TCC Podcast #258: Making Email Marketing Simple with Liz Wilcox

Liz Wilcox will blow your email marketing mind on the 258th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast. Liz is a blogger turned email marketing expert who helps other bloggers become business owners. If you’ve been letting your list sit in the dust or you haven’t taken the plunge in creating an email list, this might be the episode to give you the push. Here’s how it all breaks down: Have you ever googled: How to make money from home? The overwhelm that comes with all the ways you could start a business and make money online. Why it’s a good idea to start your email list. (even with no audience) What you should do when you begin to grow your email list. Writing a book about poop? How it became the beginning of everything for Liz. The secrets behind a 100% conversion rate. Do you really need to go to the experts? Van life. Is it for you and can you start a business while living in the woods? How to think outside the box of what you see online. Going from idea to done and executed in one hour. How to get to a 47% email open rate. Steps to take to become a digital course creator. (do you need to give up client work?) When is it a good time to start pitching to podcasts? Creating an inclusive digital product based model and following through. How long email newsletters should really be taking you. Is storytelling a thing of the past? The difference between stories and updates on your life. Is Liz going to take over our newsletter? How to keep it fresh and exciting when writing to your list. Everything you don’t want to do when it comes to email marketing. Making your business your number 1 client and not apologizing for it. What every copywriter and business owner needs to be for themselves. How Will Smith will help you build your business. Need Will to help you build your business? Check out the episode below or read the transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Liz’s website    Full Transcript: Rob:  You know how when you meet some people, they just seem to be stuck. They're not able to move forward, they're just not able to do anything. If they're in business, maybe they're stuck following everybody else's formulas, doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. And then there's some people that you meet who seem full of energy. They're free. They're definitely not stuck. It's almost like anything is possible for them in business, in life. Well, today's guest for the Copywriter Club podcast, is the type of copywriter and entrepreneur who broke out of that box a long time ago. She's the type of creative who sees the worldwide web as the Wild Wild West, and as an opportunity to build and connect with companies, ideas and people. That's copywriter Liz Wilcox. Kira:  Before we jump into Liz's interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank. That's our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to think outside the box and build new offers and revenue streams in their businesses. Rob, I'm going to interview you. Why do you think the think tank helps copywriters and marketers experience real results? Why does it work? Rob:  I've thought about this a lot recently, and I think one of the things that's really different about the think tank is that we don't have a single formula that we're trying to get everybody to buy into or to follow. Some courses, some masterminds you're working with, an expert who's done it their way. And so they teach their way and they expect you to do everything the way that they did it. That's not our approach. We start out by asking each member about their goals, about what they want to achieve, about the challenges that they're facing, about the impact they want to have in the world, the authority they want to build. And based on those goals, we tailor the experience for each individual in the think tank. Everybody else in the think tank is doing something similar. They're working on their goals, but when you have everybody working together to achieve their goals in their business, you start to see what other people are doing. There's an effect that just happens where everybody grows together. And so it's different from a lot of other programs that are a little bit more rigid. I think that's one of the reasons why the think tank works. Kira:  Wow. That's a good answer. I feel like you practiced that. It was very smooth. Rob:  Not practiced at all. I'm the most unpracticed person ever on the podcast. Kira:  So smooth. If the Copywriter Think Tank sounds something that could help you in your business, you can visit copywriterthinktank.com to learn more. Rob:  Okay. Let's go to our interview with Liz and find out how she got her start as a copywriter. How did you become this expert in email, email strategist, copywriter, all of these things? Liz:  This is a really fun story. I think it's a lot different than what you typically hear on the show. Number one, I feel a lot of especially email copywriters, they start off as copywriters for other people who are selling products. I actually started off as a blogger. I was an RV travel blogger. I didn't even start off traditionally where it was, this is my passion. I just want to share the word, RVing is so awesome. No, I started off as a business. I knew I wanted to travel and I had no means of making money from the road. Of course, I Googled how to make money from home, saw all these people, make a million dollars in six months, just watch my webinar, that type of style. I realized that there were all these people making money from blogs. I saw, especially in the RV space, I saw a lot of bloggers and I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it too. I signed up for WordPress. I said, okay, here I'm going to go. From the get-go every, every online guru, so to speak was saying, my biggest regret was not taking my email list seriously. Before I had even hit publish on my blog, I made sure I had an email service provider set up. I didn't even have Facebook at the time, but I got back on Facebook, added all my old friends and I hit publish on my blog and I said, hey, actually now I live in this RV. I want to get it going. I heard you can make money on a blog, please join my email list and I'll figure it out as I go. I got 100 people on my email list in the first, I don't know, it was 30, maybe 60 days. I can be persuasive, hence why I'm a copywriter. Right? From there I just started, asking them, why do you follow me? Why do you follow me? People said, well, you're really funny and you can tell a good story. So about six months later, I wrote my first book. I published it. It was a book about poop. Rob:  Nice. Liz:  It made over $7,000 in the first 90 days, it got picked up by an international sponsor that gives me $7 for every new lead it generated for them. I realized wow, the money really is in the list, because I only had about 300 people on my email list from them. I just kept creating digital products, creating digital products. I ended up launching my very first online course. About three years into business, I had 141 people on the wait list. By the cart close day, I had made 141 sales. Flash forward a couple of months later, I actually went to Tarzan Kay and Sage Polaris, they had some, what was it called? Legendary or something. I started meeting all these copywriters. I had no idea what really a copywriter did. I'd been following some online, but I wasn't sure what they did or how they made money. And so, I'm meeting all these copywriters and I'm like, but what do you actually do? They say, sales emails, pages, et cetera, et cetera. I said, well I do all that for myself and here are the results I've had. And they were like, whoa, you should do that for a living. And so I knew, number one, I was apparently very good at writing and I was really good at writing emails, because I didn't run Facebook ads. I didn't do social media campaigns. All my success just came from email marketing. And so I actually left that conference. I put my RV blog up for sale and I went right into the copywriting business. Rob:  Nice. Okay. There's definitely a lot of questions that come out of this. First of all, RVing, tell us a little bit about, what were you driving? Where did you go? How did you make that work? This is a dream of mine. I would love to have the skoolie, the refurb skoolie, maybe a trailer and live the van life. Unfortunately my wife has zero interest in that. So I have to do this all vicariously by asking people about their experience. Tell us a little bit about that before we come back to email and copywriting. Liz:  Yeah, sure. I was married at the time, and number one, I hate to clean, and number two, I hate to spend money. We were moving, he was in the military at the time. The deal on our house fell through and he made a joke. We were moving to Alabama and he made a joke about, well, everybody in Alabama lives in a trailer, Liz, why don't we just buy an RV? We'd only been married a year and a half. He didn't really know me that well. And I said, okay, why not. And so six days later we bought an RV and we were living in it. That's when I thought, hey, this thing has wheels, kind of like Rob just said, why don't we move this thing? That sounds really fun. And so that's when I started my blog. But about a year later into the blog, I actually started traveling. We traveled full-time for about three years. First, we had a big giant fifth wheel was about 400 square feet. And then when we started traveling, we realized that was way too big. We downsized into a 32 foot Jayco Greyhawk. You can Google it. It's the picturesque RV. It's got the cab over it. We have a daughter, she slept up over the cab and she called it her little princess castle. It was really fun.