In this episode, Samantha McMahon demystifies email marketing for tutors, explaining how to leverage it effectively to stay visible and connect with clients without overwhelming effort. She shares practical strategies, audience insights, and platform tips to help tutors build sustainable marketing practices.

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

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© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

Welcome to today's episode. Now it's been a while, so it's nice to do a nice action focused one that you can really follow and implement in your business. I feel like I haven't done one of these for quite a while. And today is all about email marketing. Now I chose this topic because in my experience, tutors aren't entirely sure either what it is or they feel quite intimidated by it or they've tried it and hasn't quite worked and therefore they

they're kind of convinced or they feel like it doesn't really work for them. So today isn't about me selling email marketing as a method for you.

You'll like today's episode if you already use it or if you've wanted to think about using it and you want to figure out how to use it more effectively or if you're just curious about how you might use it in your business. Maybe you've tried it and it hasn't worked and you'd like to give it another shot. Now, if you're new here, then welcome to the podcast. I'm Samantha McMahon and I am...

an experienced business trainer who after spending a few years working corporately and then as a school teacher and then as a tutor, which I currently do, I now mentor tutors and other education business owners to help them design businesses that really fits with their definitions of success. When we work together, we don't just look at your income goals. We do look at it, but it's not the only thing. We also look at the life that you want.

and the challenges that maybe you experience. And we build something that's really tailored and most importantly, sustainable. And email marketing is a topic that does come up a fair amount because one of the things that tutors struggle with, they sometimes find unsustainable, is marketing, is social media marketing. And email marketing can be the perfect antidote to staying visible and connecting with your audience in a way that doesn't require so much of your time.

So let's start with what email marketing is, just as a quick foundation for anyone who is a little bit uncertain. You know when you see someone offering you a PDF or a guide or a little video series for free, you click the button because you want it and you have to put your name and your email address in typically. And then they email you that guide or whatever it is that you have gone for. And after that, you carry on receiving some emails from them.

Now, at the bottom, there's typically the option to unsubscribe. That's email marketing. So in a nutshell, you will typically use a purpose-built platform to collect email addresses. It's not something you necessarily do manually, because you do need to do things like giving them the option to unsubscribe or change their preferences. These platforms allow you to categorise people in your email list so that you know things like where they come from or what their profile is so that you make sure

that you send them information and content that's really relevant to them and things that they want and so on. So why do people even go for email marketing when you have to pay for that platform and yet social media marketing is free? Well, a big reason is because when someone opts into your email list, they're giving you permission to email them. They're saying, want you to email me. So it's really permission-based marketing and obviously they can remove that permission as well.

And it reaches virtually everyone who you send that email to. On social media, you're very reliant on things like the algorithm or how that platform works. And typically your content only reaches a proportion of the people who are connected to you. You might be penalized for things like, I don't know, including links that takes people off the platform. And ultimately the platform owns your profile so they could, I don't know, shut you down.

at any time, for instance. Also, sometimes people have a detox. They take things like social media breaks, whereas people rarely take things like email breaks. So with email marketing, you own that audience and you have a really robust way of reaching them and communicating with them. And they are more likely to see your email now than they are a social media post. Now with email marketing, there are still good practices to

that you should think about to make sure people actually, for example, open your email so it doesn't land in the spam folder, for example. There are things you can do to reduce the chance of people unsubscribing and so on. But today isn't about going into that level of detail. Today is about thinking a bit more strategically and about how email marketing could actually serve your business. And it's a very interesting one for tutors. I find this fascinating.

Because as a business coach, I could do something like, I don't know, like a monthly newsletter, for example, where I share little tips and, you know, maybe a little something about, you know, what I've been up to and, you know, people might be a bit interested in that. And, you know, I don't know, just interesting information. And it really works because the people who I am emailing are the people who directly work with me or may directly work with me. The bottom line is that

They are the people who get the direct benefit from the content. But as a tutor, in many cases, you're actually emailing the parent. And yet the parent isn't the person who will typically directly use the educational content or the service that you provide. And they aren't generally the person who you're directly supporting. You're usually supporting their child. So many of the very traditional email marketing strategies

They don't always work for tutors and this is the place to start. Who is going to open your emails and what are they interested in? Why have they signed up? What do they want? If you can answer that question, you will already be more than halfway to success when it comes to email marketing and even marketing in general. And you have to really know your audience well to answer that question. I don't know who your audience is because I'm on a podcast right now, but

I'm going to talk about mine. As a tutor, I teach for 11 plus entrance exams all the way to GCSE. So not all of my students are preparing for an exam as such, but they're all on the road towards one. Now, when I think about my 11 plus parents, because of the nature of the schools that I support, those parents are generally very involved in their child's preparations. They have a lot of input.

They're very, very well informed about the criteria for the exams and the schools and what's included in the papers. They understand the skills that their child needs to develop. And they're often doing a lot of work at home with their child. Sometimes they want to actually prepare their child independently without a tutor, or they do a lot of the preparation themselves and they use a tutor. So I know that they're heavily involved.

So in many ways, email marketing with them would be very easy because I can talk directly about the subject that I teach and those parents who are receiving that content will be very interested in it. But it's totally different for my Key Stage 3 or GCSE parents. Typically, they're not helping their child with the academic side, at least not of my subject. Often, they don't know what exam board their child is studying with or the texts that they may have

maybe doing or you know sometimes they've never heard of the literature text their child is studying. They have no idea how many papers their child is going to take for GCSEs. They don't know what's included, the format, the you know all the different elements of literature so they're in a very different position to my 11 plus parents and the mistake that most people make here is that they follow traditional email marketing advice or things that they've seen and they share value to these parents

who really don't understand what we're talking about when we are sharing something educational. And so now we're relying on this third party to pass that information to the students who we actually want to see it and who we're designing it for. So something to think about is how can you shift that dynamic? In an ideal world, we would be able to cut out that middle person and we would be able to make sure that the information lands directly

with our students. But I don't know about your students, your teenage students, I teach teenagers mostly, but most of mine don't even know their password or email address. You know, they just use it for Google Classroom. It's all saved. They don't check their emails. They first created it during COVID when they had to go, you know, with online learning. So for tutors like me, it's not really an option reaching those students directly in this way.

So I have to think about the parents and I have to wonder, well, what would they be interested in? And this is where niching becomes incredibly powerful. And when I say this, when I say that niching is powerful, the reality is that when it comes to running a business, a niche is powerful in general. And for many tutors, it can be a bit of a journey to get there. So when I talk about a niche, I'm not just talking about the subject that you've chosen to teach or the age group you're going to

that you're going to teach. I'm talking specifically about who you support because I teach English, but I don't support children who don't go to mainstream school. I don't support children who have additional educational needs, for instance, and I don't tend to support students who are disengaged with learning. So by taking them out of the equation, I now have a better understanding of what position my students are in.

and therefore what their parents may be feeling or thinking or what they may feel they need. But what they are feeling or thinking will largely depend on the exact position their child is in. And this is where email marketing gets really clever.

Because in that example, I could have, let's say, a lead magnet. A lead magnet is like a PDF, for example, the one that I mentioned earlier that you might download, whereby I could identify what position their child is in from the outset, and in the internal system, I could categorize them accordingly. So I could have something like a dropdown where, you know, where they complete their name and email address, they also have to tell me what their child's target GCSE grade is.

and what they got in their last assessment. I can store that and I can just automatically set my system up to categorize them according to whatever that target grade is. So if, for example, there's a child who's targeted a grade eight and they're currently working at a four, then I can guess that the parent is probably quite worried and that that student is struggling, but that goes beyond understanding the subject. Otherwise, maybe they wouldn't have had a target of a grade eight, for example.

Now, I'm saying this very, very broadly. Those data points don't always translate like that. That's not always the interpretation. But at this stage, I have to be generic. I have to make assumptions. On the other hand, if there is a student who is targeted at a grade eight and they're currently on a grade seven, then they only have one more grade to get to their target. They're already pretty high up. And I know that they're probably coming from a position of feeling quite motivated to get that result.

So the messaging changes based on who I'm speaking to. And because of the power of email marketing and the things you can do in the platforms, I could actually identify them and differentiate and make sure that they only get the content that would be relevant to them and their position. So I could create email sequences and only send a particular email sequence to people who have a particular tag that identifies them as someone who'd be interested

in that sequence, basically, in that information. So the platforms are really in, they're really good when you can set them up like that. And I mentioned earlier that they all cost, there are some free options as well. The point is you want to use a platform so that this is automated because a huge part of this is sustainability. And with email marketing, sometimes it can be a one and done. You set it up once and it can just keep working for you in the background.

Okay, so now onto what I would actually send them, the emails I would send. As mentioned earlier, the key is to send people something that they would be interested in opening and consuming. For the parent who is, you know, worried about their teen, who's really underperforming and is probably feeling a real lack of confidence and they're struggling with self-belief, they would probably be interested in certain things that they could say or do.

in the first instance, that might boost their child's confidence. And those tips might be totally unrelated to my subject. But what I'm doing there is I'm helping them and I'm positioning myself as someone who is helpful and as someone who is giving them some relief. And therefore they're more likely to come to me for support because they're now creating an association. Now you can mould this concept to different situations. I once had a client

who's she was a face-to-face tutor and her goal was to become very prominent in her local community. And she taught very young children as well. So we actually used her email marketing as a source for parents in the community where if they have young children, they could find out really interesting things that were going on that their child might love in the area. So it might be something like a really cool activity, a holiday club, it might be...

a hidden gem in their local area. It was a real variety of things. We got really creative with it.

So as with all forms of marketing, you do have to start with an intention, with your intention, and you have to marry that to the person who is going to receive those emails, that content. Many people make the mistake, and I did this for a while as well. When it comes to email marketing, a lot of people think that, you know,

when they have an email list, they need to start sending a monthly newsletter. For some reason, our mind goes to monthly newsletters. And when I tried doing this, even though it was once a month, I couldn't keep up with it. But bizarrely, I can keep up with weekly emails, and here's why. I wasn't excited about my monthly newsletter. It forced me to think, what value can I give my clients, my email list, sorry, in this particular format?

When you think of a newsletter, assume you also have to talk a little bit about what you've been up to and all of that. But people aren't always interested in what I've been up to, I'm sure. So when I changed my mind and I just decided I'm going to scrap that, I quite fancy just sending my email list and email every Wednesday about something that is just generally quite interesting, maybe to me, to them.

something I'd observed, something I'd noticed, something I'd come across, just a really chatty email every Wednesday. And not only did I stick to this, but my open rate and reply rate shot through the roof. And I think it's because I wasn't trying to brute force a strategy. And instead, all I thought about is what will connect with people and what do I want to talk about? And that energy came through. So if you are wondering about whether

Email marketing would work for you, whichever kind of business you have. The honest answer is there's no reason why it can't, but a big reason why it doesn't is because we tend to follow very generic advice. But every industry has its own nuances. And a big piece of the detail for us is that when it comes to tuition business owners, at least, we're not a traditional B2B or B2C business.

We are kind of in our delivery, but we're not necessarily in our marketing and sales. And therefore we have to adjust our strategy. Now, you're probably wondering which email marketing platform you should use. you know, I have, I do have a few suggestions, ones that I typically advise people to go with depending on where they are on their journey and their budget, ones that I have used myself, but you know, because it kind of depends on what you need.

If you want some suggestions, then just drop me a message. If you're connected with me on socials or wherever, just drop me a message and I'd be happy to share some suggestions with you. Now, if you have a really quick moment, I would love it if you could hit the subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube. And if you could leave a short review if you are listening on something like Apple podcasts. I really enjoyed talking to you today about email marketing and I hope that I have been able to tackle some of the really common questions of

How do I make this work as a tutor? And what kind of things should I, what should I actually email people about? If you're in the tutors mastermind, I've got some templates, I've got ideas for lead magnets and email sequence, I've got all of that in the mastermind. So if you don't know where it is, just let me know and I'll give you the link. Thanks for joining me today. And as always, you'll hear from me on Wednesday.