9 Lessons from The Inbox Online Email Marketing Conference

This week we're sharing 9 amazing lessons we've learnt from two years of running Inbox - our awesome online email marketing conference. It's a phenomenal event, and we promise this year it's going to be absolutely next level!

To prove that it's true, we've pulled out 9 tips we learnt from some of our amazing speakers at past events of this FREE online email marketing conference. They're so good you're going to want to take notes!

Ready to have your mind blown? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:12) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 (for FREE!)

(5:40) Lesson 1: Use emails to 're-sell' your membership.

(8:31) Lesson 2: Turn your free content into your core product.

(12:51) Lesson 3: Tweak and test your lead magnet landing pages.

(16:35) Lesson 4: Use your emails to educate, entertain, and encourage.

(18:48) Lesson 5: Talk about your lead magnet from different angles.

(23:38) Lesson 6: Test the deliverability of your emails with all the major email platforms.

(26:21) Lesson 7: Identify the people who want your highest offer first.

(28:02) Lesson 8: Grow your list by getting in front of other people's audiences.

(29:23) Lesson 9: Sell the product. Don't explain the product.

(31:22) Subject line of the week.

Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!

Our Inbox email marketing conference is on the 28th and 29th of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously, tickets for registration were up to $500, but this year we’re going to grow this conference massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing conference you can imagine. It's packed with 12 amazing speakers and presentations and is fully online and fully live. We'd love for you to come and join us! 

If you want to learn what's going to impact your ability to make more sales with email, this is the place to be. Because it's not just about the words you write, who you send them to, or when you send your emails. It's about a lot more than that! And these two days are going to have a solid impact on your ability to make sales with email marketing. If you're already salivating and want to find out all the details, see the full line-up, and register at zero cost, here's the link.

1. Use emails to 'resell' your membership – Neil Stafford

Neil Stafford is a genius when it comes to memberships, and in his presentation at one of our previous online email marketing conferences, he talked about how to use emails to keep selling your membership and make sure you build belief so your members become lifetime members.

Because your membership is something you need to 'resell' to people. You don’t just sell it once and then sit back and receive recurring revenue forever. Instead, you have to constantly and perpetually 'resell' it. And emails are a solid way to do that.

Of course, you need to get that balance right. You don't want to overwhelm people with all the emails you're already sending them to let them know where all the content is. For example, we have a number of emails that tell our members inside The League how they should go on the Success Track. But people still tell us they don’t know where to go because nobody gets 100% readership of their emails, even when people are paying to be a member. Because everyone’s busy!

But on top of the emails where you explain where everything is, you also need to send emails that build the beliefs that your members need, in order to stay with you in the long run. Arguably, these types of emails are more important than any instructions or directions you could ever give. Because the beliefs are what will help people stick around. If they don’t believe what you do is something they should be studying for a number of months or even years of their life, people are going to jump in, grab what they need, and go. And that’s not what you want. So email is the most direct thing you can do to make sales and to positively impact the retention of your membership.

2. Turn your free content into your core product – Matt and Joe

Our friends Matt and Joe exposed their entire business model to us, which was incredible and unique. Their core content (their podcast - The Hustle and Flowchart) isn’t just their free content - it's their entire business. It's also their product and membership.

So they shared the idea that you don't have to produce free content and then have additional products on top. Your products don't need to be separate from your content. So you could monetise your podcast by having a sponsor, for example. Or what Matt and Joe do, is create full, in-depth notes of their podcast episodes. And that’s their monthly recurring revenue model - people can subscribe and get their notes as well as additional training.

The benefit of doing this is that it frees you up to create amazing content because that is also the product you sell. So you make it the best content it can be. Whatever your content is, make it phenomenal and give it the best chance to work and rise to the surface. In other words, make your content so good that it could be your monthly membership.

3. Tweak and test your lead magnet landing pages - Monica Snyder

In one of our previous online email marketing conferences, our friend Monica Snyder taught us to tweak and test small elements of your landing page because that can make all the difference between making or losing money on ads. Monica is a genius when it comes to getting paid to build your list, and the way to do that is to have a paid lead magnet that acts as your low-priced offer. You then run ads to a sales page where people can buy your lead magnet, and that means they're immediately in your funnel. They're not joining your list for free and then being sold later - they're a customer the minute they come onto your list.

But because you're running ads to this page, this now becomes a careful balancing act. You need to have enough conversions to cover the cost of your ads. And the best way to guarantee you do that is by making sure your landing page works for you. That means you need to get some key core elements right and then change and split test different components to see what works best. 

So to make your lead magnet profitable, focus on the things you can control. You can't control how Facebook runs ads or what other marketers in your industry are doing, but you can control the elements on your landing page to see what works best for you. 

4. Use your emails to entertain, educate, and encourage – Jacob 

Our friend Jacob is very much on the same wavelength as us when it comes to sending emails that entertain, educate, and encourage. We talk a lot about education and entertainment, but the word encouragement is really important as well. Because it captures the idea that you can inspire people and make them feel good with the content you share. And you can also give them permission to go ahead with whatever it is you help them with.

The word encouragement was a key takeaway for us because it’s an all-encompassing concept. You don’t just want people to learn lots of things. Because sometimes people leave paid memberships or coaching groups because they’re learning too much and don’t have the time to implement it all. And if all people are doing with you is learning, it can get overwhelming really quickly. 

But if you can give them encouragement and use your emails to support people to take what they learnt from you and implement it, suddenly what you send becomes more valuable to them. Because everyone loves to open an email that makes them feel better by the end of it! So how can you encourage your audience to get out of their rut and take some action to get the results they want? And how do you keep educating them in a way that’s also entertaining?

5. Talk about your lead magnet from different angles – Teresa Heath-Wareing

Another important lesson we learnt from our friend Teresa Heath-Wareing is that you should talk about your lead magnet from different angles - not just in the same exact way all the time. For example, you could talk about the benefits of it, or the thing it’s going to save people from.

You want to think about 20-30 different angles and then rotate them whenever you talk about your lead magnet because that will ensure it appeals to different people at different times. Or even to the same person at different times. This gives you the freedom and ability to post more regularly on social media or write more in your emails about the same lead magnet. And that's because by using different angles you’re not constantly talking about the same thing.

It also means that you don't have to come up with new lead magnets all the time. In fact, rather than spending extra time trying to create a new lead magnet, sit down with a piece of paper and think of ways you can talk about the lead magnet you already have. It's quicker! And it allows you to then use  different hooks for social media content, which you can then share in various ways (Stories, reels, videos, posts on your grid, etc.)

6. Test the deliverability of your emails with all the major email platforms – Ed Forteau

Our friend Ed talked to us about testing the deliverability of your emails. Do your emails get to people's inboxes or are they just ending in spam? In order to find out, Ed told us to go and test our emails on all the different platforms. And you do this by creating different email accounts with each of the major providers, like Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, etc.

You can create these test addresses for free and then subscribe to your list from each account. This gives you a good view of how your emails are performing. And you can even set up multiple accounts for each platform to see what happens when you never open the emails, when you open them but never click, when you open the email and reply and click, etc. Depending on your level of engagement and your sender's reputation, you can find out how exactly your emails are being delivered to all the main platforms. 

7. Identify the people who want your highest offer first – Steve Rosenbaum

A big revelation from our friend Steve Rosenbaum was that some of the people who join your email list want the most help you can possibly give them. They want to pay the highest price for your most advanced programme.

While some people join your email list and start escalating through the value ladder from the bottom to the top, others want your highest offer straight away. And if you offer them products that are below the level of support they want and need right now, they’ll disengage. They’ll never buy from you – they’ll just leave. 

Plus, your highest-price offer is usually also your highest-profit offer. So if you offer that to the right people straight away, you get to make sales early in the process. The key is to get people to raise their hands early in the email relationship with you so they can let you know they want the highest price, highest-involvement, and highest-impact offer.

This is what we've started doing recently when offering our agency service, where we write people’s emails for them. So now we have a process in place to find people who are most interested in that, and we filter them out and put them through a separate sales process.

8. Grow your list by getting in front of other people’s audiences – Melanie Benson

A tip we learnt from our friend Melanie Benson was to build your email list and authority by putting yourself in front of other people’s audiences. You want to effectively 'ethically hijack' that audience to get in front of it.

And one of the ways to do it is by getting on the platform they use. So if you've never used Clubhouse, for example, but know a potential business you could collaborate with who has an audience there, you could leverage that audience. It's about finding people, a platform, a place, or a community where people hang out online and try to get in front of them. 

9. Sell the product. Don't explain the product - Todd Brown

And last but not least, a tip we learnt from Todd Brown - the master of the offer - in a previous event of Inbox (our awesome online email marketing conference) is to sell the product - not to explain the product. And we'll leave this there because we could make a whole episode just about this!

Come and join us at Inbox - it's THE online email marketing conference of 2022!

So if this sounds as amazing as we think, remember that this year’s Inbox event is just around the corner. It’s absolutely FREE for you to register and to attend completely live. It's THE online email marketing conference of 2022, and it's on Zoom, so there’s no tech, financial, travel, or time barrier. There's nothing stopping you from growing your business, getting more sales, and serving more people by doing awesome email marketing. You get your free ticket by signing up here. So make sure you register now and join us over the two days. It’s going to be awesome!

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is the back arrow emoji (the one pointing to the left) with the words “doing it backwards.” The story was about the fact that we often do stuff in reverse or the opposite way round to how most people do things. And that's because we see that others aren’t getting the results they want, so it makes very little sense to copy them. So what we tend to do instead is look at stuff that is conventional marketing wisdom and do it backwards.

And the subject line worked because it sort of implied that you could be doing something wrong. Did it work? Did it blow up? In this case, this was about something being backwards but correct, so quite interesting!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Why You Should Attend Inbox 2022. 

The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.

What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks.

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

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