The Email Marketing Show

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! 

This week we're sharing 9 amazing lessons we've learnt from two years of running Inbox - our awesome online email marketing conference. It's a phenomenal event, and we promise this year it's going to be absolutely next level! To prove that it's true, we've pulled out 9 tips we learnt from some of our amazing speakers at past events of this FREE online email marketing conference. They're so good you're going to want to take notes! Ready to have your mind blown? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 (for FREE!)(5:40) Lesson 1: Use emails to 're-sell' your membership.(8:31) Lesson 2: Turn your free content into your core product.(12:51) Lesson 3: Tweak and test your lead magnet landing pages.(16:35) Lesson 4: Use your emails to educate, entertain, and encourage.(18:48) Lesson 5: Talk about your lead magnet from different angles.(23:38) Lesson 6: Test the deliverability of your emails with all the major email platforms.(26:21) Lesson 7: Identify the people who want your highest offer first.(28:02) Lesson 8: Grow your list by getting in front of other people's audiences.(29:23) Lesson 9: Sell the product. Don't explain the product.(31:22) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Our Inbox email marketing conference is on the 28th and 29th of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously, tickets for registration were up to $500, but this year we’re going to grow this conference massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing conference you can imagine. It's packed with 12 amazing speakers and presentations and is fully online and fully live. We'd love for you to come and join us! If you want to learn what's going to impact your ability to make more sales with email, this is the place to be. Because it's not just about the words you write, who you send them to, or when you send your emails. It's about a lot more than that! And these two days are going to have a solid impact on your ability to make sales with email marketing. If you're already salivating and want to find out all the details, see the full line-up, and register at zero cost, here's the link.1. Use emails to 'resell' your membership – Neil StaffordNeil Stafford is a genius when it comes to memberships, and in his presentation at one of our previous online email marketing conferences, he talked about how to use emails to keep selling your membership and make sure you build belief so your members become lifetime members. Because your membership is something you need to 'resell' to people. You don’t just sell it once and then sit back and receive recurring revenue forever. Instead, you have to constantly and perpetually 'resell' it. And emails are a solid way to do that.Of course, you need to get that balance right. You don't want to overwhelm people with all the emails you're already sending them to let them know where all the content is. For example, we have a number of emails that tell our members inside The League how they should go on the Success Track. But people still tell us they don’t know where to go because nobody gets 100% readership of their emails, even when people are paying to be a member. Because everyone’s busy!But on top of the emails where you explain where everything is, you also need to send emails that build the beliefs that your members need, in order to stay with you in the long run. Arguably, these types of emails are more important than any instructions or directions you could ever give. Because the beliefs are what will help people stick around. If they don’t believe what you do is something they should be studying for a number of months or even years of their life, people are going to jump in, grab what they need, and go. And that’s not what you want. So email is the most direct thing you can do to make sales and to positively impact the retention of your membership.2. Turn your free content into your core product – Matt and JoeOur friends Matt and Joe exposed their entire business model to us, which was incredible and unique. Their core content (their podcast - The Hustle and Flowchart) isn’t just their free content - it's their entire business. It's also their product and membership.So they shared the idea that you don't have to produce free content and then have additional products on top. Your products don't need to be separate from your content. So you could monetise your podcast by having a sponsor, for example. Or what Matt and Joe do, is create full, in-depth notes of their podcast episodes. And that’s their monthly recurring revenue model - people can subscribe and get their notes as well as additional training.The benefit of doing this is that it frees you up to create amazing content because that is also the product you sell. So you make it the best content it can be. Whatever your content is, make it phenomenal and give it the best chance to work and rise to the surface. In other words, make your content so good that it could be your monthly membership. 3. Tweak and test your lead magnet landing pages - Monica SnyderIn one of our previous online email marketing conferences, our friend Monica Snyder taught us to tweak and test small elements of your landing page because that can make all the difference between making or losing money on ads. Monica is a genius when it comes to getting paid to build your list, and the way to do that is to have a paid lead magnet that acts as your low-priced offer. You then run ads to a sales page where people can buy your lead magnet, and that means they're immediately in your funnel. They're not joining your list for free and then being sold later - they're a customer the minute they come onto your list.But because you're running ads to this page, this now becomes a careful balancing act. You need to have enough conversions to cover the cost of your ads. And the best way to guarantee you do that is by making sure your landing page works for you. That means you need to get some key core elements right and then change and split test different components to see what works best. So to make your lead magnet profitable, focus on the things you can control. You can't control how Facebook runs ads or what other marketers in your industry are doing, but you can control the elements on your landing page to see what works best for you. 4. Use your emails to entertain, educate, and encourage – Jacob Our friend Jacob is very much on the same wavelength as us when it comes to sending emails that entertain, educate, and encourage. We talk a lot about education and entertainment, but the word encouragement is really important as well. Because it captures the idea that you can inspire people and make them feel good with the content you share. And you can also give them permission to go ahead with whatever it is you help them with.The word encouragement was a key takeaway for us because it’s an all-encompassing concept. You don’t just want people to learn lots of things. Because sometimes people leave paid memberships or coaching groups because they’re learning too much and don’t have the time to implement it all. And if all people are doing with you is learning, it can get overwhelming really quickly. But if you can give them encouragement and use your emails to support people to take what they learnt from you and implement it, suddenly what you send becomes more valuable to them. Because everyone loves to open an email that makes them feel better by the end of it! So how can you encourage your audience to get out of their rut and take some action to get the results they want? And how do you keep educating them in a way that’s also entertaining?5. Talk about your lead magnet from different angles – Teresa Heath-WareingAnother important lesson we learnt from our friend Teresa Heath-Wareing is that you should talk about your lead magnet from different angles - not just in the same exact way all the time. For example, you could talk about the benefits of it, or the thing it’s going to save people from.You want to think about 20-30 different angles and then rotate them whenever you talk about your lead magnet because that will ensure it appeals to different people at different times. Or even to the same person at different times. This gives you the freedom and ability to post more regularly on social media or write more in your emails about the same lead magnet. And that's because by using different angles you’re not constantly talking about the same thing.It also means that you don't have to come up with new lead magnets all the time. In fact, rather than spending extra time trying to create a new lead magnet, sit down with a piece of paper and think of ways you can talk about the lead magnet you already have. It's quicker! And it allows you to then use  different hooks for social media content, which you can then share in various ways (Stories, reels, videos, posts on your grid, etc.)6. Test the deliverability of your emails with all the major email platforms – Ed ForteauOur friend Ed talked to us about testing the deliverability of your emails. Do your emails get to people's inboxes or are they just ending in spam? In order to find out, Ed told us to go and test our emails on all the different platforms. And you do this by creating different email accounts with each of the major providers, like Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, etc.You can create these test addresses for free and then subscribe to your list from each account. This gives you a good view of how your emails are performing. And you can even set up multiple accounts for each platform to see what happens when you never open the emails, when you open them but never click, when you open the email and reply and click, etc. Depending on your level of engagement and your sender's reputation, you can find out how exactly your emails are being delivered to all the main platforms. 7. Identify the people who want your highest offer first – Steve RosenbaumA big revelation from our friend Steve Rosenbaum was that some of the people who join your email list want the most help you can possibly give them. They want to pay the highest price for your most advanced programme.While some people join your email list and start escalating through the value ladder from the bottom to the top, others want your highest offer straight away. And if you offer them products that are below the level of support they want and need right now, they’ll disengage. They’ll never buy from you – they’ll just leave. Plus, your highest-price offer is usually also your highest-profit offer. So if you offer that to the right people straight away, you get to make sales early in the process. The key is to get people to raise their hands early in the email relationship with you so they can let you know they want the highest price, highest-involvement, and highest-impact offer.This is what we've started doing recently when offering our agency service, where we write people’s emails for them. So now we have a process in place to find people who are most interested in that, and we filter them out and put them through a separate sales process.8. Grow your list by getting in front of other people’s audiences – Melanie BensonA tip we learnt from our friend Melanie Benson was to build your email list and authority by putting yourself in front of other people’s audiences. You want to effectively 'ethically hijack' that audience to get in front of it.And one of the ways to do it is by getting on the platform they use. So if you've never used Clubhouse, for example, but know a potential business you could collaborate with who has an audience there, you could leverage that audience. It's about finding people, a platform, a place, or a community where people hang out online and try to get in front of them. 9. Sell the product. Don't explain the product - Todd BrownAnd last but not least, a tip we learnt from Todd Brown - the master of the offer - in a previous event of Inbox (our awesome online email marketing conference) is to sell the product - not to explain the product. And we'll leave this there because we could make a whole episode just about this!Come and join us at Inbox - it's THE online email marketing conference of 2022!So if this sounds as amazing as we think, remember that this year’s Inbox event is just around the corner. It’s absolutely FREE for you to register and to attend completely live. It's THE online email marketing conference of 2022, and it's on Zoom, so there’s no tech, financial, travel, or time barrier. There's nothing stopping you from growing your business, getting more sales, and serving more people by doing awesome email marketing. You get your free ticket by signing up here. So make sure you register now and join us over the two days. It’s going to be awesome!Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is the back arrow emoji (the one pointing to the left) with the words “doing it backwards.” The story was about the fact that we often do stuff in reverse or the opposite way round to how most people do things. And that's because we see that others aren’t getting the results they want, so it makes very little sense to copy them. So what we tend to do instead is look at stuff that is conventional marketing wisdom and do it backwards.And the subject line worked because it sort of implied that you could be doing something wrong. Did it work? Did it blow up? In this case, this was about something being backwards but correct, so quite interesting!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy You Should Attend Inbox 2022. The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email 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 key lessons we lernt from Inbox - our FREE online email marketing conference) 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 should you attend Inbox? Because it's the email marketing conference of 2022 (even if we say so ourselves). Inbox is the online conference that helps you sell more of everything you're doing by using email marketing. It's on the 28th and 29th of June 2022, and we're going to show you how to get totally FREE tickets and attend this fantastic event from the comfort of your very own pajamas. Ready to get all the juicy stuff? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:27) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 (for FREE!)(4:52) What is Inbox 2022?(6:39) Email is the most direct way you can make sales.(7:44) Learn from different approaches (from our amazing speakers).(8:38) The 5 areas covered in Inbox 2022.(10:00) Inbox 2022 is FREE and the reviews are incredible!(11:58) Inbox 2022 is online and live - on Zoom!(14:16) Who attends our event, Inbox?(16:18) Here's the link to register for Inbox 2022!(17:19) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Our Inbox email marketing conference is on the 28th and 29th of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously tickets for registration were up to $500, but this year we’re going to grow this event massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing party you can imagine. It's packed with amazing speakers, fully online, and fully live.If you want to learn what's going to impact your ability to make more sales with email, this is the place to be. Because it's not just about the words you write, who you send them to, or when you send your emails. It's more than that! So if you're already salivating and want to find out all the details, see the full line-up, and register, here's the link.What is Inbox 2022?Inbox 2022 is our completely FREE online email marketing conference. This is the third year we're running it, and we're inviting you to attend. Why? Because email is the most direct way that any of us can make sales - whether your emails are in real-time or automated. So it’s definitely worth taking two days out of your schedule to study everything there is to know about email marketing. And that's exactly what Inbox 2022 allows you to do - to immerse yourself into this topic and up your email marketing game. You can dive deep into what you can do, find out what everyone else is doing, and why they always talk about how amazing email is.Because it’s easy to think that the way you’re doing email marketing is the way it’s done, right? But we learn new things all the time - from every guest that we interview for this show and from all the speakers we’ve met in the last two years of running this event. We learn new things and we implement them. And that's what makes us better at what we do.Email is the most direct way you can make salesThere’s nothing else you can do that directly impacts the top and bottom line of your business as swiftly as email marketing. And that's a fact. If you have a little cash flow blip in your business, the best thing you can possibly do is to find something to sell and send a few emails about it over the course of a few days. That will fix your cash flow problem - it's as simple as that!Literally, nothing else will work as well. You can't just host a webinar, for example. Because how will you get people to sign up for it in the first place? With email, of course. You could try social media, but the reach isn’t very high, so you wouldn't get the same results.Learn from different approaches (from our amazing speakers)The great thing about conferences is that you get to learn new things. And at Inbox, you don't just get our ideas. Sure, we'll be giving a presentation or two. But over the two days, you’re going to learn from all kinds of different approaches – both from us and from our amazing speakers.A lot of the time, the reason people get stuck with their email marketing (or anything) is that they don’t know what they should be doing. They don’t know what questions to ask or what they should be studying. If you buy a course, for example, you’ll learn whatever that teaches you and nothing else.But at this event, we have a whole bunch of speakers talking about different topics, so you can learn way more than just one approach or one specific thing. We're confident that you'll leave this conference with whatever you were hoping to learn, but also with a lot more – with new ideas you didn't even know you wanted or approaches you wouldn't have thought about. We know for a fact that you’ll leave feeling more inspired than when we walked in.The 5 areas covered in Inbox 2022We split our email marketing event into 5 areas and asked our speakers to fit their talks into one of these categories:List building. How do you get more people onto your email list?Specific email campaigns. We’ll talk about specific email campaigns, including one that allows you to leverage the objections your audience has and turn them into reasons to buy and sales. Conversion. There are different types of conversion, so this is all about what you can do to help your subscribers to convert.Copywriting and content. What goes into your emails?Technical stuff. This is all the tech around email marketing - the stuff that allows you to do the things you want to do. Inbox 2022 is FREE and the reviews are incredible!We've said this before, but you get to learn all of this for absolutely nothing! Because Inbox 2022 is free to attend. And we have rave reviews! We remember reading the chat (where attendees can interact live with other participants all day long) and seeing people have lots of fun. But also saying they were blown away by this event and thought it was genuinely excellent.We host the whole two days live because we don’t want it to be a bunch of pre-recorded videos that you can download and watch anytime you want. We want it to be a live experience, which is why we host it all and aim to make it a lot of fun - we even have some surprises along the way.We’re super excited to be doing this for free because we want to help more business owners realise the true potential of email marketing. If you’re not doing email at the moment because you’re focusing on other things, remember that email is the one thing that will allow you to put more gasoline on the fire. It’ll help you make whatever you’re already doing bigger and better - simply more impressive!We want this event to have a real impact on businesses, which is why we made it free. So you can focus on absorbing the content, joining in and participating, making new friends, and asking questions to our speakers. Whether you’re looking for new ideas to add to what you’re already doing or for inspiration to get started because you’ve been putting email marketing off or left it on the back burner for a bit, this event will help you.Inbox 2022 is online and live - on Zoom Inbox 2022 is fully online, which means you don't need to spend thousands on travel, hotels, or food. You don’t even have to take additional time out to get there and back like you'd normally do at either end of an in-person event. We're streaming this event on Zoom, which is something most of us are familiar with, so there are no technological barriers. The speakers will join us live and you can connect from wherever you are – and you don’t even have to have the camera on. We don't mind!So for no additional cost (in time or money), you can completely transform your business (not just your email marketing) and increase the amount of money you get to take out from the thing you love doing. Of course, there's an option for you to buy the recordings if you want to support the event. This gives you access to the sessions so you can review them at your own pace and convenience. We find this is a great idea because nobody ever studies an entire 60-minute presentation and leaves remembering all of the amazing a-ha! moments they had. Sometimes you read back through your notes and realise you can't read your handwriting or maybe you don’t even take notes! And that's why we give you access to the recordings of all 12 presentations for your to review as many times as you want to.Who attends our email marketing conference - Inbox? One thing we absolutely love about Inbox (remember it's the email marketing conference of 2022) is that we get to chat with the attendees throughout the sessions. And we get to meet people from all over the world – from Australia to across Asia, all around Europe, the US, and Canada. And it’s people who do such diverse things with their email marketing, too!We have people who sell online courses and have packaged their knowledge into a programme. Some who offer coaching and help clients in all areas of their lives – from their businesses, to their personal lives and relationships. We have people who sell memberships and have recurring revenue models. Others sell services or products – from candles and cakes to handmade bespoke jewellery.We have participants selling directly to consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B). And everyone is applying the same techniques because you have access to all these different angles, with lots of fresh ideas to take away from the event. And if you think no one's ever done what you do in your space, that’s even more exciting! Because you have the amazing opportunity to be the leader in your space.Here's the link to register for Inbox 2022So if this all sounds awesome to you, go grab your free ticket here. The event is just around the corner now, and all you have to do in order to be there is to register before it happens. So go do it right now because it's the email marketing conference of 2022, and you don't want to miss it! And of course, to make it easier for you, we’ll also send you email reminders closer to the time.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “ick” with the vomit emoji. This came about when Rob was talking to a friend who was sharing the stuff in her life and business that gives her the ick. This was an expression Rob had never heard before, but the minute he heard it, he was suddenly noticing it everywhere. He just hadn’t realised it’d become a trendy expression people were using. And one of the things you want to try and do in your marketing is to tap in and use the currently trending expressions. So for example, a while ago that was TLDR (for “too long, didn't read”) or PSA (for “public service announcement”). There are words and expressions that sometimes start trending online. And typically they’ll be popular for months - until they're not anymore. And if you then keep using them beyond that point, you'll sound like somebody's dad trying to be cool. So find that sweet spot where an expression, phrase, or word is trendy and cool and use it in your marketing. It really works. Just keep your ears to the ground and notice what people are saying - it's that simple!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy You Might Want to Think Twice About Consumption Emails.How To Build Your List by Speaking At Events Online and Offline.Why Email Marketing is at the Top of the Digital Marketing Trends for 2022.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 you should attend Inbox - the best email marketing conference of 2022) 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 encourage your audience to consume your content? Whether it's a free download or a paid course or a membership, how do you use your emails to inspire your subscribers or customers to use the amazing content they now have access to? Today we're covering content consumption by sharing an exclusive panel discussion with our friend Monica Snyder taken from our 2021 Inbox conference. Monica is the CEO and Founder of Birdsong.co, and she's a true marketing genius! She’s great at funnels and ads, and she’s super analytical. In our conversation, we talk about consumption emails - the emails you send when someone opts in for your free lead magnet or buys something from you. Should you send these emails at all? Do they help? Or do they just get in the way?Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:21) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!(5:50) Should you send consumption emails?(9:15) YES to sending consumption emails AND to offering upsells.(10:40) Consuming your content encourages people to buy more from you.(13:04) Do consumption emails work for both free and paid-for products?(19:21) Are consumption emails nagging? (22:32) How to upsell in your consumption emails.(23:56) Make use of custom fields!(27:45) Do free trials work?(33:35) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Before we get into this conversation with Monica Snyder, we want to let you know that our Inbox conference is happening at the end of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously, tickets to this conference were $500, but this year we’re going to grow the event massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing party you can imagine. It's packed with amazing speakers, and it's fully online, and fully live. So check out the line-up and register here for FREE!Should you send consumption emails?There’s definitely a view that if someone takes the time to consume our content, uses it, and gets results, they’re more likely to buy something else in the future. However, in our business, when someone opts in or buys something, we put them into a campaign to sell them on the next thing as soon as the next day. For Rob, for example, when people download a free lead magnet from you, follow-up emails are more about trying to get them to click a link, rather than looking at the free content. Why? Because we think it's important to get them to subconsciously engage with us as a brand, rather than blindly consuming the content. It's probably a controversial viewpoint, but Rob thinks we cannot always trust our subscribers or customers to implement our solutions. The onus to consume the content and get results is on them, and it's a fact that most people never consume the content they download or pay for. So if you’re waiting for the point where the person has consumed your content, you may be waiting forever! YES to sending consumption emails AND to offering upsellsMonica, however, thinks we should definitely encourage people to consume our products. Part of our job as course creators, teachers, and information givers is to make sure we’re providing the information to ensure people do what they need to do with what we’ve given them. So for Monica, consumption emails are a big YES! But she also believes we should let people know about the next thing to buy. This is why Monica’s consumption emails lead straight into a sale.For us, part of the problem is that in the past we found ourselves bashing our heads against a brick wall trying to get people to consume our content. That's how we reached the cynical viewpoint that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. We're the kind of people who will unsubscribe from someone’s list after buying something if we feel we're being heavily forced to consume it. And that's because we don't like to consume content on someone else's timeframe.Consuming your content encourages people to buy more from youHaving said that, there are definitely places where consumption is important. First of all, sending consumption emails is less aggressive than the older way of pushing people to buy something else straight away. Also, if you help people consume your content (which they were excited enough about to opt-in for free or buy) they will get to experience how good your stuff is. They’ll be more like to buy more in the future.So the way we teach our clients to encourage content consumption is by sending emails that remind people of how good the content is - regardless of whether they'll go and look at it or not. Because the number of people who opt-in for free content and never access it is astronomically high! So what we'll do in our emails is point out there's value inside whatever our subscribers or customers have downloaded or bought. And we tell them exactly where they can find it. So when they get an offer from us, they're also aware that they're already sitting on some good value.Do consumption emails work for both free and paid-for products? Monica consistently runs traffic to both her free and paid offers, so her focus with consumption emails is both on lead generation and paid customer acquisition.However, with free downloads, she encourages her subscribers to reply to her and explain what their biggest pain point is. That's so she can see if she can help them and also use that language in her marketing. She has a follow-up email that she sends after she's delivered the content to check whether people received her product. She also asks for their thoughts - assuming they looked at it. And it's that assumption that normally prompts some people to go look at the content and then reply. For her paid-for course (low-ticket offer), Monica sends a 5-day email consumption sequence before she starts pitching people the next product for 7 days. With this sequence, she tries to manage people's expectations rather than dropping the product and moving on to the next thing. She believes it's important to make sure people have good expectations around how long things are going to take or where there might be roadblocks. It’s more about managing her customers' mental states. So she will, for example, point out where people can find specific knowledge points. It's what we normally describe as 'training your audience'. Consumption emails for your membershipWhile we probably have a bit of a cynical viewpoint when it comes to content consumption around one-time offers, we find they work for our membership, The League. We typically use consumption emails to push people into our members’ area so they can view what's available and click on some of the resources. And because we can track the clicks, we see a lot of sales coming from that activity. Are consumption emails nagging? Monica doesn’t think consumption emails are nagging as long as they’re well-written. But if emails are boring or bland, then people will unsubscribe - a clear sign your audience doesn't like them!We think it’s important to think about the psychological stack in people's heads here. By the time someone goes back to their inbox after downloading or buying something from you, a lot has happened. So within the first email, you need to be reselling them on the benefit of why they wanted your product in the first place.After that, if you keep asking your subscribers if they've consumed your things, you probably do come across as nagging! But if the emails are valuable (if you’re soft teaching some of the points in your course, for example), then they can’t be considered annoying.So use your emails to share some teachings but also remind your audience of the reasons why they want to learn your solution, which is why they downloaded your content or bought it in the first place. When your audience realises they're sitting on good, valuable content, their goodwill goes up - they feel like they've made a good decision. The key, we believe, is that your consumption emails resell people what they already bought. How to upsell in your consumption emailsMonica also added that you should use your consumption emails to let people know about any products you have that could further help them. If they want to solve their problem faster or better or go deeper into the solution, then you have other products, and you can pitch them to your audience. So if all they have right now is a free download, then you pitch the paid offer to them. And you present that as the next or advanced level. As we always say, email should never be used as a notification. You should always weave your consumption emails in with the style of your everyday emails. So our emails typically have a story or lesson of some description and then an offer and a call to action. And it’s easy enough to make the call to action an invitation to go and consume the content they downloaded or bought.Make use of custom fields! Recently we had someone get in touch to say they received 4 emails from us on the same day. Initially, we thought that wasn’t possible. But then we investigated and realised they had. And we’d advise you to also look into this for your own list - it's really easy to make that mistake!And it was happening to Monica too... until she found the perfect technical solution to this - custom fields! Monica uses the custom fields in her autoresponder software to ensure she doesn't send too many emails to the same person in close succession. She does this by adding a date and time stamp for the last time people received a certain email. That way, she won't be sending another email to the same person for a  certain timeframe.Monica also uses custom fields to calculate lifetime value. So anytime someone buys from her, their purchase goes into the lifetime value custom field. And she uses this information to make decisions in other email sequences.Do free trials work? We found that when people pay money towards a product (rather than simply parting with their email address), content consumption is usually higher. But that’s no guarantee. Between us and Monica, we have plenty of examples of people who invested thousands in a product and didn’t consume it at all! And this brings up an interesting point around free trials, which are a great conversion strategy as long as you make the offer work. When doing free trials, content consumption is everything. So you absolutely need a conversion sequence because if people aren’t getting into your free trial, then they won’t be upgrading to the paid-for offer either.Free trials work, but you have to make them work in your style - they need to feel comfortable for you as a sender. Test things out and see what works for you, as it’s always going to depend on circumstances as well. The key is to do what works for you and your audience. Just remember though, as Monica says, that you use emails to sell and build relationships. And consumption emails fit perfectly with these objectives. Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Woof, woof?” It was an email about dogs and barking. Rob isn’t even sure why that worked! But... it's not a sentence and there’s no context, so that's probably why it worked a treat for us. Because people wanted to know what the email was all about, and it triggered that curiosity.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesOnboarding Emails Examples for your Online Course. Testimonials – how to write and collect them automatically to bring in more sales with Monica Snyder. What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks. FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email 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 encouraging content consumption with your emails) 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!

Do people have reasons for not buying from you? Yes, they do.We're Kennedy and Carrie, and today we're sharing the three subconscious questions people have that stop them from buying from you. It's super important you answer these exact questions in your marketing and sales copy because people can't and won't buy unless you do!Ready to find out what these questions are and make more sales in your business?Let's go.SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:30) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:44) Check out our sponsor - Zerobounce! (3:34) Question one - will it work for me? (7:47) Question two - how long until I see results? (11:17) Question three - how much work will I need to do (and how much will it cost?) (18:18) Find ways to give people immediate gratification. (22:15) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. (23:34) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Sell More By Tapping Into The Power Of Buyer Psychology In Your Email Marketing.What To Send In Your New Year’s Emails To Get Your Clients Excited About Your Business (And Buy From You).How To Prevent Buyer Remorse And Turn Customers Into Raving Fans!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 Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website or at Fully Leveraged Business. Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 3 reasons for not buying that people have and that you need to address in your marketing) 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!

So you want to use deadlines in your marketing. You want to close your offers on a particular date and time and, more than anything, make sure they work. In other words, you want to use deadlines effectively. But you also want to do it genuinely and honestly. This is no doubt one of those marketing ethical dilemmas we've all had at some point - and it's a valid one! So how can you do deadlines well but also ethically in your business? Let's find out, shall we?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:09) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(5:02) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(6:48) How do deadlines even work?(9:46) The power of urgency and scarcity.(11:37) Why you should never extend an offer.(14:32) Why you should be able to have a logical reason for your deadlines.(16:22) Make sure the technology is watertight.(18:26) Can you use deadlines ethically for evergreen products?(21:22) How to implement ethical deadlines for your evergreen products (video link included!)(22:47) 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. How do deadlines even work? First of all, let's take a look at why deadlines work in the broader sense. We find people often miss the point when it comes to running any kind of countdown special offer with a deadline at the end of it. And as a result, they don't get the results and sales they were expecting before their launch. Why?Because the psychological, fundamental reason why deadlines work is that they appeal to the fact that we give people a reason to act right now – to bring forward this decision they might have made in the future and make it now. This decision becomes the top of their list of priorities. Because if they don't act now, they risk missing out. And people hate that. Let's think about the buying process for a second. Buying something (anything at all) requires you to decide that you want to buy it and then convince yourself that you want to buy it. Only then you go through the process of buying it. But unless you have a reason to buy right now, you might not grab that offer immediately.The power of urgency and scarcityThere are only two reasons why you might grab it right now - urgency and scarcity. If you want to go to a concert and know it’s going to sell out, you’ll act straight away because you'll want to grab tickets before you miss out, right? But in order to sell a product based on urgency or scarcity, people have to believe you. Because if they don’t, the whole thing isn't going to work. If you have a marketer who keeps telling you every day they're extending their offer for another 24 hours, you're not going to buy. You have no reason. Because you know they'll keep extending that offer. And so the deadline has the opposite effect of what it's there to do - it's causing you to put that decision further away!Why you should never extend an offerLet's not forget we're talking about ethical marketing here. If you keep saying that the offer is closing but you constantly extend it, it’s unfair to the people who may have spent money to prioritise this purchase right now. In their head, maybe they’d assigned this money to something else, but they bought your offer now in order to get the deal that was on the table. And this is important. Because people have an emotional attachment to cash and how they spend it. If you check out the episode How to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer, we talked about why you should never extend an offer. Even if someone gets in touch to ask you to extend the deadline or honour the offer once it's expired, you should politely but firmly say no. Why?First of all, because if you keep extending the deadline, people won’t believe you. And that defeats the purpose of it, which is to help you make sales. So if you're using a deadline, don't move it.And the second reason why you shouldn't extend an offer is that you always need to be crystal clear on when the deadline is. Your audience needs to be aware at all times when the offer expires. If they’re not, then you haven’t created the deadline at all! Because you haven’t engaged that rush and urgency for people to go and grab it before it goes away. So make sure you have a deadline on your sales page and maybe even use a countdown timer. Plus, send emails that lead up to that deadline – tell your audience that the offer is closing today, then again that it's closing this afternoon, and then again in an hour. Always be super clear about communicating your deadline.Why you should have a logical reason for your deadlinesAlso, make sure you have a good, logical reason for all your deadlines. There’s no point in picking an arbitrary date and time for when the offer closes. It can’t be a date and time that just popped into your head! The reason could be that it's Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Or maybe there's a live class element attached to it. You have to be able to say “this offer is closing here because…”There’s a lot of science around the fact that whatever follows your because can be almost anything. But for the purpose of good, ethical digital marketing, you want your reason to make sense - to be logical. Because that helps your audience instantly drop their guard and understand why that deadline is there and how it benefits them.In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Professor Robert Cialdini talks exactly about this - about the importance of the work because and how powerful it is. Your reason could be anything, but it needs to make sense and support your deadline. Make sure your technology is watertightAnother point to consider when using deadlines in your marketing is that people are smart, and if they can find a way around your deadline, they probably will!If someone doesn't trust the ethics of the person selling, they might wait before they buy because they think a better discount will come down the line. Or maybe they believe they can get a better deal if they get in touch with you directly. But also, does the big countdown timer on your website change when you refresh the page? Always make sure that if you use countdown software to support your offer, it's watertight and can’t be somehow circumnavigated. Can you use deadlines ethically for evergreen products?So now we know how to do deadlines ethically for offers that expire. But what if your product is evergreen and the doors never close? The great news is that you can do evergreen deadlines because every subscriber will go through them in their own time. How?It's simple, really! You could have someone joining your list today and then in X amount of days they go through a flash sale or a special offer. How long that sale or promotion lasts determines those subscribers' unique deadline. They can't work around that date because it's triggered by the day they join your list. So the way we create urgency with evergreen products like our membership, The League, is by having individual people on our list go through our automated campaigns (like our Golden Cloak campaign, for example, and many others). The key is that you include countdowns where people see the clock ticking. It creates a type of tension we all resonate with and shows people visually that the offer is closing. So make sure you have these timers on your web pages but also in the emails you send out.  How to implement ethical deadlines for your evergreen products (video link included!)You can use countdown timers for all sorts of things. But you'll always get a better result when using an ethical countdown or deadline, like a limited-time discount, bonus, sale, or automated webinar.If you’re wondering how you do this, we’ve put together a FREE video where we walk you through how to use deadlines ethically, particularly when setting up automated evergreen countdown timers where every subscriber gets their own path. Go and check it out - you can find it here.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “I cheated. (Confession)”. Once again, this is all about negativity, which seems to ring true in terms of getting higher engagement. This particular email was about reminding people that we don’t write subject lines to get people to open our emails. Instead, we want to encourage them to click through. This one works particularly well because people want to know what the confession is. There’s a lot of curiosity associated with it, and it has an inherently negative connotation. People like the idea of a bit of dirty gossip or a confession of some description. This is why this subject line got us a high click-through rate (and it also contained a link to content people can use to ‘cheat’ with something in their marketing and get results a little faster).Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer. 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 one of those marketing ethical dilemmas of how to do deadlines well and ethically) 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!