TCC Podcast #94: The Ins and Outs of Email Marketing with Val Geisler

Email expert and sometime copywriter, Val Geisler, is our guest for the 94th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. In this episode, we go deep on the ins and outs of emails—especially on-boarding sequences which can make a huge difference to your client acquisition processes (and the one you create for your clients). We cover: •  how Val went from stage manager to copywriter and email marketing genius •  what she did to learn business skills then start her own business •  how managing stage productions has made her a better writer •  Val’s processes for designing and mapping email sequences •  why she added strategy to the services she provides (in addition to copy) •  Val’s secret for getting clients (that we’ve mentioned on the podcast before) •  the backdoor Val uses to get results from her clients •  the writing and testing tools Val uses as an email copywriter •  how she presents then delivers final copy to her clients •  how she sets up projects and charges for them •  her advice on welcome sequences to onboard new customers •  the mistakes everyone makes with their email marketing •  her favorite tips for working with VAs •  the new book she is writing about her experience as a woman in the tech industry •  how marketing is like a dinner party •  how to get her regular email tear-downs Val also shared how you can get her regular email tear-downs if you want to keep learning about email marketing. To get this excellent episode in your earbuds, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. It’s also available on iTunes, Stitcher and your favorite podcast app.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Lululemon LucidChart Litmus Intercom ActiveCampaign Drip Drift Airstory ValGeisler.com @lovevalgeisler Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Kira:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob:   You’re invited to join the club for episode 94 as we chat with copywriter and email strategist Val Geisler about email copywriting strategy and what it takes to convert casual visitors into happy customers, writing a book, and how thinking about your marketing is a lot like hosting a dinner party. Kira:   Welcome, Val. Rob:   Hey, Val. Val:    Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Episode 94, that’s so huge. Kira:   It’s exciting. I realized before you jumped on here that you are the only guest we’ve had on this podcast that I have also interviewed on my previous podcast from a previous lifetime, the Bridal Rebellion Podcast in 2015. I was lucky enough to interview you about your wedding, and planning, and systems, so I feel like this is just coming full circle. Val:    Wow. Yeah. That’s like a blast from the past. It just kind of proves my theory that the journey you go on in your career is one that’s pretty unpredictable, and that if you would have told me in 2015 that I would be sitting here talking to you about copywriting and email marketing, I probably would have laughed at you, but here we are. I didn’t have this plan, but this is where the life has taken me as I’ve let plans unfold. Kira:   All right, so let’s start with your story. You didn’t expect to end up as a copywriter, so how did you end up as a copywriter? Val:    Sure. Well, I have a degree in theater, so I went to school for theater production. I was a stage manager and worked in theater for several years. Stage managers are the people behind the scenes who make everything happen. They tell everybody where to be and what they should be wearing, and props to be carrying, and when the lights go on, and all those things. When I worked in theater, I traveled a ton and got really tired of not having the same hairdresser ever, or ... I really had no, my parents’ address was my home address, so I didn’t really have a home. I just lived in extended-stay hotels, and Airbnb wasn’t a thing then, so like long-term rentals off of Craigslist. I got pretty tired of the nomad lifestyle and was looking for a job that would be similar to what I was doing and found event management. I worked in events both at non-profits, for-profits, and for small business owners. I worked mostly in the wedding industry, very much like theater, organizing a tiny little production multiple times a weekend. Did that for a couple of years, and in that process of doing all of these events, having a pretty crazy stressful job, managing weddings and people and personalities. I started doing yoga, and when I was in yoga class one day, someone was talking about the company Lululemon. Lululemon Athletica was still a super small company in the United States. It was still a big brand in Canada, but there weren’t very many stories here in the U.S. I investigated the brand a little bit, fell in love with them as a company, and started applying for jobs in my area. I ended up opening a store. I lived in Virginia. I opened up a store in Richmond, Virginia, at the time, and Lululemon taught me how to run a business. This is where it’s like all these things I never would have guessed the next step, and, trust me, we’re getting to copywriter here, but I learned everything about running a business, from marketing, to budgeting, to leading a team. Lululemon really gave me the tools that I needed, and they said, “Okay. We’re going to pay the rent on the store and give you all the product, but you build the community. You build the team. You build everything you need to make the store a success.” I did that, and at the same time, the leadership in the company also says, “Unless you really want to be here in this company forever, we want you to take what you learn here and go out into the world and do a greater good with it.” At the time, this is when we met, Kira. I was getting married, and my fiancé at the time said, “Well, you have all these skills from running businesses. You know how to organize things on the backend. You’ve mentioned a few business owners that you know who need help, who need organizing. Is now a good time to leave the brand and go work for yourself?” I listened, and I took the leap, and I worked for myself. I reached out to those business owners that I knew and said, “Hey, how can I help you? You’ve mentioned this thing, and this thing, and this thing, and I actually know how to do all those things.” They were things like writing blog posts for them, uploading them to WordPress, answering emails, taking phone calls, even. I did like a virtual receptionist for a client. I was a virtual assistant before I even knew that that was a thing. I was just helping business owners. While doing that, writing on my blog, writing for other people’s blogs, learning about writing, copywriting, content creation, and my business really grew in those next couple of years. I got married, found out I was pregnant, knew I wanted to take a maternity leave, so I hired a little team of virtual assistants who I really acted as their project manager. They took on all the doing while I was away, and then I came back from my maternity leave and hopped back into the business as a project manager and really started worked with clients one on one on organizing their teams, and their systems and processes. Communication is a huge piece of that puzzle, and that was something I helped people with more often than anything else was, how are they communicating with their clients? What does their client journey look like? What is the experience for their customers on the other end? I worked with a lot of creative business owners who were like, “I just want to design websites,” and I was like, “Yeah. Okay, but you have people that pay you to design those websites, and you have to take care of them.” I was doing all of that, and was working in software myself, like working with different systems and tools, and ended up with a job offer from one of those tools I was using, an email marketing software, to write on their blog. They liked my writing, and I was in a place in my life where I thought, “Well, I think freelancing has been really fun. It’s also been really exhausting,” and we were thinking about having another child. It just felt like a good time to try this in-house thing on, so I went full-time at the email marketing company and worked there for a year and a half, did end up having another kid. After she was born, I went back to freelancing, but now, I had all this email marketing knowledge. I realized there was a total juxtaposition between the customer experience stuff I had been doing from theater days all the way through, the line through is pretty steady, so all that customer experience stuff and then taking on the email marketing work that I had done for the last year and a half and honing my chops as a writer, and I combined all of that into basically my dream job of being an email marketing strategist and copywriter for B2C software companies. Rob:   Wow. That is… Val:    It’s a long and winding path. Rob:   That is a heck of a career path, and, I mean, it’s almost like you had no choice but to become a writer, because you’ve got such a broad breadth of experience from starting a business, to working in a startup, to doing your own thing now. I want to go all the way back to that theater manager role where you started out and talk a little bit about, I’m assuming that having to manage all of the moving pieces of a stage production actually prepared you, in a real way, for all of the stuff that came after, as a project manager, as a leader, as somebody who has to get people in the right places at the right time and coordinate all of this stuff.