Is email marketing dead? According to my guest on this episode, if it is, it should probably be a zombie on the Walking Dead due to the many times it's been declared dead and come back to life.

The bottom line is this: Email marketing is alive and well, stronger than ever, and here to stay. And you want to be in it to win with it.

Today’s guest, Jennifer Burke, lets me borrow her brain to tap into her brilliance about all things email marketing. Whether you're new and just getting started with email marketing or you've been at this for a while, Jennifer shared information to help you with whatever level you're at right now.

And Jennifer didn't just give us info about email marketing. She also dropped tons of nuggets about building a community, leveraging social media, optimizing your lead magnet and so much more.

Get your coffee ready along with your notebook and pen. You'll wanna take notes on this one!

Don’t Miss Inside This Episode:

• The best way to build a relationship with your followers (hint: it doesn't involve crazy dancing and pointing on TikTok!)
• Statistics about the effectiveness of email marketing vs. social media for growing your business and sales. This will shock you!
• How to leverage social media and why you want to move people off the social platforms and onto your email list.
• The best type of lead magnet to create, how to create one quickly, and why waiting until you've got it perfect is a big mistake.
• A big 'No-No' that many people commit after networking events. Don't do this.
• Why 'one size fits all' doesn't apply when you're deciding on an email service provider (ESP).
• At least 5 different strategies you can easily implement to grow your email list starting today.
• What are 'essential emails' and when is the best time to send these?
• Why your social media 'link in bio' call-to-action should be redirecting visitors back to your website, not some software 'tree' with a list of links.

Links and products mentioned in today's episode:

Active Campaign email service provider --Jennifer and Melissa both use.

Jennifer's free Email Set-Up for Success Guide. This is Jennifer's most successful freebie opt-in that she talks about in the interview.

Jennifer's free Fix Your Freebie guide-- Jennifer walks you through how to improve your lead magnet.

The Mighty Easy Email Gifts Workbook - No more procrasti-planning for you!

Exclusively for all the listeners of the She's Got Content podcast; Jennifer created a super special discount coupon = YES17 just for you. [Thank you so much, Jennifer!]

Instead of the $27 regular price, you'll pay only $10 for this workbook which will walk you through how to get your first [or next] email list-building freebie done in record time. Not just any old freebie. Jennifer shows you how to pick the best idea to attract your most aligned ideal clients to your new freebie. And you can use this workbook over and over. Get your copy now.

*************

Head to IG and continue the email marketing conversation over at Instagram : @drmelissabrown

About Jennifer Burke

Jennifer Burke is a marketing geek and darn proud of it!

Jennifer is there for you--the busy solopreneur, coach, author, or creator who stumbles on marketing technology. Jennifer has all the deets about email services, landing pages, and managing social media. She explores the tools and really digs into them to unpack the good, the bad--the pros and cons-- inside those tools, so you don't have to; you merely borrow Jennifer's brain!

Jennifer loves coaching her clients to promote their businesses with confidence.

She's also a geek about all things sports, wine, photos, and grilling! Ask Jennifer about her favorite wine app.

Jennifer's Website

Mighty Marketing Mojo

Connect With Jennifer on Social

Facebook: Mighty Marketing Mojo

Instagram: @mightymarketingmojo

About Your Host

Melissa Brown, MD - Coach, Author, Speaker, Teacher, and Podcast Host.

After leaving medical practice in 2009, Melissa discovered the online world and never looked back! After coach certification, she began a healthy lifestyle coaching practice online and quickly fell in love with blogging, writing, and content marketing.

Melissa believes that coaches have the power to change the world. Unfortunately, too many coaches get discouraged by the amount of content they need to create for marketing their business and this can lead to overwhelm and giving up on their dreams. There's such a ripple effect when a dream dies, so Melissa is on a mission to help coaches and solopreneurs overcome the overwhelm when it comes to content creation so they keep those dreams alive.

Your content can impact massive amounts of people and positively change the world. You've got content in there inside you; let's get it out into the world.

Check out these social media sites:

She's Got Content Facebook group:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Get your FREE Never Run Out of Content Ideas Tool Kit/Workbook

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. It means the world to me to have you here on this journey! If you got value from this episode, please share it on social media, and recommend it to your business besties.

Please leave feedback or questions about this episode in the comment section below.

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Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. I am so grateful for the time and effort it takes to rate and review this show and I would love to give you a shout-out as the next Content Creator of the Week when I read your review of the show.

Hello, Content Creators.

Today on the She's Got Content podcast, we're talking about setting up your email

marketing for success, no matter if you're just starting out, or maybe you've been

at this a while and you're not getting the traction you had hoped for by now.

Today's super smart guest is my friend, Jennifer Burke.

Jennifer is a true marketing geek who doesn't mind digging into all things tech

and tools when it comes to marketing.

That way, when you're in that tech ditch and you can't dig yourself out, Jennifer

invites you to borrow her geeky brain and she'll shovel you right out of that ditch.

You can find her home on the web at mightymarketingmojo.com.

Today's episode with Jennifer is a little longer than I usually produce.

That's okay, Content Creators, since Jennifer spilled so many

nuggets in today's episode, and I just couldn't cut any of it out.

So get your notebook ready to take notes and let's go ahead and dive in.

Welcome, Jennifer to the She's Got Content podcast!

Hey Melissa, I am so excited to be here, finally!

Finally!

This has been at least what, two years that we've been talking about doing this?

Yes.

I went and I found the calendar invite from you.

It was almost exactly two years, and I just gotta say kudos to you for both

perseverance and sticking with an idea, but also being okay with, hey, something

in terms of content or marketing wasn't the right fit at a particular time.

You put the idea in your now next later file, and now you've come

back to it and that's so exciting.

Thank you.

Yes.

The timing just came together.

I knew I wanted to do this and now I can't say it's all history, but it's on its way.

And she has content now.

She's got content

There are so many things I could borrow your brain to talk about

today, but I think, I love hearing you talk about email marketing.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Let's talk about email marketing.

And I know you you've got a lot of ideas about how to set it up right

from the beginning to be successful.

I do.

And Thanks Melissa.

I love chatting with you all the time and maybe I'm such a

big convert to email marketing.

I mean, I love content marketing of all kinds.

I think it's important for our blogs and for video, but I've really seen the power

embody in terms of email being an asset.

It's something that we own and can control, but it's also, it's a

conversation and we can be us and have our personalities and share and educate

and do all of those good things to help build a business through email.

And I think if anything, the last few years has shown us that whatever

type of business you are online coaching, solopreneur, brick and

mortar, maybe you're my friend, the yoga instructor who is glad she had

some kind of yoga student's email list when she couldn't teach in person.

But she was able to start sending out recordings and asking people if they

wanted to buy, and if she hadn't had that email list, where would she have been?

That is so true.

You said, build your business, but you're building your business based

on building a relationship with the people that are on that list, and

Absolutely.

That is the best way to be able to build that relationship,

I think is with email marketing.

I agree with you.

I'll even say that I've tried to retrain myself in my head that

I talk a lot about my pals in email.

They're my mighty pals that I talk about my email community

because it isn't just a list.

They're not numbers.

They're people.

There's a real person at the end of every email that I send, and I know

that when I get replies back, and I know that when some people click more often

and read everything and reply to every, what you just said, the content is there

to nurture and build a relationship.

And that really speaks to really well, let me back up a minute.

You go on the internet and you're gonna see a ton of the gurus

saying, email marketing is dead.

Oh, I know.

Be still my heart.

Oh.

Oh, there's a deck.

Let me pull the lights out.

Okay.

So when known marketers, when they say email marketing is dead,

let's talk about that for a minute.

What do you.

All right.

What's your take on that?

Well, I'd say no, and the funny thing of course is

that email has been proclaimed, dead so many times, it should be a

zombie on the Walking Dead , because it just keeps coming back, to life.

There are probably certain trends and certain demographics that like other

forms of messaging over others, but things like, I had this written down, and it was

in a blog, posted in an ebook somewhere that there's like three times more email

accounts in the world than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts, combined.

That you are six times more likely to get a click through from an

email than you are from a tweet.

That literally, there's billions of email users worldwide.

And that a lot of people in studies even say, look, we want, there's one from

Marketing Land that says 77% of consumers want to get a marketing message via email.

They opted in.

I may not have joined Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok so that

you can market something to me.

But yes, I gave Wayfair and readers and content sellers and all kinds of other

places, my email address specifically, so they could send me marketing

related emails or content and coupons

. Melissa Brown: True.

True.

Like how many of you, I'm betting, Melissa, you

signed up and got a coupon for something in your email box today.

Oh, multiple ones.

And right now everybody's promoting prior to Black Friday.

Black Friday's coming up.

And we're already being inundated with a lot of emails, with promotions.

Absolutely.

And there's gonna be January 1st emails and your gym is gonna promote

and try and get you back into the gym for New Year's resolutions.

And somebody else is gonna promote a President's Day sale.

And I talked in my membership group today, I'm like, Hey, you go out and be the first

one to have an Arbor Day sale, cuz you're not gonna have a lot of competition.

But yes, everybody is going to do that.

And if it wasn't working, do you think big corporations would still

be putting money behind email?

No.

No, no.

And like we said, like my friend, the yoga instructor,

like your local restaurants have shown it's beneficial to have that email,

even if you're not sending something every day like the people who sell

me sheets and furniture and glasses.

And when you were talking before about the value of

a tweet or a Facebook post, what we all have to remember is we don't

know from day to day whether those platforms will still be around.

Holy flames of social media shifting sand!

They're not just shifting sands, they're shifting sands that are on fire right now.

And I feel like we've seen this and we've gone through cycles and algorithms

change and what gets favored changes.

I feel like things have accelerated more, and while there are some opportunities

for us there, I'm gonna be probably not the only person who's gonna yell at you

to say, if you're gonna be on social media, you better well make use of that

traffic to get them back onto your list.

Amen.

Amen.

Yes.

Because I was in a call just this morning and we were

talking about, there were two coaches, two small business owners who'd lost

Facebook accounts in the past week.

One got theirs back, one didn't.

I'm seeing it probably happen, actually more than that.

I've seen it in dozens of times a day, almost in large groups on

social media going, I got hacked.

Or we did something and we have no idea what, because there's no real

person back there, looking at these sorts of things and taking our help

unless you've given them money for ads.

And they're like, what do we do?

When do we get it back?

And the answer is, chances are you're not.

When you mention this week, I also heard this week from someone

who is in a group with someone who's on a board or something for Facebook, and

the word trickled down that if you are posting anything, promoting your business

on your Facebook personal profile, you are subject to be dismissed from

Facebook immediately without notice.

Permanently.

Yeah.

It's always been against the terms of service, for Facebook.

They're now, they're really cracking down.

I've told people that for years.

I've seen instances of that happening for years.

And people didn't believe me when I said, yes, it can happen.

Yes, I've seen it happen and at the same time, it's like Facebook's talking out

of the other side of their mouth and they're like, oh, go turn your personal

profile into a professional profile, so now you can talk about business more.

And then I'm seeing people going, oh my God, yeah, and then it

killed my reach and it did this.

And all of that can or can't help.

But if you don't have those people and your followers, you don't own your

followers, you don't own your likes.

And this is true whether we're talking Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube.

No matter the platform.

No matter the platform folks.

If you want to know that you are sending a message and it's going to the people

that you intended it to go to at the time that you chose it to go to, there's email.

Now, I gotta put a caveat on this, Melissa, because yes,

there's all kinds of things that can affect email deliverability,

and there's techy stuff there.

And Lord knows I feel like I've been fighting that with deliverability

issues this year and there's engagement and stuff like that.

But if you do it the right way and you do it ethically and you follow

the right rules in terms of email marketing, that's an asset that you own.

And, if say you had a type of business that you could sell some

of the valuation of that business, it will include your customer list.

Anyway, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

That's what we're saying.

Right.

But build an email basket

. Jennifer Burke: Yes.

There we go.

There.

So when you were just talking about a community, you talk about your email

list as a community, let's talk about how does one successfully, because this

is what we're talking about, do this successfully right from the get go.

How does one build that community?

What are some of the tips you can give us?

So I'm glad you asked and cause I feel and part of is, I

always talk and teach my people from experience, and I'm like, I'm gonna carry

you along with me and show you what I've done and what I've learned, as well as

what I've seen others do, successfully.

I have a guide and it's called the Email Setup for Success Guide, and it

goes through 12 steps of here's the things that if you do them, you will be

in a better position to be doing email marketing in a way that's gonna make

it successful for your business, no matter what niche you're in, what type

of coach, that you might be, whatever consultant or course creator you are.

And I actually did the math.

I went back and looked today that, that one particular opt-in gift, freebie,

aka lead magnet, has brought more than a thousand people into my community.

Woohoo . Yeah.

And I'm like, yes, and so there was a lot of small business

owners who want help learning all of this.

I also, if I have to do this over again, and I'm looking at this

going, I need to follow my own advice because the guide could be better.

But things like you need to have email marketing software.

Hopefully all the folks we're talking to and listening today know that you cannot

go out and build a relationship with lots of people, not just a one to one

relationship, you can't do that through your Outlook and your Gmail folks, right?

You know that.

No, no.

That's number one, do not use your gmail

number one rule,

yahoo, aol, any of those things.

No.

It's like, number two, there is no, you can't take your business cards from a

networking event or a conference and just dump them into the system either.

Oh, this is a pet peeve of mine.

Oh my gosh.

Yes.

I know, I know.

Preach it.

Preach it,

Preach it.

I'm like, there's even one gentleman who's a consultant.

We've been in some groups together, we've attended meetings together,

and part of me has wanted to take him aside and go, you know, I

never actually gave you permission.

You violate.

I shared my business card with you.

I did not opt in to your list.

And I haven't had that gentle conversation with him.

But the point I used to be more strident about what email software

I thought people, should use.

And I say that having used a lot of them and have had test accounts

in a number of software and I've helped clients through others.

I think the most important thing is that, what I use for me and where

my business is right now may not be the best choice for somebody else.

I moved to Active Campaign three years ago.

Oh, it's coming up on four years and I love it.

It's what helped me take off with growth in my business, my email list, absolutely.

I followed to change from my email service

provider after I saw your success.

And I said, Ooh, that Jennifer, she's a smart gal.

So I made that move too.

I flipped over there.

Thank you.

I've brought several people along with me over the years.

That said, I've also worked with clients who, based on their niche

and their message, there were other services that made sense for them and

others because of the deals they got.

And I'm like, look, if it's what's working for you, you don't have to change because

I think there's some other tools out there and maybe there's a better tool

that's more intuitive for your brain.

I know some people whose brains just work better with Convert Kit and whose

brains work better in Mailer Lite.

I don't know anybody's brain who works better in MailChimp, but I

get why they were literally like the biggest monkey in the room.

That said, I think the most importantest thing is you go in, you learn your

software, you learn and figure out does it have the tools in it at the plan that

you can afford that are gonna let you help your business grow and grow right now.

I felt like when I moved over to Active Campaign, I'm like, oh, I am putting on

my big girl old pants and I am not ready for this tool, but I know I will be.

If I follow the steps, this is what's going to help me

get to where I need to go.

Talking about the big girl panties, a lot of people

think, well, I'm just gonna start out with one of these freebie things.

Mm-hmm.

free software, and then I'll make the move.

But having moved once when I had automations.

You've moved three times?

Yeah.

One time is enough for me.

And I'm not even gonna count the one piece of software I was

in so long that I never actually even moved my list there or out of it.

Oh, actually you just reminded me.

I did do a trial with another one and talk about not having a brain.

It just did not click with my brain.

And I was like, I don't get this.

I don't get why it's so popular.

But when I made the move to Active Campaign, yes, there is a learning

curve, but it just made so much sense.

There's a lot of intuitiveness.

Is that a word?

I just made that up, if not.

That it just worked with my brain.

Right.

Let's just talk for a minute about are there certain things

that, yes, we all know email service providers send out emails, but is there

a list of oh, must haves, even from starting out, if it's a brand new coach

just starting to build an email list.

I don't know if they all have tags, but I know tags are

really, to me, very important.

It's one of the biggest reasons I moved.

That's the one area when I write and I caveat in my guide where I lay out here's

the biggest and the top ones to look at.

And it's the one caveat that I have when I talk to people and clients who are

thinking about going completely free.

Understand the limits and understand what you get what you pay for, or in

this case what you're not paying for.

And is that limitation gonna hold you back from growing your business.

Things like the limitations and the non-existence of automations with

the totally free plan in MailChimp.

Making sure that you can create a multiple email follow up sequence when

somebody gets your free gift or buys your product or registers for your

webinar that they get the series of emails you want them to automatically.

Cuz you and I aren't gonna be sitting there sending emails at two o'clock in

the morning in case somebody who's on a different coast or time zone from us,

that's when they sign up or they find us.

That's the beauty of email marketing.

And yes, some of those free plans don't include that to the degree

that even a beginner needs.

The ability to group people so that you could say, Hey, here's all the

people that are interested in my email setup list, and then here's all

the people over here that wanted the thing when I was talking about Canva.

And those aren't necessarily the same people, although some of them are.

If you're a parenting coach, you wanna be able to group the people who

are parents of toddlers differently than the parents of tweens.

Or teens, because while you may talk about tips that help all of them,

chances are you're gonna have courses or products or coaching that's very

different for a three year old, a nine year old, and a 17 year old.

True.

And if your email software doesn't easily and affordably

let you make those groups or segments or use tags to create them, and instead

it makes you count them on multiple different lists and then it counts each

person, you've gotta wait a minute.

I've got a mom and Barb over here is a mom of both a five

year old and a nine year old.

So technically she needs to be in both of those camps, but I don't wanna count Barb

twice against my email subscriber list.

So those are some of the questions that you can ask, and I think some

of those tools have gotten better.

It's where I would say, if somebody's really gonna go after

free, then look at Mailer Lite.

But be sure you're aware of the features that you are not getting and make a

plan so that you can make the sales necessary to cover your email costs.

Cause I'd almost say that if you can't afford the $15 or the $9, a month,

the $10 a month for the features in most of these email software,

Convert Kit has affordable plans, Active Campaign was cheaper when

I moved there than it was what the software that I left, Mailer Lite.

You need to be able to sell at least that much a month so that you can

pay for your email because it's gonna help you make more sales each month.

Right.

Yeah.

If you look at some of the plans, some of the email service providers, as you get

more subscribers and the cost goes up, that might be a turnoff to some people who

say, oh my gosh, look how much it is per month when I have that many subscribers.

But look at it a different way.

You've got that many subscribers.

You've got more opportunity to have more products that get in front of

those people and make more sales.

Get more clients customers.

Absolutely.

And I think that leads us to some other questions about

what is success in setting up?

You don't put off building the relationship, sending the emails,

sharing useful, relevant offers until you get to some X number on your list.

No, start writing emails when you got, I was writing emails when I had, five

people on my list, 30 people on my list when I knew all of them by name.

And I'd probably met them in person.

And when one of them unsubscribed, it felt like a dagger to my heart.

Cause I'm like, God, Marilyn, how can you leave me?

You know?

But it's okay.

It's not the right fit for them.

Maybe they'll be back.

The point is that there are, it's like you said, there's more people that you

can potentially build a relationship.

There's more offers that you can potentially make.

Don't let it scare you and don't think that you have to get to some magic number.

It used to be coaches are like, no, you gotta wait till you got a hundred.

You gotta wait till you got a thousand.

I'm like, hell no!!

No, no.

Yeah, I talked about that on another podcast episode about that being an email

marketing mistake is waiting too long.

Give till it hurts.

Give till it hurts.

No, that's a mistake.

You can give things away, but you can make offers too.

Don't train your people just to get everything for free from you.

Right.

And folks offers can be everything from, join this group, listen to

my podcast, or listen to Melissa's podcast, She's Got Content.

It could also be, get on a call, fill out this survey, watch this

video, sign up for the free webinar.

You're trying to take them from points where they are just getting

to know you to seeing you in action.

Hey, here's a $7 ebook.

Here's a $7 planner for you.

Because once they commit and they make the $7 or the $17 offer, then it makes

sense to maybe buy into, oh, wait, here's a course that's related to that..

It's a lot harder if you join and you're building this relationship

and you nurture and you give lots of free content and blogs, and then

you hit them with your one and only offer is this $5,000 a month program.

Well, that just didn't fit.

You weren't setting yourself up for success.

You weren't setting your community up for success with you.

Yeah.

And you're bringing up another point that, listen, if you're a brand new coach,

you don't have an offer out there yet.

You're kind of figuring out what's gonna be the thing to offer.

There's nothing wrong with doing some affiliate marketing.

And that means that you're promoting something with an affiliate link

to the people who are on your list.

But make sure that those products that you're recommending are vetted by you and

Absolutely, yes.

Let's circle back, because I know that there are

certain email service providers

Yeah, I'm sure we will.

We will get questions and concerns going, oh no, we're gonna violate

the terms of, I'm like, yes, no.

We can circle back to that.

Melissa, write down that we will come back to affiliates.

I did a coaching program on writing and one of my students helped me rename it.

Your Essential Emails, because it's like the five emails you send at the

very beginning of the relationship are the most essential cuz they set the

relationship off on the right foot.

They get to know you.

They get good valuable content.

You're helping them with a specific problem.

It's related to the reason they joined your list in the

first place for community.

And you're setting up going, Hey, here's the other things that

I do to help people like you.

Let me show you how I can help you more.

You're doing a disservice to your community if you don't

tell them how you can help them.

And whether that's your own calls, your workshops, your coaching, your consulting,

or it's the offers of somebody else that you've known and vetted for them.

That was the thing that was the biggest light bulb that went off in my head.

And the switch that flipped was that I was doing a disservice for my

people if I didn't email them and if I didn't present them valuable offers.

I often say there's one person out there who needs

to hear from you, and they're not gonna hear it from anybody but you.

And you're doing that one person, of course, it's always

multiplied by one person.

Yes, many, many more.

But just think about that one person and even give them a name.

Call them, call her Cassandra or Bob, and think about how they're sitting there

and needing a solution and you've got it.

And if you're not giving it to this person, by sending out your emails,

making these offers, then that person's sitting there just waiting for the

answer, waiting for the solution.

Or they leave, they're gonna go find somebody else,

find it somewhere else.

They're gonna find it somewhere else.

So, yes.

So related then, since we here, I'll circle us back.

Yeah, circle back there, Jennifer,

to affiliates and referral links.

It's been talked about in multiple groups that there's many of the

email service providers who are like, you cannot do affiliate marketing.

There's a difference between what I would call, the affiliate links that say Melissa

or I share in the course of an email that we write that has valuable information,

that has a tip, that shares a story and says, and by the way, here's the product

I think you can help you with blank.

Right.

That's okay.

I've done stuff like that in, it's more than hundreds, it's probably a

thousand plus emails in the almost four years I've been with Active Campaign.

I have not run into an issue once, not ever.

What they're concerned about is basically the kinds of people who wind up in

your spam folder where it's nothing but hard hitting and promo, and they're

not necessarily high quality offers.

And you can kind of clearly tell that they're just churning and

burning and they'll churn and burn a list and they don't care.

Because if they can get three people to click on some spammy, high, whatever

offer, and then it paid off for them.

And that's not who any of these email providers want on their list because

it's tanking their reputation scores and their server scores and bringing

everybody else down around them.

So yes, they have to tend to put into their terms that they were

against affiliate marketing.

They're against that type.

They're against spam.

If all you ever send out is an affiliate promotion and you never tell people

who you are or give them a background and you're not giving them any tips

and you're not sharing valuable content, then yeah, then yeah, you're

probably gonna run into trouble and you're probably not gonna have a very

effective or engaged email list either.

But if I send out a link to one of Melissa's courses or programs

or her content twice a month, I'm not gonna get in trouble for that.

I can send out a link that probably has three affiliate links in it

to three different products if they make sense within the context

of the rest of the message.

And all the other emails that I send out, many people are like, that's cool.

Good.

Jennifer's cool on that.

Okay.

And we also wanna say there should be a disclaimer on your email that

says, this email contains affiliate links.

Absolutely.

And something along the lines of, you're not paying anything

more, but the person who has this product is gonna send me a little thank you

check if you do purchase, but it doesn't cost you, the consumer, anything more.

Does not.

Follow all legal guidelines regarding affiliate and referral marketing.

Follow the ftc.

Yes.

There is a disclaimer in the footer of every one of my emails

that has that information.

Yes, there's other stuff that needs to be on blogs and websites.

I am gonna tell you I am not a legal expert and I am not playing

a lawyer on the internet here.

I'm just gonna say that I think people are more scared and scared

away of certain email services versus others because of affiliate.

And now I will say something.

So here's another caveat.

Yeah.

MailChimp's gonna crack down on that more.

Why?

Because they have more free accounts and free users who are going to abuse that.

Mailer Lite may or may not crack down on that more.

Again, they have a very big free program.

That's one of the advantages as opposed to not being on a free plan from Active

Campaign and they're not being a big free plan there, is that your average

spammer isn't gonna pay what I pay a month so that they could send crap emails.

So there's another reason why you may have to think twice about the free

plans with some of the email software.

I can be fired up talking about email today, Melissa.

I know.

And now that you're so fired up, I wanna circle into, alright,

how are we gonna build up?

How are we gonna get people to sign up for our list?

Talking about starting right from the get go, being successful right

from the get go with our email list.

Well, I can totally tell you don't do some of the

things that I've done in the past.

No.

Oh, I could do that too.

I could,

We could both share a list of the things that haven't worked for us.

Actually I've done things that technically while they worked and

they built me an email list in the end didn't turn out to be the right list.

Right.

It wasn't the right people on the list.

It wasn't the right people for right me.

They were great people, but in one case, I built that for one business and

they love the content, they love me, but they weren't the decision makers.

They weren't the buyers for that business and that consulting business.

So webinars worked, but didn't.

You're talking free webinars where people will sign up.

Yeah, it's still a thing.

It's still done.

I think everybody's like, oh, I know.

I'm gonna go make an ebook and I'm gonna put my ebook

out and people are gonna join.

The first thing is that you can't just put a form up on your website and go,

hi, click and sign up for my newsletter.

Folks, that, that might have worked 20 years ago.

It isn't gonna work today.

Not today.

So we have what's known as the gift, the enticement, the optin, the

incentive, the lead magnet, the freebie.

And I'll tell you this right now, you wanna go and you're gonna test one

and you're gonna get it out there and then you're gonna change it because

whatever you put out there the first time probably isn't the best one.

But that's okay cuz it's out there and you're gonna learn from it.

I could probably ask Melissa, how many different opt-in gifts

have you had over the last

? Melissa Brown: I have lost track.

There's a bunch of them that are now sitting on my hard

drive, cuz they're my babies.

I can't let them go completely, but they're not available to opt in.

No, I can do like the mistake I made, oh, I was so proud

of, I think one of the first ones I made and it was pretty, and my very

beginning Canva skills and a PDF and I believe it was a resource guide

and there were 30 plus resources.

Oh my God, how many pages was it?

It was too many pages.

It was too much.

It was just too much.

And that's, if anything, the irony right now is I have a freebie called

Fix Your Freebie where I'm trying to put into practice what I do.

And I'm looking at one of my most successful ones, the one that's

gotten me more than a thousand people over the last few years.

And I'm like, it's too long.

It's too long.

It made sense at the time.

It's helped people.

How can I make this better?

People are looking for a quick fix.

A quick win.

They don't wanna read a 50 page or it used to be a hundred page

was like such a valuable resource, but now nobody wants that.

More is not better.

No it is not.

They want a quick win.

They want checklists.

They want something that maybe even one page where they can look at that

as they're going through the steps.

Check 'em off and resources.

That's what people want.

They want quick fixes.

Here's the advice for anybody setting up.

First of all, understand that all of us have created more than one.

We've had ones that flopped.

You're gonna go out, you're gonna create one.

You're gonna see what resonates with your ideal people and audience.

And then you're gonna fix it and you're gonna tweak it, and you'll change it.

Do not spend weeks.

Or months and I've seen that happen.

Oh, yes.

Putting something together and having it be gorgeous,

and also having it be something that somebody's looking at.

And I'm I don't even, I don't know what this is.

I'm working with a client.

it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's well laid out, but there

seems to be an ebook here.

And a journal and a planner and something else.

It was too much.

Just, it was too much.

Each one of those things could have helped solve one single problem.

And I feel like now I'm going into Hey, I have an entire workshop about that.

That wasn't what Melissa asked me to plug, but I do.

I've created a suite of products that go from the freebie to the workbook to

the workshop depending upon how deep into this you wanna dive to fix your

email gift and, do it as easily as you can so that you can start building your

community and figuring out almost as you go along where's the right fit, for you.

And you said don't spend a lot of time getting it perfect.

Well, because done is better than perfect.

How many people have spun their wheels for weeks to months, to years and not

gotten anything out there to start their email list, to start capturing

the names and email addresses?

Absolutely.

I'm gonna bet that most of you, if you are out there and you're

coaching, you're consulting, you've worked with the clients one on one.

You have content.

You have a checklist or a tip sheet that you could easily put together of the

top seven questions that your type of client has before they hire you or this,

the top seven sleep tips for toddlers.

You've got experience from talking with people that you

can put together that freebie.

If you've been blogging for a while, well then great, you've got tips you

can pull from three related blogs that you could combine together into

a quick, short ebook that maybe you make it a video because again, hey, we

consume content in different methods.

The point is, you've got content sitting on your hard drive between

the emails maybe you've written one on one with clients, blog posts,

if you've purchased or licensed any content, you can create a freebie

and you can get it out there quickly.

There's other ones out there.

Quizzes.

Quizzes are still really popular.

I haven't delved into the quizzes as much as I'd like.

Why?

They're technically more challenging.

It takes a lot more time.

And unless you're willing if you've got the budget for it, you pay someone

to help you actually do it for you.

It's not inexpensive, but that's a really great way to get people onto an email list

and segment them into different buckets.

Yes, it's a great way to take people who maybe already have

started to know you deeper into a relationship or a conversation with you.

I certainly don't with my clients who are newer with tech stumbles

who have great experience.

They've probably been a service provider.

They've possibly been working offline, and now they're trying to bring

their skills online as coaches and consultants and authors, and they

wanna create their first courses.

Make this easy for yourself.

Start getting your community out there to be set up for success.

Going after a quiz is not setting you up for easy, for success.

It's a great thing to do, but don't tell yourself that that's

the thing you have to do first.

Put that one on the back burner.

Yeah.

If at all.

But get that checklist, a short ebook, some type of a worksheet.

Yes, absolutely.

If I to tell anybody right now, checklist, worksheets.

Maybe not even the ebook.

I'm not even sure if you wanna count the most recent thing I

created in Canva as an ebook.

It's six pages.

One of those is the About me page.

One is the cover.

One's the next steps, which leaves, the other three is being the actual tips.

You don't even have to call it an ebook.

It could just be oh, it's a pdf.

I think I called it a cheat sheet.

OK.

Sheets.

But because the meat of it's on one page and hello tip-- that content for that came

from emails that I had sent, a video I did, which then turned into a blog post.

Repurposing

You are the queen at that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

So lead magnets.

This is a great way to get people to sign up.

You mentioned webinars.

What other kinds of things can people think about to build their

list, to build their community?

You're on social where sharing links is tough.

Create your own LinkedIn bio page.

Create a page on your website.

It's a landing page.

It's got your top content.

It's got an offer or a coupon, or it's got a great video for them.

And make sure you have that link so you can point to it to people.

If you're big and you're gonna insist on using and or it works for your audience,

for Instagram and reels and stories, then make sure that you can actually

drive people back to your website and you capture all that web traffic.

Sure, there's third party link bio tools.

So much better if you can just send the people directly to your

own website and your own traffic.

Social media still works for sharing those things.

I'd say honestly that, while there are quizzes and while there's webinars and

while there's videos, the other best way you create, that super focused

freebie, that checklist, that worksheet in terms of actually getting it out

there to grow your list, collaborations.

Collaborations and what I would jokingly call other people's audiences, are the

best and fastest way you're going to grow.

I did a workshop on this, a presentation for somebody else, and I had actually

calculated the numbers in my growth for my Marketing Mojo email community,

and it's a redonculous number.

It's like in the 90% range of people who have come to me have

come through some collaboration.

I can sit here and talk to you about popups and forms and all the sorts

of things you need to do on your website and you still need to have it.

And unless you are getting a bleeping ton of traffic, organic or otherwise

from Google, because you've got some massively greatly performing blog post

on your website, then the people who are finding you that way are going

to be coming at you slower than this.

Yes.

Collaborations.

That's where it is because listen, you develop those relationships with other

coaches, other solopreneurs, other groups and bundles and giveaways, being on

other people's podcasts and offering.

Oh hey!.

I should probably be promoting a freebie on Melissa's podcast and I'm sure she'll

put it in the show notes, right, Melissa?

Yes, of course.

We're gonna talk about that in a minute.

It is important to have that collaboration with other people.

It's just a great way to get traffic to your opt-in.

It's a great way to start developing those relationships so you can

have those collaborations and maybe you're the one eventually who will

be doing a collaboration and will want people to help promote your

whatever it is you're promoting,

I'd say that it can also be super informal, cuz

this notion was intimidating and it can be if you're starting out.

It could start off as simple as what we call just a freebie swap.

Here's the key point for any of these collaborations: you wanna be

looking to work with people who have the similar type of ideal audience,

clients and customers, but they have different products or services than you.

Melissa and I both talk about content marketing, but we also

talk about it differently.

There are other people that I know that are big in video, and I touch a little

bit on video, but I'm not as big on video as Tanya Smith and Lou Bortone.

So they'd be great people to partner with because we're gonna have similar

audiences of entrepreneurs and online business owners, but we teach

and talk about different things.

It's why it might make sense for somebody else, for me to partner

with somebody who does web analytics.

There are some techy things I don't necessarily do.

I don't build websites anymore.

So somebody who handles that, great, I wanna partner up with you

because again, we have the same end audience, but we're not competing so

we could make a good collaboration.

Now, here's where it doesn't make sense.

I am not going to go be on a summit or join an event that is primarily for

people who do low content printables.

That might not be my people.

Or if everybody is a homeschooling mom.

It's not a fit.

But now you could do a swap if you know another coach or you are an accountant

and you partner with a coach, because maybe you've got the same audience.

You can say, Hey, I'm gonna talk about you and share your thing on my blog

or my podcast, or I'm gonna email my people and tell them about you.

And then two weeks later, they're gonna email and tell their people about you.

That's the most simplest form of collaboration beyond these organized,

I call them list building events.

Right.

Yeah, that's a really good point, because when we talked a minute

ago about building a list that did not include the right people.

Yeah.

That can happen if you're in an event and you're, let's

say you're in a giveaway or a bundle and the target market is just, it's not

a good fit, but you don't realize it.

People will possibly still opt in for your free thing that you're giving away,

but they're not ever gonna buy from you.

They're not going to want your services because it's not the right fit.

It's important to know who you're collaborating with and who their target

market is for that particular event.

Absolutely.

It's one of the things that I grew the list and I grew it that way through

those types of events, and now I'm having to go back through and go.

Okay, all of you are on here through one form or another, probably

about email marketing and maybe a few other things, but you're not

necessarily engaging the way I thought.

And I've sent targeted and segmented emails, and now I'm gonna have to go

do the hard work of cleaning up and working on re-engagement of my list.

And it's probably gonna mean that yes, I'm going to purposefully wind up cutting my

list because in the end it's going to mean that more people actually see my message

and it gets delivered to the boxes of the people who actually wanna be with me.

And it means I have to be much more careful about whatever

collaborations and the partnerships that I'm in in the future.

And what do I do to engage with those people after they first found me?

Don't welcome people to your community and then leave them

sitting in your living room for days on end without welcoming them.

At the same time, if you've invited them and everybody's come from the same

party, now back to your house, they might be a little overwhelmed and maybe you

need to give them at least a little bit of time to cool and chill down before

you hit them with some more emails.

Have a plan.

And even if the plan is, Hey, I'm gonna check back with you next week.

Okay, cool, thanks.

Here, go watch this video in the meantime.

Cool.

Have a plan.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Have a plan and when you talked about cleaning up the list or making sure

that the people on your list want to remain on your list, unsubscribes

does not have to be a bad word, because sometimes we do it ourselves.

We unsubscribe people from our list because A, they're not engaging.

They're not opening the emails.

Sometimes it's harder to find out that they're actually opening

the emails or not nowadays.

That's a separate conversation.

Unsubscribes is not a bad word because let's talk about it from

a standpoint of there are people who don't want to email their list because

they're afraid someone will unsubscribe.

Goody.

It's okay.

Bless them and release them somebody once told me.

Thank you for telling me that we are not the right fit.

That makes it more likely that somebody who is the right fit

for me is now gonna get my email.

And I admit, I had to talk my way through that.

Good news folks, as you finally start to build a bigger email community and you

don't know by name, face and sight, every single person on your list, Somebody left.

Okay.

It only starts to get to you and you're like, Aw, but that

person's been on my list for years.

But they come back back.

That's the cool thing.

They come back.

I have done it.

I may get on a tear where I'm unsubscribing from this one,

that one, this one, that one.

Not because I'm mad at them, but because I got so much email that I

got overwhelmed and I unsubscribe, but then I subscribe again.

It's not personal.

It is not personal.

And it is the best thing that can actually happen for your email community

because it means the people that are left are gonna engage with you

and they are more likely to actually become your customers, your buyers.

You want to segment.

I'll also say, for example, mismatches.

Before I ever participated as someone who was building my own

email community through events, Lord knows, I was a consumer of them.

And I opted in for all kinds of things.

And a lot of it was because at my heart, research is my middle name.

That's the trained librarian in me as well as the trained marketer in me.

And I'm like, cool, what are they doing?

How are they doing it?

How do they set it up?

And I remember one time I'm like, cool, this person's freebie

is all about email marketing.

I wanna see what they're doing.

I wanna see how they're doing it.

And then I get it.

And then all of their emails afterward were about religious faith

plr and their journey to something.

Wait, how did I get on this list?

Who is this person?

So I went back and I found the email.

I joined this list because this person was promoting an email marketing guide.

Why did they do that?

If that isn't what they actually talk about and or why wasn't the guide

maybe tailored to say, hi, this is how you can do email marketing as

a faith-based entrepreneur and talk about your faith in your emails.

That might have even made sense in which case I wouldn't

have opted in cuz it isn't me.

But somebody else would've been like, that's me.

I didn't hit spam because I'd opted in.

But yeah, I unsubbed pretty fast cause this is a total mismatch.

Something's gone wrong here?

I don't know why you did what you did, but it's not working for either of us.

I'm sure everybody listening has had that instance.

Or worse, somebody ghosted you.

You pick up their freebie and then you heard nothing.

And then, it feels like for me it's three months later and maybe

it was only four weeks, but, and then I get an email from them.

I'm like, who the bleep is this?

Well, sometimes it's six months or a year later.

Oh, and you think, I don't think I ever opted into this person's list.

And then you go to unsubscribe and it shows you where you actually had

subscribed, but you had not heard from that person for that long.

Which speaks to another reason to keep talking to people, sending an email.

You're probably not gonna say, oh, you have to email once a week.

It depends what is the sweet spot of how often you should be emailing.

It depends with a caveat.

It does.

So if you email, I'm gonna go ahead and call it, infrequently, if you email

once a month, or you email once every six or eight weeks, a lot of other

things can come into somebody's inbox.

The content they consume, the tv they see.

Our brains get overloaded in that amount of time, and it becomes really

easy for them to forget who you are, especially if it's not somebody that

they've met you at a real meeting or a conference, or that they've been on a

call with you or in a group with you.

It's harder to build a relationship if you're long distance dating and

very long distance and than very far apart with the communications.

That said, it doesn't have to be this massive email very frequently.

I'm never gonna be a okay, somebody told me once I should never say never.

James Bond said, never say never that I don't email daily.

That said, I went from once long time ago, being a once a month, here's my

newsletter and it's all officially, and it was a different business then,

and I thought I had to do that too.

Well, but if I have something to say in the meantime, can I send another email?

Yes.

You can send shorter ones.

I made the conscious decision to make myself more consistent

when I moved to Active Campaign.

We're gonna go to twice a month and the goal is before three months

are out, I'm gonna get to once a week and it's gonna be Thursdays.

And there was no rhyme or reason.

It doesn't matter necessarily what day of the week, if you're

consistent and your people know.

I know Melissa's gonna show up in my inbox on Mondays.

Melissa knows I'm gonna show up in her inbox on Thursdays and at the same time,

because I do email every Thursday, I've also bought myself leeway, which means

that when I forget, or life gets in the way, or I have a medical emergency

and I need surgery and you don't get an email from me this Thursday, it's

not the same as if I ghosted you for some long period of time, you're

like, oh, there's Jennifer back again in my email box, and you're like, I

think it happened twice this summer.

And I'm like, you all didn't miss me, did you?

Cause you didn't, that was the week, that was a blip of time

in your lives you didn't notice.

That's really good because if you're in people's inbox

once a week consistently, and then like what happened to you with an

accident and in surgery and you don't get that email sent, but then you come

back and you say, did you miss me?

And you're like, wait.

It's like a blip of time.

You weren't there that last week and then you go looking back

and you're like, oh my goodness.

No!.

Where was she?

Where was she?

I've coached people through things of like, okay, if it really has been a

long time, yes, there are certain things you can do to rewarm up, re-engage.

But don't let that happen in the first place.

Don't let it up in the first place.

You don't need this long explanation of your entire life history of what happened.

You just need to say, oops, life happened.

Here's my plan going forward.

Commit to something you can keep up with.

I've talked with a client in my group, and I'm like, look, don't say

I'm gonna be back in your email box every week if you know you can't do

it because of the rest of what's going on in your business and your life.

Do what makes sense for you.

That's said, I will share wisdom from someone who's been both of

our coaches, that if you email more often, you have more opportunities to develop

the relationship and more opportunities to actually make offers and for more

people to see that offer because so much else is happening in their lives and we

are not the only thing in their inboxes.

We are potentially competing with every other list they're on, and Warby Parker

and Wayfair and the pizza place and omg.

If you show up a little bit more often, you can remind them of that offer.

If you only email twice a month and you're gonna use one of your precious two

emails a month on a promotion and somebody doesn't see that email for your course,

Sad trombone and sad face.

If you email at least once a week and then you throw in a dedicated promotional

email and then you mention the course at least two more times, you are more likely

to have gotten your offer in front of the people who need it right now, because

you are in their boxes more frequently.

I have a sticky note and I know what you think about sticky

notes, but I have a sticky note that's sitting here right in front of me.

It says, if it's worth promoting once it's worth promoting four times.

Oh, I was gonna say three.

We're up to four.

Okay.

Yeah.

Four times.

You're right.

People don't always see each email and if it's worth promoting once,

it's worth promoting four times.

Okay, well, Jennifer, I could just borrow your brain all day long.

We're not going to, because everybody else, they need

to actually go out and they need to create their freebie and they need to

go out and write a couple of welcome emails to nurture their community.

And then they need to go out and make a plan for, Hey, how you

gonna send two emails this month?

Come on folks.

That's all I'm asking for you for right now.

Start off with two emails a month and then we can work up, and then

you're gonna be set up for success.

And I know that you had something that you

wanted to give away today.

Well, I do.

I was gonna say, I can give away my email setup guide that goes through all

the 12 steps that goes into more detail.

It's got my rundown of the top email marketing software and links.

It gives tips on practicing writing your emails and writing subject lines.

And I will also say, it's a bit on the long side for an ebook.

I have shorter, faster freebies.

If you want that, I'll send you the Fix Your Freebie Fast guide too.

I'm going to give Melissa the link that you could put in the show notes,

the mightymarketingmojo.com/email - setup - guide.

But definitely there will be a link that'll be a whole lot easier to click.

If you wanna join my email community and hear me talk about all of this and model

it, and I tell stories and I let you know what's going on in my life in my emails.

Melissa is fantastic about that as well.

She's one of my role models for integrating life and

storytelling into her emails.

Oh, thank you.

You're welcome.

All right.

That's awesome.

So, all those links will be in the show notes so go on over there to Mighty

Marketing Mojo and check that out.

Thanks so much, Jennifer.

Thank you, Melissa,

and all you content creators.

You get out there and start creating some content and grow your list.

Jennifer has just spilled all the beans here for making a

successful email community.

So I wanna see all of those emails going out over the next few weeks and months.

Thanks so much, and we'll be back here next week.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of the She's Got Content podcast.

I hope you got at least one nugget to take action on this week.

If you got value from today's episode, I would be so grateful

when you leave a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

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If you're listening on Apple Podcast and leave a review of the show, it

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And last but never least, if you want an endless supply of just right ideas

for content you can write about for your blog posts, your emails, your videos,

podcast episodes, all the content things, then you wanna head over to my

website at shesgotcontent.com/content and pick up your free workbook,

Never Run Out of Content Ideas.

Look for that link in the show notes today along with the other

links mentioned in today's episode.

Until next time, Content Creators, you've got an audience waiting to hear from you

and you've got content to share with them.

Stop being the best kept secret and make a bigger impact when you've