different reasons, and different motivators get people to buy. So instead of having one automation about product A and then another automation point B, we can have multiple automations about product A to offer it from different angles to appeal to different things. So I think both of those things are important about persevering with the offer. And the great thing about that is it's cheaper for you to stick with one offer. You don't have to develop a whole new program. You don't have to have a new sales page written and laid out. I mean, not everyone. If it doesn't, he doesn't know if he has a background in amazing graphic design. So whipping up a sales page is not expensive for you, but it's expensive in time. And because you're a perfectionist, we've taught them a lot about how it has to be just right. Every time you create a new offer. There's so much goes into that time, effort, money expense, heartache, concern, whereas if you're just promoting the same thing from different angles, then you don't have all of that additional stuff. Yeah,

and it ties into a big problem I've struggled with this year is simplifying and making it easier for you to actually have one offer and one thing that you're focusing on all the time rather than trying to sell multiple different things to probably different people because they appeal to different people. I think when you focus on one thing, it makes it so much easier. Yeah, yeah,

it simplifies your brain as well, not just in the business where all roads lead to that things need to get the compound effect of you constantly talking about I think that's really important, I think for our brains as entrepreneurs like we're all overwhelmed we're like should I do this? I should do that. Should I follow that person's I just don't do that thing. Should I be doing a podcast? Or should we do an ad strategy? Like there's all these things we could be doing? Oh, honey, Pinterest, only Pinterest. Only Pinterest. No, you don't need Pinterest. What you're good at right? I think if you just have that one thing there's already so many variables within selling the one thing but if you have all these other things, that's not to say you shouldn't have different offers by random people to misinterpret what I think here which is you can have other back end offers once people have bought the front end thing and that comes later but until you've really got a dialed in way of automatically turning cold people into customers of your main room headline flagship offer, then I think that's what you need. to obsess over. Really? Yeah,

definitely. You just mentioned perfectionism though. So I think that also is another mistake. Spending too long on creating automations in that kind of thing. Yeah,

I think we can get obsessed with like, this whole image needs to be perfect. Every single thing needs to be perfect and we can spend a long time on these things. That's actually why our email hero blueprint even exists, by the way, because people will come to me. So how do you find all these interesting ways of presenting your same product so that more people buy it? Just find the easiest kind of what I naturally do, I think in campaigns, but like you think in frameworks, I think in campaigns, right? And so I found that easy. So I started putting them together and Shame on people and then that's how we've got a vault of 46 different email campaigns to basically play the same offer from and that's what people have got inside of email hero blueprint. So yeah, in fact, everybody doesn't have email hero blueprint yet, you can go to email hero blueprint.com. And check out the full details of that, because it will just really speed things up. You won't spend as long as you've got the frameworks, you've got the emails to actually do it. So you don't spend too much longer on this. Don't spend enough time on it to make it good, but you don't want to spend too long at all. So I think we should get into this week's

subject line of the week.

Okay. This is one that I recently saw, actually was a little while ago now, but it really stood out to me and stuck in my mind and it was one by you Kennedy.

Another one you're talking about another one you're talking about. So you're talking about the subject line which was the words breakfast gloop. I remember you text me straight after go at breakfast blue question mark. That's that's the one just give some context. The email told the story of when I was standing around in the kitchen of a mastermind of a member of and my mentor Todd Brown was making his breakfast and because he's a bodybuilder he was doing his bodybuilding competition. He has to make this weird, gloopy. I don't know what it was. It just looked nasty but it's like high protein yuck. But he was there for it was I have a conversation. He's eaten this weird breakfast group. And he said something profound to me that was really useful. Or the reason Rekluse good works so well is because it's got nothing to do with the product right? I didn't show up and go three reasons that email hero blueprint is also more like it's not that it's a story and the specificity of ultrafine random blue because for breakfast What is that about? It's two words that really don't go together. And we're also creating like a time of when it was happening. And what's really nice about the word breakfast or dinner, is it implies a location. And when you can imply a location you instantly create much more of a story in people's minds. So yeah, it got a really amazing open rate on that email really good engagement from that email cuz we were like, who's breakfast gloop? What is the breakfast glue? Why is it for breakfast? What is the glue? Lots of questions. And it's a system we call compound curiosity, which has so many questions that you've got to open even and go what is this person bloody talking about? Ask anyway, you want to love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. By the way, folks, if you wanna come and discuss this all the stuff we've talked about in today's episode, do come and hang out in our free Facebook group created just for you. As a listener of the show, head over to Facebook, search for the Email Marketing Show community. It's just the name of the podcast, email marketing shield with the word community on the end. We'd love to see you in there and talk about how you're using automations and how you apply what we talked about in today's show to your business and what you're doing with your

office. Yeah, and thank you so much for listening to the whole show this week. We are back next week. So if you are new to the show, be sure to hit subscribe and make sure you don't miss out on the next episode.

And thanks again for joining us. We'll be back with you next week as well see you then