What do stage entertainment and email marketing have in common? As you may know, we are both from an entertainment background. Rob is a comedy hypnotist and Kennedy is a psychological mind reader (or mentalist). That means we spend a big chunk of our lives on stages using psychology to make people do certain things, to perform and entertain an audience, and make it funny, interesting, and engaging in the process. So today we're sharing 12 email marketing strategy examples from our on-stage careers that we use in our psychology-driven email marketing. Ready to find out how you can apply these 'tricks' to your email marketing? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (00:09) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:28) Train your audience and create authority.(9:54) Grab and keep people's attention.(12:27) Be yourself and surprise your audience.(16:49) Tell stories and create a setup & payoff situation.(21:03) Build beliefs.(21:38) Adjust and adapt the way you address people.(24:51) Find the most efficient way to do things.(27:08) Pay attention to language patterns.(28:58) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. 1. Train your audienceThe first strategy we'd like to share is training your audience. What do we mean by this? Well, this may sound strange, but when people go to an event for the first time, they don’t know how to behave. Can they interact with the host? Should they stand up or sit down? People have questions. So the first thing we do when we get on stage is to explain the culture and the rules of engagement. In other words, we train our audience.We do this right at the start of our opening bid, which is highly interactive and more akin to stand-up comedy. It’s where we let people know how the show is going to go. We communicate our style and form of entertainment, which is individual to each performer. And we do the same in our email marketing, which is why we talk about how important it is to tell your audience how often you're going to email them and what they can expect from you, for example. Tell them if they can reply - and of course, we encourage that.In our Getting to Know You sequence (i.e. our welcome sequence) we ask a question that gets people to reply. And we also include a link (or several) in every email we send. Because this teaches our audience that every time they click on a link in one of our emails, they get rewarded with something valuable.  Whatever you do (or don’t do) in your email trains your audience into specific behaviours - whether you're doing this consciously or not. Are these behaviours serving you (and your audience) in a positive way? Because if they're not, you may be stopping people from getting value from what you do. So become aware of what you’re training your audience to do.2. Create authorityAnother important email marketing strategy example we want to share is creating authority. As entertainers, sometimes we go on stage to perform in front of a group of people who don’t know who we are or whether we’re any good. People have to believe that we can deliver the show that’s been promised - that we can do what we said and that it's going to work. And in order to achieve that, we need to create authority. Of course, there's some natural authority that comes with the framing of the show. People spent money to buy a ticket and come to the show so they already assume (to a degree) that it’s going to work.Now if you translate that into the email marketing world, the fact that someone set up a business with a website where you can subscribe to their email list already creates some sense of authority. But above and beyond that, you want to show people what you’ve done before and what you could do for them. On stage, we do this with footage and clips from previous shows that prove that we can do what we say we do. But remember it’s important to create authority by giving proof or evidence that working with you is going to be worth their time.3. Grab people's attention The next thing you want to do is ensure you have the attention of your audience. This is true on stage but also in your email marketing. If you don't have people's attention at the beginning of the show or at the start of your relationship with your subscribers, they’re going to talk all the way through (at a show) or not pay attention. And you don't want that - you want their attention.So how do you do it? First of all, you show up with something that’s attention-grabbing. In the world of email marketing, this is done by giving people a promise when they first opt-in and making sure you deliver on that promise. And the first thing you have to always deliver on is your name - it needs to be the same whose list people subscribed to. We see that mistake a lot with business owners using a different name in their emails compared to what they have on their website.4. Generate engagement and keep people's attentionAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples we want to share is to grab and keep attention through subject lines, for example. They set an expectation, they grab someone's attention right from the start, and they help you keep it. When it comes to our shows, for example, we keep people’s attention by making sure our events are fast-paced and interesting. If we used a boring, corporate voice with no personality, people’s attention would immediately drop.So keep it pacey, get to the point, stop waffling, and don’t give people too many things to think about at once. That’s why we suggest  you don’t put too many points or offers in one email - one email is one offer, just like on stage you give one instruction at the time. Otherwise, it gets confusing and people can’t keep up or remember, so they don’t do anything. It's about being clear in your instructions to keep people engaged.5. Be yourselfThis is a contentious subject in the world of entertainment these days, but you're the one on stage, and it's your show. So within the confines of what’s acceptable, tell the jokes you want to tell. And if people don’t like them, that’s fine. They don’t have to buy tickets and come and watch you. It's okay to polarise people. In fact, if you're not making an attempt to make your stuff disliked by some people, you probably don’t have a tight enough angle - and you definitely want one. Even within the culture of cancelled entertainment, we still want to be ourselves and do a show that’s enjoyable for us. We want to be able to tell the jokes that we want to tell and write the emails that we want to send. Because if you compromise on that, you’ll end up with a show (or a business) that you don’t actually like! We say this all the time – we’d rather not have our business, podcast, or membership The League  if it meant we’d have to be boring and corporate. If we couldn't be ourselves and had to behave differently, we wouldn’t want to do it. This is who we are, and we love to create content that we would like to consume, which is what we suggest you do too. 6. Surprise your audienceIf you’re always doing the same thing and what you say, do, or write, is very formulaic, then you won’t keep people engaged. And also, you won’t be able to create an emotional response. For example, during his show, Kennedy might ask someone to take out their phone, find a photo, and look at it. And then Kennedy will start describing that photo. By the end of that segment, people will be amazed, but the reality is that the audience can tell where that is going. They know what he's going to do when he first asks someone to pick a photo. There’s no element of surprise there because the ending is implied in the setup. But if at the end of the show Kennedy tells that person what photo they almost picked, then there’s a surprise!And surprises are great at energising people. They set off different neurotransmitters in your brain that get you re-engaged or hyper-engaged. So think about sending pieces of content that are surprising and not what people expect. That’s why we often use elements of surprise and funny quirky analogies when writing our emails. How can you surprise your audience? Could you offer something for free, for example? 7. Tell storiesAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples taken from our shows is to tell stories. Rob, for example, will paint a picture and create a story to give people suggestions about what he's asking them to do. He talks them through the narrative of a story so they can paint that picture in their brain. And he does it that way because stories allow people to make connections that are emotional, real, and interesting.For example, you could build stories around how your product or service was created, how it can be used, or how it should never be used (that would be interesting!). Or maybe you could create a story around why your business is more credible than others.As entertainers, we use stories to get people to emotionally buy into what we’re about to demonstrate on stage. So if you want to do the same, show them something or let them see something in your business.8. Create a setup & payoff situationAnother strategy we use in our entertainment careers is to set something up and then make sure there’s always a payoff. So if Kennedy tells his audience to think of a card from a deck, for example, at some point he has to tell the person what card they picked. If he forgets or can’t figure out what the card is, there’s no payoff to that segment. And people need the payoff! If a magician makes something disappear, they also have to make it re-appear. Otherwise, it’s an incomplete loop in people’s minds!In the world of email marketing, that means that if you say something, you have to deliver on that. If you tell people you have a free workshop, it has to happen. And it has to be free! If not, people don't get their payoff. And when people don't get that, they stop buying into the setup. You need that buy-in because it's what gets people excited. So make your payoff clear and then make sure it always happens - without exceptions.9. Build beliefsWe talked about this before, but building beliefs is essential - both on stage and with your email marketing. This is definitely one of the email marketing strategy examples we stand by because, on stage, people need to believe that we can do what we said we’d do and that it’s going to be enjoyable. We do that by demonstrating, proving, and showing people what things we’ve done in the past. But we also build beliefs by sharing stories and dropping hints. So make sure you do the same in your email marketing. 10. Adapt and adjust the way you treat peopleDuring our shows, we 'read' people - we have to figure them out. And then we adjust our behaviours accordingly. That means we treat people in different ways depending on how they act. For example, Rob will need to always adjust the language pattern he uses to hypnotise someone based on signals he reads from a person. So he'll observe how they sit, how they engage with him, where they're looking, etc. And Kennedy will ask someone from the audience coming up on stage all sorts of questions. Why? To see how they behave on stage. Then based on their reactions, he'll use different techniques to either figure out or influence what they're thinking. How does this relate to your email marketing? In your email marketing, you should collect lots of data points about your subscribers, including how they came into your world. Because that gives you information about them and what they're interested in. Pay attention to what they engage with or what they click on. Trust what people do - not what people say. And then adjust your behaviours accordingly. If you have a subscriber who always watches videos, for example, send them an offer via video. Or if they always engage with a certain topic, send them more content that seems important to them. Read people, figure out data points, and then adjust your behaviours based on theirs. 11. Find the most efficient ways to do thingsAnother one of our email marketing strategy examples is to find the most efficient ways to do things. So if Rob is hypnotising someone, the process needs to be interesting and engaging. Otherwise, his audience is going to switch off and stop paying attention. The same happens with Kennedy in his shows. If he’s not using the most efficient route to get to an answer and is taking too long, then people are going to get bored. So we’re always looking for interesting shortcuts and tricks to speed up our processes and for efficient ways to get in front of an existing audience to get extra attention. 12. Pay attention to language patternsAnd finally, the last of our email marketing strategy examples from our on-stage career is to pay attention to language patterns. Why is this important? Because it helps you influence people. We have a full programme called Remote Control Persuasion, which is all about that. But the idea is that whenever you're communicating (whether it's through typing or speaking the words), it’s about knowing that some words are going to be more impactful and influence others while other words will do the opposite. So start looking at your language. Are you helping people with what you’re saying? Are you moving your audience towards where you want them? Or are you saying negative things that make them go round in circles? Everything you do and say in your emails (including the language you use) has an influence. Because we emotionally buy into the words that people use. So you want to make sure you’re using language that nudges people in the right direction. And changing little words every now and then makes a difference.Did you enjoy the 12 email marketing strategy examples we shared with you today? Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “was $499 (now FREE)”. This is something you can use if you have a discount or if you're introducing a before and after price or offer. Or you could say something along the lines of “today it’s $29. Tomorrow, it's $499”. This tells the whole story in the subject line, but people still need to open the email and click on the links to grab the offer.So it's something you can use on the last day when an offer is about to close, for example. This subject line was from the opening email of one of our campaigns, but we also used it as the closing one. It works well for demonstrating and telling the whole story in a short subject line and encouraging people to act now.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesMaking Yourself Choosable with Belinda Weaver.The Little-Known Right Order to Make Your Offers (For Maximum Sales).9 Psychological Things That We Use In All Of Our Campaigns.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 12 email marketing strategy examples that we use on stage) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review...

How do you make sure you get better results, more engagement, and more sales using email marketing campaigns? You need to understand the psychology of marketing.We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and today we're going to share the 9 psychological strategies that we successfully use in all our email marketing campaigns.Ready to discover all our best secrets?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Use Summits To Get Visible (Even If You’re An Introvert) And Build Your Email List, With Fifi Mason.Useful Strategies To Stop Procrastinating RIGHT NOW To Get Your Email Marketing Done!How To Build The Most Impactful Email Marketing Strategy Plan To Make More Sales In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a 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 the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content 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 Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Fifi?Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people - those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the biggest mistakes you're making with your email automation strategy) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Do you have a flagship product - a core product or service that you focus on with your marketing and your messaging? Today we're sharing how you decide in what order to promote your products so you can simplify your business and your marketing and maximise your sales per subscriber. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's a really simple trick, and you're just about to learn all there is about it! Ready? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:43) All roads lead to Rome!(7:21) Choosing your Rome.(9:34) Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audience.(10:40) Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can help.(11:46) Bring more eyeballs to your core product.(13:09) Simplify your business and maximise your profits.(14:56) How to structure your email marketing.(16:29) Talk about your offers in different ways.(18:04) How to pick your flagship product.(21:20) Subject line of the week.All roads lead to Rome! In a casual, throwaway comment we shared during our Level Up mastermind in London, we said that all businesses need to have a core product and all roads must lead to it. It's like the old well-known expression that all roads lead to Rome! This was hands down the biggest takeaway from our participants, and it's an idea that we often take for granted but want to shed some light on because it might help you solve some of the problems you're currently experiencing in your business. When using our email campaigns, a lot of people ask us in what order they should sell their products and to whom. If you sell a couple of different products in your business and have a few lead magnets as well, you have to juggle different offers. So how do you know how they all fit together?The great news is that there's an easy answer to this. You need to pick the one thing that you ultimately want everybody in your world to end up in. For us, it’s our membership, The League. Interestingly, what you choose as 'your Rome' doesn’t have to be your highest-priced product. For example, our email writing agency or our mastermind Level Up cost more than The League. But those are what we call our profit maximisers or upsell offers. They are products we make available for the people who want further help from us (more about that later). So to help you figure out what your Rome is, finish the sentence, “If I could wave a magic wand and get everyone single one of my perfect customers to buy one thing from me, it would be ............”.Choosing your RomeOur Rome is our membership because with our more expensive products we have a capacity issue. In our mastermind, we only have two groups of 15 people, for example. So we don’t want every single one of our ideal customers to end up there – that’s just not possible! But with our membership, we can have as many members as we want because it’s a scalable offer. In other words, having more people inside The League won’t diminish our ability to deliver. That's why our membership is our Rome, and everything leads to that. Bringing people closer to our Rome (our flagship product) is our ultimate goal.So that's what you want to do too – figure out what your Rome is and then lead people to it. Because if your marketing isn’t doing that, it’s probably confusing people and pushing them away. Once you have one focal point in your business, your customers will see that too. But if you have loads of different offers, it’s hard for people to figure out what’s right for them. They can get confused.It's okay to have different products that will bring in people at different points and help them with various parts of their journey. But ultimately you want one core offer - something you’re driving everyone to. That will be your focal point - your North Star. So every time you’re creating a new piece of content, a new offer, or setting up an email campaign, you want to first figure out how that activity helps you to get more of your ideal clients closer to buying your core offer.Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audienceOnce you've picked your Rome, look at everything else you're doing to see if your other activities or offers act as a ramp towards your Rome. Do they move people towards your core offer? Everything you do in your business and your marketing needs to act as a precursor or prequel to the one thing you want to sell. In order to achieve that, you want to create things that appeal to different segments of your audience. For example, in our business, we might create a piece of content that only appeals to course creators. And then we'll have something separate for membership site owners or coaches. These are all micro products, and they can be free or paid for, but the key is that they lead into the core product. So create on-ramp products or offers that appeal to different segments and lead to your Rome.Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can helpOn-ramp offers can also be useful to help you reduce the risk for potential new customers who are on the fence about buying your flagship product. In other words, you can use on-ramp products to make your Rome either lower price or lower commitment. Can you think of ways to reduce the level of perceived commitment?Another thing you can do is to deliver some kind of result to prove that you can help people. We currently live in a world with the highest levels of skepticism and lowest levels of trust ever in the history of the human race. People might not want to commit to you just yet. So it's key for you to be able to deliver some small result – something that proves that you're good and that your product or service works. Can your on-ramp offers do that?Bring more eyeballs to your core productAnd finally, on-ramp offers can be tied to some kind of traffic method that brings more eyeballs to your flagship product. For example, we only have affiliate programmes (where we pay people a commission for selling our products) for our on-ramp offers. We don’t have an affiliate programme for our Rome – The League. And that’s because we know that by running affiliate programmes for our on-ramp offers we get more people to run promotions for us and therefore more ideal customers to see our Rome.For example, in our online email marketing conference - Inbox - we had presentations about lots of different topics. And those will appeal to different segments of our audience. The business model for our event reduces risk because Inbox is free to attend. You pay nothing upfront and only spend money if you want to buy the recordings. So we deliver results for people. Because people take the teachings, apply them to their business, and make money. Plus, all our speakers promote the event to their lists and bring more subscribers to our world from their audiences.Simplify your business and maximise your profitsSo, to summarise, when looking at any other offers you run in your business, check whether they are on-ramp products that move people closer to your flagship product. If not, are they profit maximisers, like our writing agency or our mastermind? If you have anything else that doesn't fall into these categories, are those things just a distraction? Because something that doesn't help people come into your ecosystem by getting closer to your Rome or isn't a profit maximiser isn't needed. So get rid of it and simplify your business - not just for you but for your subscribers too.When someone new comes into your world, the undertone of everything you say is that ultimately they should end up in your Rome. And if people want to dip their toe in the water with you first and find out if you’re any good and can get results for people, you'll have other lower-commitment offers that are either free or paid for. Look at what we do – yes, we talk about our membership The League a lot, but every now and then we also tell people about other things we’re doing. We give people lots of different opportunities to try some of our products.How to structure your email marketingOnce you've set things up in your business this way, you can also figure out how to order your campaigns in your email marketing engine and create your ideal subscriber journey.When someone new comes into your world, you want to put them through the Getting to Know You sequence (that's what we call our welcome sequence). And then after that, you have a string of campaigns designed to sell your core product and tell people why it’s good, why they should buy it, and why they should buy it now. Some people will buy, but those who don't will receive new campaigns (coupled with your daily emails) where you offer them your lower-commitment products.So if join our list as a new email subscriber you go through a series of campaigns about The League, which we believe is the best thing you can do for your email marketing. But if you get to the end of our engine, and you're still not ready to join, then we can help you with other products (i.e. our on-ramp offers). For example, we can sell you our List Building course or our Bottomless Email Strategy (which is included inside our membership, by the way). And a lot of people who start off with these products do end up in The League because we’ve proven to them that we can help. Talk about your offers in different waysSo, picking your flagship product and deciding that everything in your marketing leads to that helps you simplify your email marketing and your business. You can wrap multiple offers and campaigns around your flagship product and then talk about it in different ways. You can highlight different aspects of your product that will appeal to different people. What you don’t want to do is to talk about different products every month. Because that’s a sure way to confuse your list and make no sales! A confused mind cannot make decisions, and if you continuously promote different products, your audience won't be able to tell the difference. They won't know what's available or what they should buy to solve the problem they have. But when you have one Rome, there’s no confusion. So stick with your one thing and talk about it from different angles to make sure you continue to build the beliefs, the understanding, and the desire for your core product.How to pick your flagship productSo what types of products would make for a good Rome? You have many options here, but here are the core ones. High-ticket coaching programme. Think 12 weeks, or 6-12 months, for example. Mastermind. Membership. This is what we chose to do because we wanted a subscription we could scale. But even if you sell physical products, you could have a business model that encourages people to buy from you every month.Flagship course or programme.A live event you do once a year.Once you've decided what your Rome is, you can add other offers for the people who want to get even closer to you (i.e. the profit maximisers). Remember, you’re not trying to sell those to everyone – they are offers for the people who want more help from you. We created our mastermind at the back of people who wanted to spend more time with us to get some help with more than just email marketing.So if you want to find out more about our world, go and check out our Rome – The League. And as for our mastermind, Level Up, we don't have any availability right now (August 2022). But we’ll be opening up some slots in the future. So if you want to register your interest and go on the waiting list, the link is here.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “what’s your face doing?” followed by the confused face emoji. This works because it's a curiosity-driven subject line - people can't tell what it's going to be about. Will it be an insult? It’s a weird question to ask and totally driven by curiosity. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy We Started an Email Marketing Agency. How To Do Your Email Marketing While You’re On Holiday.Lessons Learned from Running Our 2-Day INBOX Event.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to pick a flagship product and order offers in your business to maximise sales) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Are you thinking of running your own online summit? Are you wondering about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing?Today we're sharing the lessons we've learned from running our own two-day online event - Inbox. This is the third year we hosted our signature email marketing conference, which is a totally free online event with multiple speakers and a ton of value. Want to know all about it so you can find out exactly what email campaigns you can run to make your next online event a super profitable one? Then let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:03) Why the online online virtual summit business model works.(6:49) Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom.(8:00) Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event.(9:53) Find sponsors for your event. (10:56) Promote your event with email marketing. (12:39) The registration sequence and the engagement sequence. (16:06) The sequence you run during the event and the post-event sequence.(20:07) How to handle the price hikes.(25:51) Check out our Virtual Summit email campaign workshop.(29:06) Subject line of the week.Why the online virtual summit business model worksOur Inbox email marketing conference is now online, which means people can attend from all over the world. But when we first ran the event in 2020 it wasn't meant to be free or online. We'd planned an in-person conference in Newcastle for $500 per ticket. But then the pandemic hit, and we had to move the event online. We've basically changed the business model so that instead of having people pay for a ticket, they pay for the recordings of all the sessions (we call this All Access Pass). Plus, because all the speakers also promote the event to their audiences (and earn a percentage of the sales), an online event like this is a great list-building exercise. We absolutely fell in love with this business model, and to this date, our conference Inbox creates the biggest influx of brand new subscribers to our list each year. Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom One of the things we learned is that although there are different platforms designed to host virtual events (and those are absolutely brilliant) sometimes tech barriers stop people from attending. So we decided to host our event on Zoom, and we have no intention of ever changing that. Because running a virtual summit is a list-building exercise, you want lots of attendees! So it's probably not the right time to try out fancy platforms that people aren't familiar with because there can be a lot of resistance to those. Whereas with Zoom, pretty much everyone knows how to use it, so if you remove the tech resistance you'll have more people registering and attending the event. Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event Another thing we learned is that not all businesses treat email marketing as a priority in their business. So while we know in advance what we're going to promote and when, a lot of businesses might not. During the first year of running Inbox, we asked all speakers to promote the event to their list, but we didn't specify any timelines for them. And that meant that we got very little (if any) promotion at all from some of the speakers. So what we do now is to ask the speakers to specify in advance what dates they're going to promote the event. We ask them to create a schedule, put it in their calendars, and commit to it. So if you're organising an online event, don’t be afraid of letting your speakers know that it works as a collective. If all the speakers promote the conference to their list, then you’re getting in front of all of their audiences. But if they don't, then you don't get as much exposure - you all have to do the promotion. Find sponsors for your eventAnother tip we can give you is to try and find companies that are happy to pay to get in front of your audience (because they're their ideal clients too) and offer them a sponsorship package. This means you'll have other businesses advertise at your event and pay a fee to be able to do so.The sponsorship fee could be any amount and might depend on the scale of your event, but it gives those sponsors a good potential for return. And for you, having sponsors means additional revenue. We suggest you put different sponsorship packages together and let your sponsors know what they get for paying different amounts. That way, you allow businesses at different levels to put their message in front of your audience. Promote your event with email marketing Another tip we have for you if you're running your own virtual summit is to use a few short email campaigns to promote it. Inside our membership The League we have different campaigns that are perfect if you're hosting a big, expensive, in-person event. But for a free online event, we use and recommend four email sequences.A summit is a list-building event, but it's also a money-making opportunity. So you're leaving money on the table if you don't try to at least make half the sales yourself. Because of course, you can rely on speakers promoting the event, but you’ve got a list too! And in fact, you have the most engaged and responsive list of people who are interested in your brand and what you sell.So don’t make the mistake of abandoning your list. You want your event to turn into a cash-generation activity too, and the following four email campaigns are going to help you maximise your sales.1. The registration sequenceThe first email campaign we run is a registration sequence. This goes out to your audience to get them to come and register for the free event. Ours is made up of 15 emails going out over 14 days (with two emails on the last day) and drives people to go and check out the sales page.And speaking of the sales page, let's remember that even though the event is free, you want to sell it! So imagine you’re putting together an event that’s thousands of dollars per ticket. Make a page that will sell that and then make it free - don't skimp out on the sales page just because it’s a free event.You want people who register to feel that this event is so good that they’re taking advantage of you by getting it for free. So when they find out that the session recordings are available to sell, they want to go and grab them!2. The engagement sequenceThe second sequence we use is a “show up” sequence to drive engagement. It's an important one because when people turn up at the event, watch the content and realise it's mind-blowing, and they can't take notes fast enough, or they can’t attend all the sessions because they have other commitments during the day, this sequence will drive people to go and buy your recordings.For this, we use a sequence of 5 emails over the course of 10 days leading up to the event. Remember that your emails shouldn't be boring - you need to include valuable content and position the event in such a way that will make people want to attend. Effectively, you want to re-sell people on the event even though it's free because you want them to show up. And you want to have an impact on people even if they decide not to buy the recordings.So even if someone decides to never buy our All Access Pass, we still want them to see how good the event is. Because later on, when they’re ready to think about email marketing, they’re going to think of us as the industry leaders for hosting such a great event. And by drumming up engagement, you're helping your speakers too. 3. The sequence you run during the event The third sequence is the one we run during the event. While Inbox is running, each morning we send out an email that explains what's happening in the morning sessions. And then we do the same in the afternoon. Because we run a two-day event, that's a short sequence of four emails.  In the first year of running Inbox, we would send out an email every hour. But we soon learned that our subscribers didn't like that - way too many emails in a day! So we don't suggest you do that. 4. The post-event sequenceThe fourth email sequence is a post-event sequence. In ours, we send a feedback survey to help us improve the event, and that’s how we learn about what people like. As the founders of Response Suite, we are big fans of surveys and use them a lot in our business. Something key that we do in our online conference is to set different prices for the recordings, and typically the price for our All Access Pass goes up by five times 2-3 days after the event. So we use our post-event email sequence to remind people of the price hike and compel them to buy now.As you've probably figured out by now, three-quarters of the sequences we send out have the primary goal of pushing engagement and selling the recordings. So it’s not just about building your list from the event - remember you want to make it profitable too!After registration, we have a window where people can get the recordings for a ridiculously cheap price. And we sell a few All Access Passes at that price, but we sell as many (if not more dollars’ worth) at the higher price point. And that’s because not everyone trusts the value of the event to buy immediately or beforehand. But also, not everyone is necessarily looking at a decent return on their money – they'd rather have a decent return on their time. So they’re happy to spend more money once they’ve seen some of the event or have worked out that they want to go back and watch the sessions later on.So don’t leave money on the table – put these sequences in place and remind people that the recordings are available. How to handle the price hikesWe mentioned earlier that we have a window after registration when the All Access Pass is super cheap. We call this the 20-minute fast-action discounted price, and that’s available to someone immediately after they register. That price will automatically expire 20 minutes after registration. To do this, we use a tool called Countdown Hero, which is part of our Automate Hero tool - something we include for free in our membership, The League.For the 20-minute fast-action discount, we also ask some of the speakers to add some bonuses - something that gives them more eyeballs on their content. So this increases and grows the value of the All Access Pass. But also, if the speakers recommend the event to their list, people are more likely to buy the recordings at a super discounted price. The speakers get a percentage of those sales via their affiliate link, so you increase your conversions while the speaker increases their commissions. It's a win from both angles!After the 20 minutes have expired, the Early Bird price kicks in, and that’s available until the event starts. After that, you sell at the Regular price, which is obviously higher than the Early Bird. So in your pre-event emails, make sure you remind people about the price hike to give them a chance to buy at the Early Bird price. And during the event, keep reminding people they can buy at the Regular price before the price goes up afterwards.  Using conditional contentOf course, for people who have already bought the All Access Pass, we suggest you use conditional content. This is a feature that all email platforms will have which allows you to segment those subscribers who have already bought the All Access Pass. And instead of telling them about the price hikes, you simply re-sell them on the valuable content they already have access to.Check out our Virtual Summit Email Campaign WorkshopUsing these automated email campaigns to promote your virtual summit or online event is great because once you've set them up, you can run your event regularly. You only need to change the dates or any other details. That's what we do. And just like that, you're ready to roll out again. For us, getting ready for Inbox 2022 took about 10% less time than it took us the previous year because all our campaigns were already in place.But if you want to do this quickly and efficiently the first time you run your own online event, we have something for you. You can use the exact emails we used over the last few years of running Inbox because we are teaching a Virtual Summit Email Campaign Workshop on Wednesday, the 17th of August 2022.We teach all the campaigns we went through here today and unpick the psychology of why every word in those emails helps you get more people to register so you can grow your list and get them to buy the recordings so you can make the event profitable. Not only do you get all the teaching, but we also give you a Google document with every email for you to copy and paste, and send out when you run your online event. You also get a free account to our tool Countdown Hero, so you can create automatically expiring countdowns.So go and check out this link to join The League and attend the Virtual Summit Campaign Workshop. And once you signed up, you’ll also get the recording for that session if you can’t attend live.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “what’s your face doing?” followed by the confused face emoji. This works because it's a curiosity-driven subject line - people can't tell what it's going to be about. Will it be an insult? It’s a weird question to ask and totally driven by curiosityUseful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes9 Lessons from The Inbox Online Email Marketing Conference.Why You Might Want to Think Twice About Consumption Emails.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

How do you know if you're unique enough? What makes you stand out? How do you market yourself so that your ideal customers choose you and not your competitors? These are some of the questions we answer today with the help of our awesome guest Belinda Weaver. Belinda is a copywriter who helps people who are learning to be copywriters to up their game. And today she talks to us about how to make yourself choosable. Yep - that's a word. And you sure want to find out all about it! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:50) Did Belinda really have a pet peacock called Cocker?(5:10) Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd?(7:20) No USP? No problem!(8:45) How do you make yourself more choosable?(10:00) Lean into the combination of ingredients that makes you unique.(13:06) Tell people what it's like to work with you.(16:44) Share your passion and why you got started. (18:52) Be yourself and don't be afraid of feedback.(23:02) Subject line of the week with Belinda Weaver.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd? As business owners, we all worry about the idea of standing out. Why should people choose you? Do we worry too much about this? Is this a valid concern? Our friend and awesome copywriter Belinda Weaver shared with us that having a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is indeed Marketing 101. We're told to come up with our USP and our differentiator and to have a great elevator pitch that explains what we do, who we do it for, and what makes us different. These kinds of things are drummed into us. And Belinda calls this the unicorn fallacy. It's this idea that in order to be successful, you have to be unique and different. But when she first started out as a copywriter, Belinda didn’t know what made her unique yet. So instead of trying to focus too much on that, she decided to become as good as she could be and then figure out what made her unique. And she thinks a lot of business owners should do the same. As a copywriter, Belinda always asks her clients what makes them unique. And funnily enough, she never expects a great answer because she doesn’t have a great one herself! In fact, at first, she thought there was nothing in particular that made her unique. But she kept showing up, earning an income, and making progress. And at some point, she realised that maybe she didn’t have to be different in order to be successful.No USP? No problem!Is anything ever unique anyway? Even if you invented something brand new, is it going to be unique for long? According to Belinda, having a USP isn’t completely irrelevant. We probably all have something that’s uniquely and brilliantly us, but if the USP becomes a gimmick that holds us back from what's important, then it’s not useful.If we get paralysed in trying to find our USP and don’t do the things we could be doing to get more business, then there's no point in finding a USP in the first place! We sometimes get so worried about what makes us different, unique, special, or rockstar-worthy that we do nothing. And that's not cool.  How do you make yourself more choosable? Making yourself choosable isn't just about standing out from your competitors. Yes, there are people who do the same thing as you, but there are often different solutions to similar problems - alternative routes we could take and different types of businesses we could use. So what can we actually do to make ourselves more choosable?Belinda tells us it all starts with the idea that you don’t have to be unique. The best in the market isn’t always the favourite. So instead, try and get in front of people and become their favourite. Because what we do as buyers is make decisions on who we choose. We don’t want to look at the whole Internet. We want a short list, which is often made of the people we know. Consumers are always trying to cut their choices down, so send out signals in your marketing to help you become people’s favourite.Why you need to share reviews and testimonialsAs buyers, we want to know that you, as a business, are capable of solving the problem we have – that you've done it before and can do what you say you do. So how do we know? We know because you’ve done it for other people and you did it well enough to get reviews and testimonials.And also that you’re not a complete twat to work with! That can be the difference, and it's how you become someone's favourite. However, according to Belinda, that's an area a lot of people shy away from. So show that you can solve a problem, that you’ve done it for others, and let them see what it’s like to work with you as a human. Because when you do these things on a regular basis people start to know, like, and trust you. And that’s what makes you choosable - you don't have to be totally unique and not even the best! Lean into the combination of ingredients that makes you uniqueIf you look at most businesses, a lot of them aren’t unique at all. We all use the same ingredients. But a business is like a cocktail, and it’s the combination of the ingredients that makes it unique. So in Belinda’s case, it’s the fact that she’s a copywriter from Australia who lives in the States and that she set up her business to have the flexibility to raise a family, which she now has. Her work revolves around her children and her pug. Some of these things might not sound relevant initially, but this is the unique cocktail that makes Belinda choosable. This is what makes her distinguishable, especially when it comes to courses and memberships. Because Belinda certainly isn’t the only copywriter who offers copywriting courses and a coaching membership. But even if someone is a leader in a particular space or industry and you don’t like them or the way they portray themselves, you’re not going to want to work with them. Personality really comes into play too! Tell people what it's like to work with youAccording to Belinda, there are more elements that should come into your marketing and that a lot of businesses overlook.  Something crucial you want to be doing is explaining what happens once someone joins your programme and what the process of working with you looks like. Also, don't forget to share reviews, testimonials, and credibility markers all the time.Why? Because these are the things that make buyers feel safe with you. As consumers, we all have this natural anxiety when we make a decision. What is going to happen next? So let people know what happens when you start working together and give them proof that you’ve done it for others. That makes them feel safe and certain, which can be a great way to get people to choose you.Take care of all these things first and then the swaying point, if all things are equal, is about whether people enjoy hanging out with you. Do they respect you? That can be a huge influence on someone making decisions, but only as long as you’ve taken care of the other elements first. And if you do that consistently, people get to trust you and know you. So the likability factor is the tipping point.This is something we do too for our own membership, The League. We give a video tour to our new members so they know what's involved, and how to navigate the content and find their way around. This definitely helps people overcome certain objections, and Belinda explains it’s about shifting a lot of the information we reserve for people who have bought from us to our prospective buyers.Why? Because that's what gives them the roadmap of working with you, especially if you're someone who does launch marketing. It's about pulling a lot of the content that we normally keep behind the paywall into your pre-launch material. That works because it allows you to show people what happens when they join, and that helps them feel safe. Share your passion and why you got startedAnother thing we can do to make ourselves choosable is to share our passion and why we got started. Belinda, for example, became a copywriter before she had kids because she wanted a family-friendly business. A lot of her business journey is getting it all done around two kids and a pug, and she shares a lot of that in her marketing and her emails.As a result, a lot of the stories she tells attract people who feel Belinda understands what it’s like to be them. By bringing her passions and why she started into her marketing, she's able to make strong connection points with her audience.There are also other more frivolous things she shares - such as what she enjoys in life (whether it's tea or coffee or her favourite TV show). Belinda calls these Velcro hooks, and the more of these you share, the stronger the connection with your audience is because we continuously build that know, like, and trust factor.So we don’t wait until we launch.  In fact, when we send our big, long pre-launch email campaign, people are ready to sign up. Because they've already decided they like us and want to work with us. They've already chosen us. Be yourself and don't be afraid of feedbackOf course, it goes without saying that for every person who chooses you, there are going to be people who don’t. Belinda believes there’s a vibe for every tribe, and for everyone who does like you, there will be people who don’t. And we have to be okay with that.In all honesty, this bothered Belinda when she first started - she thought she had to be "professional" and never alienate people. But after a couple of years, she realised she was making herself too vanilla and not interesting to those who would be interested. So she started leaning into who she is by being herself more. Because you don’t have to keep up a façade.And when she started being more herself, she got a much greater response. Yes, there are other courses and memberships out there, and some people are going to choose those instead of you. And that’s fine. But if you water down or lose the things that make you you, then you’re going to lose everyone. It’s best to have people who really dig you than to be bland as all hell.And sure, you'll get feedback. Some of it will be great and say that you're the best thing ever. When that happens, it means you've created what we call the environment of zero competition, where nobody else has that unique recipe. And that's because your personality, your offer, your history, your fee, your services, etc. are unique to you. But you’ll also get negative feedback and people who will say they'll never buy from you - for whatever reason. Don't be afraid of negative feedback. If you're going to put yourself out there, you have to get tougher skin. There are people who feel it’s okay to say rude things to you, and you have to learn to ignore them.That doesn’t mean you’re not going to read some of those comments sometimes and end up questioning everything you’re doing. But you have to build your muscles to bless and release - catch that narrative and let it go. Because the more you concentrate on negative feedback, the less you focus on the people who are actively interested in what you do. So bless and release, and move on.We hope you take this as permission to go out and be yourself, do the best work you can, and deliver more of yourself in everything you do so you can attract the tribe that is right for you. Subject line of the week with Belinda WeaverBelinda has not one but two subject lines for us! Her best-performing subject line is super straightforward: “The Copywriting Incubator. I have news”. The Copywriting Incubator is the name of Belinda’s programme, and this subject line works for her as it literally labels the content of her email - a practice Belinda swears by.  Because she believes we don't open emails when the subject line is mysterious.  But Belinda’s favourite subject line is “Quick question” which contains a 9-word question that usually re-engages people. Belinda likes this one because when you’re looking at your inbox you don’t want to see emails that need a 20-minute reply, do you? You want something you can quickly answer so you can then get out of your inbox. So this subject line lets people know that this is going to be super fast, and it works because Belinda is only asking for a few seconds of your time.Useful Episode ResourcesAbout BelindaIf you want to find out more about Belinda you can find her on her website. And if you’re a copywriter, she has a quiz that tells you the one focus you need to have to accelerate your copywriting business.Related episodesThe Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.Little Tricks to Write Better Emails That Aren’t Boring. Why We Waited 3 Years Before Creating a Brand.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to market yourself to make yourself choosable) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

What do you do if you have a high unsubscribe rate? What is a high unsubscribe rate, and does it even matter? Or should we simply focus on addressing any spikes in unsubscribers instead? We hear so many people telling us they put in a lot of work to build their list just to see their subscribers leave pretty quickly. And we know it's easy to feel bad about it, but if you find yourself in this situation, fear not! There's quite a bit you can do about it.Ready to find out? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:48) Unsubscribers aren't a bad thing!(6:55) Why you can't just rely on your lead magnet.(8:41) How to make sure people want to hear from you.(12:48) Why use a Welcome sequence.(14:39) Why monitor your unsubscribe rate.(18:31) What to check when you have a high unsubscribe rate.(21:41) Have you made any changes to your email marketing?(22:51) Why always include offers in your emails. (25:15) Build a list of subscribers, not hostages!(26:53) Subject line of the week.Unsubscribers aren't a bad thing!Here are a few things to think about when it comes to unsubscribe rates - the impact they have on your technical email deliverability, your relationship with your list, and your business. Because broadly speaking, unsubscribers aren't a bad thing, especially when it comes to your emails getting delivered. Just for a second, imagine you have a massive mansion. You decide to have a housewarming party, and instead of just inviting your friends, you tell everyone who lives within 100 miles of your new place. So they all come, but the thing is – you don’t want most of these people there. In fact, you probably want them to leave! Because ultimately, you only want to hang around the people you actually like. And the same goes for your business. You want to build a list of people you like and who like you.Why you can't just rely on your lead magnetHigh unsubscribe rates are typical of the way we build our lists. And they're definitely part of the course when we use lead magnets. If you’re running ads or employing any other quick-win list-building strategies, you need to come to terms with the fact that a lot of people don’t want to be on your list - they just want your lead magnet.So they’ll opt in for the thing, get it, and then quickly unsubscribe because they don't care much about hearing from you. But one way of fixing this is to make sure you have a long-term nurture sequence.For example, if you join our list because you’ve listened to a few podcast episodes or have been in our Facebook group for a while, you’ve been nurtured into our world. That means you are subconsciously and psychologically committed to remaining on our list because we've built a relationship with you over time. It’s a totally different experience from someone you've never heard of before who signs up to a lead magnet. How to make sure people want to hear from youA good solution to help with this is asking people to join your email list because they want to hear from you however many times you email them every week. That way, your emails become the thing people are signing up for. And that should reduce your unsubscribe rate. Plus, it means that people are expecting emails from you. It's not just you suddenly sending them sales emails after they downloaded your lead magnet. You see, we also lose a good number of subscribers quite early on in our email journey. But this isn’t something unique to email marketing - it happens everywhere. Think about networking events or work meetings, for example. There aren’t that many people that you meet that you find interesting enough to keep in touch with or want to see again. And even out of those people, only a smaller percentage become meaningful to you.What this means is that you want to build a list of people who are good, responsive, and ideal subscribers. As we always say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs! You need to accept you'll have a lot of people come into your business who won't hang around for very long. And that's okay because the goal isn’t to build the biggest list that you can. Your subscribers aren’t Pokémon - you don't have to catch them all.What you need is something in place that makes people hang around long enough to turn into raving fans. And if you can't do that, then it's okay if they leave. Hopefully, the percentage of people who leave immediately is small, and more people will instantly become fans and feel they want to stay on your list because it's the right place to be for them. Why use a Welcome sequenceThis is why we created out Getting To Know You sequence. It’s our version of a welcome campaign or indoctrination sequence (which is a phrase we don’t like). The way we look at it is that people come into your business, and you’re getting to know them as much as they’re getting to know you. The idea is that you gather data on your subscribers to find out how you can serve them better. And at the same time, they get to find out why you’re unique and why they should hang around.When people unsubscribe from our list during the course of the four days of the Getting to Know You sequence, it’s because they realise they’re not that interested in email marketing right now – it’s not their priority. Maybe they just wanted to dip their toe in the water.In our Getting To Know sequence we tell people we're going to email every day with a hint, tip, story, idea, or piece of inspiration to help with your email marketing. If you’re in that phase of your life, you’re going to hang around and love it - you'll feel instantly committed. But if you’re not, you’re going to unsubscribe. And that’s okay.And people might still come back later. This happened to us recently when someone got in touch to say they had subscribed and unsubscribed a few times. But eventually, they joined our membership The League. But they only did that when the time was ready. So don’t be needy and cling to people. Just serve who you want to serve – some people will hang around and others will come and go.Why monitor your unsubscribe rateThere are some times when you want to be observant of your unsubscribe rate – you don’t want to be ignorant or arrogant about it. And if you're someone who's taken our advice to increase the frequency of your emails, you might notice that when you did that, a bunch of people unsubscribed from your list. But that figure levels off eventually. So after that, you want to look out for sudden spikes of unsubscribers. When those happen, it’s time to investigate. Was it a particular email? Was it an email automation? Or was it what we call a train carriage (which is a particular sequence of emails) that is getting people to leave? Is there something you're doing that people hate? If you spot anything happening that's affecting your unsubscribe rate, you have a chance to go and fix it. And that's what's great about automation - it allows you to go and fix something for the future. So we advise that you do an email audit. Because email marketing is such a priority for our business, we do an audit once a month. If you’re busy, you might just want to do one every 90 days or once a quarter.And what you do is look at a few different things in your email engine. For example, we look at what campaigns we have running and check the stats inside our email marketing platform to see if any of our campaigns are getting a ridiculously high unsubscribe rate. Should you rely on those metrics? Yes, because they're all tracked within the email marketing platform and therefore are accurate (unlike open rates).What to check when you have a high unsubscribe rateSo what do you do if you find a particular email or a campaign that's causing you issues? Here's a quick checklist of things to check.The subject lineSometimes people feel tricked by subject lines. Or maybe they feel offended. Is there a disconnect between the subject line and the content of the email? We know this is often not done maliciously. But we've seen it done on purpose too. In other words, does the subject line not fit the email? Have you caught people's attention with something to make them open the email but then taken a different direction in it? Because that could cause people to unsubscribe.Your lead magnetWhat's the lead magnet someone signed up for when they joined your list? Is there a big gap between what they downloaded and what you email them about? If so, it might be time to ditch that lead magnet. This is one of the things we talk a lot about inside our membership The League, where we give you training to help you create lead magnets that will make sales for your business. You don't want your lead magnet to sound appealing as a standalone but then prevent your subscribers from turning into customers! Your traffic sourceIf you see a high unsubscribe rate, where are the people who unsubscribe coming from? How did they join your list? You can see where they are coming from by checking the contact record in your email platform. Do they all come from the same place? Is there something you need to change in that particular acquisition channel or method? Have you made any changes to your email marketing?For example, has someone started writing your emails for you? Have you changed your email platform? Does the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails look any different? Have you changed your email signature? Have you created new offers? Changed your branding? Have you suddenly started talking about things people aren’t jamming with? Have you changed the layout of your emails? Added pictures? Taken stuff out? Have you changed anything at all that could have caused your subscribers to leave?Why always include offers in your emailsLet’s just remember that every single time we send an email, someone will leave. It's the nature of the beast. And that's because they’ve decided that for whatever reason, they don’t want to hear from us anymore. So every time someone leaves, that’s going to cost us. And that's fine.But we might have paid to get those people into our world in the first place. That could be through running ads or doing content marketing, for example. So every time someone leaves our list, it costs us. And that's the reason why we rarely send an email that doesn’t have an offer in it or doesn’t sell something. Because when we send an email, people are going to leave, and you want to recoup that cost. You want to make some sales to cover the cost of losing some subscribers. Build a list of subscribers, not hostages!Generally speaking, unsubscribes are not a bad thing. If you notice a spike in your unsubscribe rate, by all means, check it out and do something about it. But at the end of the day, you want to build a list of subscribers, not hostages. Unsubscribes aren't the worst thing because you can make a shit tonne of money by sending emails to people who want to hear from you.And that's key. Build a small tribe of people who really want to hear from you and keep them highly engaged. A small but engaged list makes delivery and relationship-building easier. It also makes your list more profitable because it costs you less to host it. So unsubscribers aren’t the worst thing in the world unless they’re out of the blue and unusual. If you notice a spike, do something about it. But otherwise, don't worry too much about them. And if you want to find out more about this (and how we do things) check out our membership The League.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “How to get FREE flowers”. So with this subject line, Rob did two things you’re not supposed to do, apparently. (But that's only if you believe the stories that are told out there in the email marketing world!). Rob used the word FREE in the subject line and also put it all in block capitals. In theory, these things will damage the delivery of your emails. And if you do everything else wrong, they actually might.But why does this subject line work? Because it's a benefit-driven subject line but has nothing to do with what we teach. We rarely have benefit-driven subject lines that work. Things like “How to get more people on your email list” never tend to work well for us. So this is taking the “How to” benefit-driven structure that we know works in headlines and applying it to something that has nothing to do with email marketing and everything to do with the story that Rob shared in the email. Try it out! Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy You Shouldn’t Worry About Your Unsubscribe Rate.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.How To Use Email Subject Lines To Do More Than Get Your Emails Opened.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about what is a high unsubscribe rate and what to do if you see a spike) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Why did we wait three years to create a brand? Shouldn't that be the first thing you do when you start a business? Probably not! It's not what we did, and there are valid reasons for that. Because for years, we proved again and again that we could sell our product - even if it was ugly. Want to know what this is all about? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:33) Why we finally decided to create a brand.(9:29) Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your business. (11:10) How we started Email Marketing Heroes.(14:58) Focus on your offer first.(19:57) Fix what doesn't work before making it pretty.(21:26) The four things you need to focus on to make your business work.(23:40) Launching 'ugly' businesses.(27:47) Creating our brand - why now?(29:39) Why create a brand for our products and audience. (33:25) Subject line of the week.Why we finally decided to create a brandYou may have noticed that a couple of months ago we finally decided to create a brand - we overhauled our entire branding. Our colours and fonts look different, and we've even had our first professional photo shoot together. Why? Because our previous branding looked significantly uglier than it does now. Over the years of being in business, we've definitely seen people around us producing graphics that looked way better than ours did. But the problem is that neither of us has an eye for things like that. We’re good at communication, but we’re not designers. When we first launched our business, branding wasn't our priority. We just wanted to get off the starting blocks - not to create a brand that looked nice. So when we launched Email Marketing Heroes all we had was a logo. We ran a contest, and the person who submitted the best logo also came on board to work with us. She's an amazing designer, but she's not a branding expert. And as a result, over the last few years, we’ve been producing graphics that looked inconsistent. They were nice in isolation but didn’t fit with anything else. All the different elements of our business had a different vibe, and we felt our branding was disjointed and was getting worse with time. Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your businessUnfortunately, over the years we've also seen businesses with amazing branding go out of business. Why? Because they focused on the things that looked good or what they found naturally interesting, enjoyable, and easy for them - rather than what needed to be done to run a business and to keep it going. Because we all have to make sales. We have to show up and give value to people. And we need to put out offers that are so interesting and valuable that people are willing to invest in them, so we can stay in business and help more people.And there’s one really uncomfortable piece of advice we find ourselves dishing out a lot to our clients, which is to stop doing the thing you’re doing because it’s the wrong activity for you to be doing in your business right now. Your problem above and beyond anything else is to figure out how to make money. Once you have that nailed, then you can build around it.How we started Email Marketing HeroesWhen we started our business, we wanted to find out whether people would pay us to teach them email marketing and buy our campaigns. When we launched our membership The League, we didn’t know if people wanted a new email campaign every month - and that's one of our core propositions.But figuring all of this out was our first aim - our aim then was not to create a brand. Could we build a thriving business based on something people want? Are our offers good enough? It’s not just what we sell and how. If Rob and Kennedy (the hypnotist and mind reader who teach a psychological approach to email marketing) sell email campaigns that you can swipe and use in your business along with coaching, will you buy it (regardless of how we package it)? That's what we tried to figure out. And doing this was completely independent of any sales pages or any branding. Because it’s about the concept. Is it interesting? Does it get your attention? Is it valuable enough for you to pay a reasonable amount that’s a good economic fit for how we need to grow our business?So that's what we did back in 2019 when we first launched. We focused on making $20-30k in sales with nothing more than a logo. And truthfully, could we have done it without even having that logo? Because if we could, then we could prove that the fundamentals were all there. If you can sell it when it’s ugly, you can sell it when it’s pretty. And in the end, we didn’t create a brand until we’d made $600k in the last couple of years. And this year alone (2022) we'll be making over $1m in sales. We waited so long to create a brand because we first focused on how to understand our customers better to make more sales and become more valuable. Focus on your offer first  If you can take the right offer, prove it, and sell it when it’s ugly, then you can sprinkle glitter on it later. For example, as we learnt from our friend Natalie (co-founder of BuzzFeed) having a pretty Instagram grid isn’t really that important. Sure, there’s an element to it. But if your content strategy is good, you can grow a massive audience regardless of how pretty it is. If you also have the ability to make it pretty, then it’s probably going to grow faster. But ultimately, if you have bad content or a bad offer that looks great, it'll never work. But if you have amazing offers, your business will still thrive even if it doesn’t look good.So for years we put the branding off and focused on what was helping us have a business. And this is something we see a lot of people struggle with – they’re trying to solve the wrong problem for the wrong stage of their business. The first thing to do is to figure out what problems you have to solve for the stage where your business is.We could have decided to never fix the brand. And we would have still continued to grow. Because we solve a problem. If you have an interesting and compelling hook to your offer, it will work and it will sell.Fix what doesn't work before making it prettyYour number one goal should be how to put money in your pockets so you can keep the business going and continue to serve people. Having a nice website and cool social graphics is fun. But if you start focusing on that first, you might be putting off creating a system for selling your product.So, for example, if you have a webinar that isn’t converting well, you need to keep tweaking it until you make it better - until it starts converting more. Putting more people in front of it won’t help if it doesn't work. So improve it first and then put more people into it. The four things you need to focus on to make your business workThe first thing you need to focus on to make sure your business makes you money is the offer.Can you position your product in such a way that people understand it and want it?Can you grab people’s attention enough that they’ll want to pay for it?Is your offer compelling enough for someone to get their credit card out and buy from you?Once you've sorted your offer, you want to focus on the audience.Are you speaking to the right people?Then you want to look at the logistics.Can you support the business model? Does it work?If you’re relying on having guest experts give a presentation every month inside your membership, will they do that for free? If you have to pay them, can you afford to?Can you get your business to operate the way you want it to from a systems point of view?Will it be worth the money or is it just impossible?In a nutshell, can you logistically run the business and scale it?The last thing you want to focus on is the economics, which combines all of the above.Can you get the right people to pay you the right amount for long enough to cover the cost of running your business?Or is it going to cost you too much to manufacture your product?Does it mean you'll never be able to sell it at a price people are willing to pay?When you combine the audience and the logistics, will the economics work?Can you acquire customers to go into your audience cheaply enough that the offer will cover the cost and make the business work?Launching 'ugly' businesses That's exactly what we did when we launched our Level Up mastermind in February 2022. We told people inside our membership, The League, that we were launching a mastermind without even having a name or a logo for it. We explained what it was, how many people we were going to take in, and how it would work. Does it surprise you that we didn’t even have a sales page? All we had was a Google Document and a concept, and we still sold it. And that's how we've always launched our businesses. And also why we tell our clients that if something isn't working, it’s not about changing the graphics or the colours. It’s about fixing the offer. Present the offer and sell the product profitably without it being pretty. If you can do that, the branding is secondary.We believe that most products will eventually sell if you can persevere with dialling the offer, the audience, the logistics, and the economics. But not all of them will. We’ve had this happen to us too when we decided to launch a membership for magicians. A few months in, we realised that the logistics of making that product didn’t work. And that's because it relied on members (the magicians) to contribute their tricks and ideas to the audience. And we couldn’t make that happen. So we decided we weren’t willing to persevere and re-gig the offer again and again. We just scrapped the idea, and that's okay. Because if a business isn’t making sales consistently, you can’t scale it.Creating our brand - why now? So we waited three years - until we got the stage where we're on track to make $1m sales - before creating our new brand. You now know why and what we were focusing on before this.So why now? Because we wanted to. Because it's a bit of fun for us. There are plenty of things we could do with the $10k we invested in our rebranding. And a few years ago, putting that money in our pockets would have been our priority. But now we're at the stage where we get personal satisfaction out of watching our branding look better. We probably won't get a huge ROI for that money. In fact, had we continued to run our ‘ugly version of the brand’ it would still continue to sell, and we'd still be growing. So if you’ve been guilty in the past of spending time, energy, and money on making things pretty and thinking it will help you convert better – that’s not going to happen.Why create a brand for our products and audience We're at a point in our business where we want our new brand to represent and show in a visual sense how good our products are. Because people do judge a book by its cover. But it doesn’t matter how good your cover is if the book doesn’t do what it says on it.We know that everyone who’s used our products received the most amazing customer experience and the best training. But looking from the outside, you couldn't tell how incredibly good our products are. We waited until we made a significant volume of sales before changing our branding, but we've now designed a brand for the products that we know people are willing to buy. We’re not doing this for products that people may or may not buy in the future. We're building a brand around our audience – the people who buy from us. We're building a brand that speaks to them and their problems - we're not taking a guess after creating a customer avatar on a piece of paper.Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital, who did our branding, happen to be our customers as well. They know our business, and we were able to tell them that these are the thousands of customers we already have and who buy from us. And that’s powerful.So what are you doing to make sales? This is what we’re asking all our clients when they tell us their offer or their business isn’t working. What is the activity you’re doing that makes sales? Because that should always be your priority. And then you can have the luxury to create a brand.We cover this and much more inside our membership, The League, where we help you sell stuff, even if it looks ugly. We show you exactly how to position your offer and how to sell it through emails.Subject line of the weekThis week's subject line is “Crushed by a piano”. Why did it work? First of all, it spells catastrophe (carton-level catastrophe, in fact), and it's also exaggerated. Obviously, people will assume Rob hasn’t really been crushed by a piano. But they’ll open the email to read and find out.This was a story about Rob’s friend Gary, who asked Rob to move a piano. Being crushed by it is definitely a terrible outcome. So what awful scenario can you come up with that has to do with your story? When you think of one, paint that picture in the subject line and describe what could have happened. The more catastrophic, the better. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesBehind The Scenes of our Business Strategy Session in Manchester.SPECIAL 100TH EPISODE: A Week in The Life at Email Marketing Heroes (Behind The Scenes with Rob & Kennedy).Why We Started an Email Marketing Agency.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about why we waited three years to create a brand) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Can giveaways help you grow your list? What prize should you choose for your contest and how do you make it go viral? Who do giveaways work best for, and how do you even run them? Ready to find out why giveaways are important for your email list growth and your business? Then let's hear it from the awesome Derek Videll! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:24) Does Derek really have uncontrollable sneezing fits when he chews mint gum? (5:19) Why are giveaways a good strategy to use for new businesses?(6:40) Should new businesses run paid ads to their offers?(8:44) Why picking the right prize will help you find the right audience.(13:00) Testing your audience and finding your target market.(14:14) Do giveaways work for B2B?(16:22) What are the key ingredients to running a viral giveaway?(21:07) How do you make the giveaway go viral?(23:40) Subject line of the week with Derek Videll.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Why are giveaways a good strategy to use for new businesses? Our awesome guest Derek told us that giveaways work better for beginners and new businesses. Why? Because while viral contests can also work for intermediate and advanced businesses, they are a much simpler and more effective way of building your list when you're starting out than other strategies are, such as organic social media posting. For example, if you're a business owner who's been trying to grow organically on Instagram by posting reels, you might have experienced limited success. Reels can be difficult to do, and not everyone likes to create them. Plus, even if your reels go viral and you gain some followers from them, this strategy still doesn't give you much control over your business. Sure, you may end up with a few thousand followers, but you'll have no consistent sales revenue.Should new businesses run paid ads for their offers? Paid social media ads are a more ambitious route than organic content sharing, but a lot of new businesses aren't yet experienced at selling their offer. They might have not narrowed down their target market or fully established their branding and website. Or their email marketing might not be fully set up yet. But all these components are necessary if you want your paid ads to bring in sales. The truth is that running paid social media ads directly to your offers rarely works. You might make a few sales, gain some followers, or even collect some email addresses, but the cost per acquisition tends to be very high, and in that case, your rates are probably very unprofitable. And that's fully understandable because a lot of new business owners who have started a passion project don't necessarily have the marketing background or copywriting skills they need to make the sales they want to make. So they end up burning money on paid ads, which isn't ideal. But there's a better way to do things! And (you guessed it) - it's giveaways!What prize should you give away in your viral contest? When you run viral contests, your marketing or copywriting skills don't have to be excellent. You just need to pick a prize that people want to win. So the first thing to consider is what you'll be giving away. It can't be something untargeted or generic like an Amazon gift card or a MacBook. Because that will only give you random followers who then unfollow you once they've realised they haven't won. If you pick a prize that has nothing to do with your business, people will only enter your contest to win the prize - they won't stay afterwards because they won't want to have anything to do with your content. And even if you do end up gaining some followers from the process, they'll probably never reply to you, and that ruins your engagement. So the prize you choose needs to pre-qualify your audience's interest in what it is you do. If you’re a course creator or membership site owner pick a prize or perhaps even create a product that's relevant to what you do so you can attract the right audience for your business. Running paid ads to a contest rather than to an offer means you get to attract your ideal clients while deterring those who aren't the right fit. Why picking the right prize will help you find the right audienceThe reason why giveaways work really well for small businesses is that if you don't have many followers on social media, it’s hard to attract an audience through organic content. But if you share a giveaway instead, people follow you to enter and win the prize – not because of your content. You’re giving them a reason to follow you. This is why giveaways are important - they help you grow that initial following. And if you've picked the right prize, you'll also attract the right people. So make sure that what you're giving away solves the problem that your paid offer addresses. Why? Because this tells you that the people who are entering your giveaway to win the prize, have the problem you're trying to solve. Then to spice things up, you can also add more prizes (like consolation prizes) or pick multiple winners.  Testing audiences and finding your target marketOnce you've selected your prize and you start running your giveaway, test different types of audiences (for example different demographics). Who would want to buy your product?At this point, your marketing doesn’t have to be so good that you're able to close sales straight from ads. It just needs to be good enough to get people's email addresses so you can test your target market. And then you run very simple ads to your contest. You don't even need lots of different angles with your ads - you just need the one. And that's to enter your giveaway. Do giveaways work for B2B? Derek told us that doing viral giveaways for B2B is a lot harder because selling coaching or consulting to a cold audience is difficult. When you’re giving away a product, people don’t look too much into where it comes from. But when it comes to coaching or similar services, people want to know who the person is. So giveaways can work for B2B but only if you already have a warm audience.For example, Derek ran a giveaway for his coaching programme to celebrate his 200th podcast episode. He gave away some of his courses and personal mentoring to one lucky person. But everyone who entered also received a free guide, so they were all automatic winners. But when he ran the giveaway to a cold audience, while he admits he could have done more, he didn't have great success. He definitely found that viral contests only seem to work well for him if people already know him and want his products.   What are the key ingredients to running a viral giveaway? The first component that needs to be in place is the reason why you're running the giveaway. You can't just say it's because you want people's email addresses! It's important you position your giveaway as something you’re doing to show your appreciation.Then you need to present the prize as something simple and straightforward that people will want just by looking at it. If you have a more complicated product that needs explaining, don't spend more than a few bullet points on the extra details. Once that's decided, you need an opt-in form where people can give you their email addresses to enter the giveaway. Don't ask people to share or tag friends, as these strategies don't work. And on the next page, simply state they have now entered the giveaway and let them know when they'll hear from you to find out if they won. This is also your chance to ask something from your audience. For example, you could tell people that to improve their chance to win they could follow you on Instagram or Facebook for an extra entry. Or they could review your podcast on Spotify or subscribe to your YouTube channel. Get creative with this and pick whatever your company needs.  Picking your giveaway winnerOn the last day, Derek will send an email out with a subject line along the lines of “The results are in”, which has a great open rate (for Derek, that's around 60-80%) because everyone wants to know if they won. And in that same email, while he has people's attention, Derek will also let everyone know about a deal they can get or any consolation prizes they might have won. In terms of picking the winner, Derek used to do that manually. But there are plenty of giveaway software programmes designed to do this that will also take into account when people have multiple entries. He now uses a piece of software called Kickoff Labs. And that also helps with making your screen look great as it's important your content looks trustworthy because people might have the preconceived notion that a giveaway is gimmicky.How do you make the giveaway go viral? In order to make your giveaway go viral, ask people to share the contest with a friend (via a custom referral link you send them) to gain an additional entry. The more friends sign up, the more entries that person gains.So while the initial entries come from running paid ads to the giveaway, you have additional ones that are gained via the share factor. And this reduces your cost per acquisition. Plus, even if they didn't win, most people will still follow you because (if you picked the right prize), they're interested in what you do. So in a nutshell, this is why giveaways are important and work particularly well for new businesses. They allow you to test your audiences and find your ideal target market when your offering, pricing, or email marketing aren't refined yet. They also give you a faster and more efficient way to grow your list and make sales than posting organically on social media (potentially to the wrong audience) for years. Running giveaways gives you not only better results but also more conclusive data. You'll also find that because you have people's email addresses at the back of running a contest, you can adjust your offer and try and resell to them. Whereas if you simply run paid ads to your offer to a cold audience, you're left with nothing if it doesn't work. But with a viral giveaway, you still have people's attention and can market them later. So... are you ready to try them out? Subject line of the week with Derek VidellDerek’s subject line is “As promised…” It's one that worked well for Derek because it triggers curiosity. People want to see what they received that they were promised. Try it out! Useful Episode ResourcesAbout DerekIf you want to find out more about Derek you can find him on Instagram or his website. Derek is giving away a FREE mini-course (all detailed with illustrations too) where he shares the social media giveaway strategy he talked to us about today.Related episodesThe Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.The Absolute Best Time To Send Emails.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about why giveaways are important) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Are you going on holiday or taking some time off from your business? What will you do with your email marketing? Will you stop your emails? Or will you keep them going? What are your options? This is what we're sharing today - how to do your email marketing while you're on holiday, whether you’re physically leaving and going somewhere or simply switching off from your business for some well-deserved time off.  Ready to find out what your options are to keep your email marketing going during the holidays? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:51) Option 1 - Stop sending emails (don't do this!)(10:08) Option 2 - Schedule your emails in advance.(12:59) Option 3 - Run a campaign.(15:02) The importance of having customer support while you're away.(17:27) Option 4 - Send your emails while you're on holiday.(20:56) The importance of having an Email Engine.(22:44) Let your holiday inspire your emails.(24:51) Always capture new ideas for your email marketing.(30:54) Take advantage of these helpful resources inside The League.(32:04) Subject line of the week.Option 1 – Stop sending emails (don’t do this!)The first option you have (and - spoiler alert - this is something we don't advise you to do) is to stop sending emails. You simply disappear for however long you're away or taking time off. This is definitely an option you have, but just because you're taking some well-deserved time off, it doesn't mean you don't have to continue showing up. In fact, you don't want to stop sending emails. Because that means losing momentum and traction.Why you need to keep showing up for your subscribersRemember that one of the things you’re doing by sending regular emails to your subscribers is to build and reinforce a habit. If you know that someone sends you an email every day of the week, you expect that. Or if you publish a podcast episode every week and suddenly stop, chances are people will stop listening. The same goes with your emails – you stop sending them, and your subscribers will stop reading them. When you drop your frequency, from a technical point of you, you mess with the algorithm. But people also stop paying attention to you.And from a psychological perspective, the minute you stop doing something, you find it harder to get back to it. So stopping your emails is bad for everything! It's bad from a tech point of view in terms of your deliverability, it’s bad for engagement, and it's bad for your audience because it gives them a chance to disconnect and forget who you are. And last but not least it's bad for you! Because once you've stopped, it's harder to get back into it.So, yes - you absolutely deserve time off. But you also have a responsibility towards your subscribers and customers to show up and deliver value. It’s part of the promise you made to your subscribers. So what other options you have to ensure you can keep showing up even when you're on holiday? Option 2 – Schedule your emails in advanceAnother option you have is to prepare in advance and write and schedule your emails. So let's say you're going to be away for 16 days - you'll want to have all your emails written and scheduled in advance a couple of days before that. And potentially, you'll also want emails scheduled for a few days after you return to give yourself a chance to get back into the swing of things.This means you batch-create the emails in advance for the duration of your trip (plus a few days before and after). And this is great because it means that as long as you spend some time preparing and planning in advance, you can take as much time away from your business as you want. The only thing to bear in mind if you're going to batch-write your emails is that you don't want them to all sound the same. We have a resource called Batch It Crazy inside our membership The League that helps you do exactly that. You want your emails to have different flavours and vibes to them. But most importantly, you want to be talking about your products from different angles. And using our resources will help you do that (and also ensure you won't run out of ideas). Option 3 - Run a campaign Another option you have is to run a campaign. What’s the difference between batching your emails and scheduling a campaign? If you decide to send X amount of days' worth of emails while you're away, you'll simply write and schedule those emails separately as you would when you're not on holiday.Running a campaign, on the other hand, takes your subscriber on a journey. You're telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The emails in the campaign work together to serve a common purpose. We have about 30 campaigns inside our membership The League that you can take, fill in, and apply to your business. The shortest one we have is about 6 days, but most of them are longer. So there’s a good chance you can cover the duration of your holiday with just one campaign. And you may think this is counterintuitive. A lot of people tell us they can’t run an email campaign because they’re away. But actually, it's the perfect time to do it! Because you can set it all up in advance before you go.The importance of having customer support while you're awayThe only thing we'd add to that is that you'll want someone for you (maybe someone in your team if you have one) to monitor your emails and respond to any queries while you're away to make sure your customers are getting access to the right content and can buy your product. You don't want broken links or pages or payments that can't go through. And if something goes wrong, you need someone to fix it. If you don't have anyone who can help, maybe you could set up your campaign a few days before you go away and test it all out to make sure everything works fine. You want to be sure that the fundamentals are solid. And if you don't have anyone who can provide customer support while you're on holiday perhaps you could check in once in a while. And if you can't, at least set up an autoreply for your support email address and let people know that you're away and when they can expect a reply back from you. This isn't ideal, but it’s better than nothing. Option 4 – Send your emails while you're on holiday Another option you have (and what Kennedy does) is to find 10 minutes a day when you’re away to write and send your emails. You might have heard us say this before, but Kennedy writes his emails first thing in the morning while he waits for the kettle to boil. Whereas Rob writes them during the day, when inspiration strikes. That’s harder to do if you’re not disciplined – because it’s easy to let it slide.But the way Kennedy does it means that doing his email marketing doesn't interrupt his day. His morning cup of tea is still part of his routine, wherever he is. Just like you don’t stop brushing your teeth when you’re on holiday, there are still things you do every day. So you can incorporate writing your emails into your daily habits, even when you're away or taking time off.Different time zones make things interesting, too. When Kennedy went on holiday to Las Vegas, for example, he kept sending his daily emails at the same time. But because of the time difference, his audience would receive them 8 hours later than usual. Did that affect engagement with his subscribers? Nope. Nothing happened because he was emailing later in the day.And part of the reason why this is, is that your subscribers probably know that you're away (if you've included that in your daily emails), and they feel like they're travelling with you. And by the way, this also proves that there is no perfect time of day to send your emails - to this day, we have never statistically found one. The importance of having an Email Engine On top of these options, there's something else we'd like you to consider. In our business, we have something we call our Email Engine. This is our core philosophy, and something all our subscribers go through in our business. It's a series of campaigns that talk about our membership The League from different angles, and it takes our subscribers 60-70 days to go through it. We make most of our sales from our Email Engine. After that, our subscribers go into our day-to-day email marketing, but what having our Email Engine means to us is that no matter how many new subscribers we bring in each month, they're all going to be taken care of. They're all going through the sequence of campaigns and emails we have already set up. And when you do this in your business, it means you can constantly make sales regardless of what you're doing - and even when you're away. Let your holiday inspire your emails Holidays are a great opportunity to give you ideas for your email marketing. Regardless of what strategy or option you choose from the ones we mentioned, you can use your holidays as inspiration - whether you share the stories in real-time or once you're back. Sending emails while you're on holiday allows your readers to feel like they're away with you. And that's great because it helps deepen the relationship with them. But regardless of when you send those emails, you'll find that a lot more happens around you than when you're not at home or following your daily life and routines.When you take time away from your business, opportunities for stories multiply - totally different things happen. You see people you wouldn't normally see and immerse yourself in different situations. And that’s amazing inspiration for stories, which you can tell as they happen or when you're back.Always capture new ideas for your email marketingOne thing you must make sure you do as you're exposed to more stories is to write them all down. Inside our Bottomless Email Strategy, we talk about a tool called the Story Vault. It’s our methodology for recording the stories to share in your emails as they happen to you, and it's super handy for those days when you feel you don't have anything to write about. So while you're away, make sure you capture all your stories so you can use them later. Ultimately, your email marketing has to continue even if you're taking a break from your business. You still need to show up and serve your audience. And by doing this, you're subconsciously telling your subscribers that you won't let them down. You're still there and will continue to be there for them, even when you're away. It teaches them that they can rely on you because you're not the business that suddenly disappears. If you decide to take time off from your business (either out of desire or necessity), email is one of the only things you can remain consistent with because you can have it running in the background. Plenty of other activities (like Facebook lives, networking, or sales calls) require you to be there and present. But not email marketing - not if you plan and schedule in advance. Take advantage of these helpful resources inside The LeagueWe mentioned quite a few resources today. So for any members of The League, take a look at our campaigns. Are there any you'd like to implement during your next holiday? Whether it's something new you're launching or an existing product you want to put a new spin on, you'll find a campaign or two to use.Another resource to check out is the Batch It Crazy programme and course, which is all about how to batch emails quickly and succinctly. And finally, take a look at the Bottomless Email Strategy and the Story Vault element from that. And if you’re not a member yet, what are you waiting for? Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is one of the longest we’ve ever sent, and it’s “It’s 30 mins for free email marketing coaching”. What this type of subject line does is to stack curiosity. We see a lot of people who give away the point of the email in the subject line. But that means there's no need for your subscribers to open your email! This subject line, on the other hand, raises lots of questions. Why 30 minutes? Why is it free? And what is email marketing coaching? Because it raises multiple questions, we call this compound curiosity. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesThe Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.The Absolute Best Time To Send Emails.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to do your email marketing while on holiday) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Have you ever raised your prices and found that no one was rushing to buy? We've been there and done that. And that's why this week we're sharing how to increase your prices the right way by telling your audience in advance and creating urgency that will boost your sales. No matter what you sell (a membership, a course, a coaching programme, or any other product) we also have something special for you - our price increase email campaign. Ready to find out how to increase your prices, build trust with your audience and customers, and make loads of sales in the process? Let's go!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (6:11) How NOT TO increase your prices.(8:23) Why give your audience notice of your price increase.(10:10) Never give people too much notice about your price increase.(11:53) Why send price increase emails to your audience.(14:50) Keep track of all the places where you mention your prices.(17:44) Why tell your existing customers about a price increase. (18:55) Why increasing your prices acts as a retention mechanism. (20:06) Why you should never extend your price increase offer.(21:43) Grab our price increase email campaign for FREE - live workshop.(22:44) Subject line of the week.How NOT TO increase your pricesIf you've ever put your prices up, you probably did what we used to do in the past (and what we see lots of people still do). You posted on social media and found there was absolutely no rush in sales. Sounds familiar? The problem with that strategy is that the reason people aren't buying isn't the price itself, so putting it up or down isn't going to make a difference. But you can use the price (and a price increase at that) as a way to compel people to jump off the fence and go ahead and buy. The way not to raise your prices is by doing it quietly and in the background. Because that's a wasted opportunity! Instead, you could use a price increase as a promotional opportunity to get people to buy. How? You tell them you’re going to put the price up in a few days and give them an opportunity to buy now.Of course, you want people to buy at the new price, right? Sure. But remember that you’re constantly bringing in new people onto your email list - every single week. And the new people will buy at the new price. But don't miss the opportunity to expose your existing subscribers to the old price and create a sense of urgency that pushes people to make a decision and buy now. Why give your audience notice of your price increaseWhy are you telling your audience and existing subscribers about the price increase in advance? Because it helps create a sense of loyalty and happiness - you're giving them notice so they don't miss out on grabbing your product at the current price. And that's a good thing because we all want customers to be with us for the long haul. You have the rest of time to make sales at the new price. So why not give your loyal subscribers who’ve been around for a while the chance to grab the existing price first?This is how we handle each price increase for our membership, The League, and any other product we've ever launched. We start with a lower price, get ourselves a good base of members first (who become our solid audience and give us base income), and then gradually increase the price over time. A benefit of doing things this way is that it gives you the time to refine your offer. When we first launched our membership, the content wasn't finished. It still isn't because it's constantly changing – we’re adding new, amazing features all the time. But we’ve also taken things out that didn’t need to be there. So by increasing your price gradually you get to create the right offer for your audience over a period of time.Never give people too much notice of your price increaseHow you put your prices up is important. But what’s also critical is not giving people too much notice. If you tell your audience about a price increase coming up next year, that's just information. There’s no urgency. And you want urgency – not information.That's why we tell our audience about any price increase 5 days in advance - no longer than that. And that creates real urgency - almost like an impending sense of doom. Because if we say there's going to be a price increase in 5 days, there's going to be a price increase in 5 days. That's urgency. And urgency only works if it’s actually urgent. That’s why we never use countdown timers of 30 days, for example - because there's no urgency in that. It's just information. Why send price increase emails to your audience Using a window of 5 days before your price increase also gives you enough to say in your emails over that period of time. The idea is to send 5 days' worth of emails to your subscribers to talk to them about the price increase from different angles. That doesn't mean 5 emails - you can and absolutely should email them more than once a day, especially on the last day before the offer closes. But make sure you always have a reason to send those emails - if you don't, then you're sending too many. So what do you say in your emails? Tell your subscribers what the price increase means for them. For example, if you're increasing your price by $20 per month, tell them about their cumulative annual saving. So an increase of $20 per month means a saving of $240 over the course of 12 months if they buy within the next 5 days. Why does doing this make a difference? Because $240 is a bigger number than $20. But also because subconsciously, you’re encouraging people to commit to joining for one year. And that means bigger savings!Another thing you want to point out in your price increase emails is that if they buy now they'll be getting the same content for a cheaper price. But if they wait and buy later? They'll pay more for the same thing - and nobody wants that! Therefore, buying now becomes a no-brainer. Keep track of all the places where you mention your pricesSomething you also want to do in preparation for a price increase is to keep a document of every single place where you mention your prices. Why? Because a price increase means updating that figure everywhere - on your sales pages, your special offer pages, your email campaigns, your promotional videos, etc.If you think this doesn't apply to you because you only mention your price in one place (probably on your sales page) then you might be leaving money on the table! There’s a reason why we make sales for our membership The League every single day. And that's because we mention our price in lots of different places - not just on our sales page. Out of all our email campaigns, only a couple send people to our sales page. All the other campaigns take different routes, which means we have lots of places where we mention our prices that need updating every time we raise them. Remember that your sales page is important (a bit like a brochure), but you'll make more sales by sending people to other bits of content.  Why tell your existing customers about a price increaseWhen putting your prices up, it's also important to specifically tell your existing customers or members. Just like you did for your audience, let them know what it means for them. Will their price also go up for them? Or will it stay the same? We always tell our members not to worry because the price they pay doesn't change - that's what we choose to do. But we also let them know in advance about the price hike because they might know someone who wants to join our membership, and if they sign up now, they'll be able to access the same content at a cheaper price.  By telling people, you're doing them a favour, and as human beings, we all like to help others - it makes us feel good about ourselves. Why increasing your prices acts as a retention mechanismLast but not least, increasing your prices acts as a retention mechanism. People stick around because they want to keep their current price, rather than paying the higher one in case they decide to leave or take a break for a few months and then re-join in the future. So informing your existing customers in advance helps with retention because your members don't want to lose that price. You may also have former customers or members on your list, and by telling them about the price increase in advance, you're doing them a favour too. Because if they're thinking of joining again, now's the time. Why you should never extend your price increase offerWe talked about this before, but whatever deadline you give to your offer, don't extend it. If you said the price is going up in X days, it needs to go up in X days. Once you have a deadline in place, stick to it and close your offer when you said you would. Why? Because if you don't, people won't trust you again. You might have people in your audience who decide to buy from you right now to take advantage of this offer by using money they'd originally allocated to something else. Buying from you now means making a compromise or sacrifice, even.So if you extend the deadline and tell people they can still buy at the old price, it's illegal, insulting, offensive, and misleading. And it’s bad for you because you lose people's trust. Whatever you do, don’t be the marketer who extends their discount for another 24 hours for days in a row. It’s terrible practice!Grab our price increase email campaign for FREE - live workshopReady to put your prices up? We’re about to run an interesting workshop about the specific price increase email campaign we use to raise our prices. You’ll get every single email in a nice copy-and-paste document you can take, fill in, and start using in your own business to make sales straight away.During the live workshop, we're going to walk you through every email and explain why every word is there, what it does, and the psychological nuances behind it. You’ll also get a recording of the workshop so you can watch it back whenever you like. If you want to grab our price increase email campaign and attend this workshop, head over to this link. Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “My favourite refund request (ever).” This came about because one of our customers got in touch to say that he bought our Bottomless Email Strategy Package and started to go through it but didn’t like it. So he was going to ask for a refund because he didn’t think our framework would work for his industry (he sells guitar tutorials).But then, he decided to give it a go, and at the back of writing a few emails, he received lots of replies from his subscribers and even made $600 in sales in the first few hours! So he got in touch with us to let us know he'd changed his mind and did not want a refund anymore. That was mind-blowing! Because one thing is to say good stuff about your own products but to get testimonials like these from your customers is incredible!So the idea behind this subject line (and why it worked so well) is to take something inherently bad (like a customer asking for a refund or “a death threat” or “food poisoning”, for example) and add the words “favourite” and “ever” to it. It works a treat – try it.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to Do Deadlines Well and Ethically. Why You Need to Avoid These Email Marketing Mistakes. How to Create Urgency For an Evergreen Membership or Course Without Product Launches. FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf 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 groupIf 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 $1This 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 MembershipNot 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.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to raise your prices the right way with our price increase email campaign) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!