The Email Marketing Show

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! 

Are you someone who can't stop procrastinating when it comes to doing your email marketing? Well, you're not alone.We're Kennedy and Carrie, and today we're sharing some useful strategies to help you stop putting your email marketing off so you can get it done. Right now!Ready?Let's go.SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:34) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:01) Check out our sponsor - Zerobounce! (3:06) Just get started (or jump back in). (5:15) Stack habits together or schedule appointments in your diary. (8:50) Make things easier for yourself and remove any friction. (15:45) Alternate between longer and shorter emails. (17:53) Follow the 'Rule of One'. (21:14) Create campaigns one email at the time.(25:20) Don't let the fear of 'being bad' hold you back. (29:29) Create a system, process, or formula that works for you. (32:19) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesTime-saving tips for email marketing – how to eliminate distraction with Nir Eyal.Supercharge Your Email Marketing Copywriting By Mastering The Rule Of One For Maximum Impact.Lies You’ve Been Told That Are Stopping You From Making Money In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with 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 useful strategies to get your email marketing done if you're someone who can't stop procrastinating) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Do you ever find yourself making important business decisions based on a hunch? Would you like to know how you can improve the success rate of email marketing (and your marketing in general) by looking at data and not relying on a gut feeling? Are you curious to finally get a clear idea of what marketing works in your business so you can do more of it?This week we're sharing a technique we created so you can 'read the minds' of your subscribers. You'll be able to work out how they found you, where they came from, and what made them buy from you. This method is quick and effective. And it only requires you to track two simple things about your subscribers. Ready to learn more about this and transform your business for the better? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:16) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:33) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(5:40) Marketing is a numbers business.(7:52) The importance of understanding what works.(10:26) Why do you need to understand your conversion mechanisms?(12:35) The problem with tracking solutions.(15:32) The two things you need to collect in your email marketing system.(20:30) How do you capture the original source and conversion mechanism?(22:48) Learn how to use this method to track the success of your marketing. (25:26) 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. Marketing is a numbers businessWe come across a lot of business owners who think that marketing is a creative practice. And of course, there's creativity in marketing. But we think that creativity is around the way you decide to solve the numerical and data-driven problems you discover in your business. Because at its core, marketing is a numbers business.It's about looking at what you spend in terms of time, effort, money, and resources and what the return on your investments is. This is called direct response marketing. And for us small business owners it's fundamental that the return on investments is (as much as possible) directly attributable to your spending.The importance of understanding what worksLast month we saw a sudden surge of people joining our membership The League. We have new members every week, but we had more than usual. And we knew that was something worth investigating. Because one of the things we talk about a lot is to raise your peaks and do more of what’s working. And if you see some changes in your business but don't have the data to understand why you're seeing these changes, then you can't course correct. You can't amplify what's working and you can't stop what's not working.So we decided to start looking at what we might have done a few weeks or months prior that could have created this influx of people joining our membership. And we looked at activities we did in the past (not only last month) because it's rare that someone buys your product immediately, even if you're running ads directly to that product. A lot of the time people will look at your offer and leave. And it might be a retargeting ad that encourages them to buy in the end. Or they may look at it a few times before they eventually purchase it. There's always a gap between somebody coming into your world and buying something.And this is even more obvious with email marketing. Because somebody may join your list today but become a customer for the first time at some point in the future. There’s often a gap between when they join your list and when they buy. And if you're doing a lot of different things to build your list (say having a podcast or a YouTube channel, doing webinars, guest training, SEO, Facebook ads, etc.) you also have several conversion mechanisms. Why do you need to understand your conversion mechanisms? So you'll need to know which traffic methods bring in the most people but also which ones help you turn them into customers. Because not all subscribers are created equal! You'll find that you have some conversion mechanisms that work better with some traffic methods than others. You need to know which traffic method and which conversion mechanism in conjunction, get you the most sales. And you also need to know which ones are costing you money. Because you might be getting conversions from a particular source but not a price you can afford to be paying.With both conversion mechanisms and traffic sources at play, sometimes it's hard to understand what works. For example, you might have a lead magnet that converts well but only through Google ads and not Facebook ads. So what's key is for you to find out which conversion mechanisms and traffic sources combined you need to scale to get the best results. Because otherwise, you're going to spend money on strategies without getting a return on investments. The problem with tracking solutions So how do you find out what works? You could use analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, but they can only map out the person’s journey during a specific session, time, or device. So you might know that someone clicked on one of your blog posts and opted in for a lead magnet, but when did they join your email list? How did they get the blog post in the first place? And what got them into your world for the first time?These are the questions you're trying to answer, and in technical terms, that's called attribution. It's about knowing how to attribute an activity you did with the result you want to get so you can do more of what's working and do less of (or stop doing) what’s not working. And unfortunately, if you run ads, ad tracking is getting worse. We’ve recently seen an increase in retargeting ads for products that we already bought. And this is from big companies and smart marketers! That's because at the moment the technology and communication between web pages and the ad platforms aren’t good. This might change again in the future, but at the moment, it’s worse than it’s ever been.In order to understand what's working in our own marketing, we'd been trying to find a solution for years. Like many others, we tried expensive tracking software solutions, but they didn't work for us the way we'd hoped they would. They probably work best for businesses that have more linear and simpler funnels.So if you don't have lots of different products, emails, or campaigns happening at the same time, tracking software solutions might work well for you, too. But you need to be aware of the fact that with any of those tools the control lays elsewhere. So, for example, if Facebook makes changes to the way they work, these solutions might not help you anymore.The two things you need to collect in your email marketing systemSo after trying a few things and not getting very far with them, we've come up with our own solution, which we talk you through, step-by-step in this video here. Unlike complicated tracking solutions that you need to learn how to use, this is super simple and gets the job done.This method helps you look at every subscriber that comes into your world and determine what traffic source they came from. And the great news is that you can apply this method no matter how many subscribers you already have - you can start at any point and stage of your business.And here are the two pieces of information you want to track:The original source. This is where the subscriber came from. Every time somebody new joins your email list (or if they buy something from you), you want to grab this piece of data. It’s probably just a word or two, like “Facebook ad” or “podcast”. It’s the original source of where that person came from.The conversion mechanism that got that person to buy. What made them purchase your product when they did? If we reverse engineer the process by which we acquire that customer, what was the conversion mechanism? A webinar, a particular Facebook ad, your LinkedIn or Instagram bio?Now that you have these two bits of information, you know what works, what you need to do more of, and what you need to keep an eye out for and stop. If something hasn't given you any customers over the last couple of months, then it's time to stop that activity.   How do you capture the original source and conversion mechanism?In order to capture the original source and conversion mechanism for each subscriber, we suggest you have a couple of custom fields that can't be overridden or changed inside your email marketing platform. Once you've captured that data (and we show you how to do it in this video) you can run a report that shows you how many people came in from each of the major traffic sources in your business and find out exactly which mechanisms were converting them. This allows you to see which traffic source turns into the highest conversions. You can obviously see what's not working and even figure out whether one conversion mechanism is working with one traffic source but not others. Another thing we suggest you look at is the lead time and value of every new subscriber from each of the sources. How long does it take somebody from a source (say, a Facebook ad) to turn into a subscriber in comparison to another source (say, a webinar)? Learn how to use this method for tracking the success of your marketingFollow this method, and you'll have concrete proof attached to every single contact in your email marketing system. This means you'll be able to stop making business decisions by relying on your gut feeling - you'll know what's working and what isn't unquestionably. And you won't be relying on external platforms or tools. The information won't risk disappearing overnight because you own this data. It's attached to your record inside your email marketing provider on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis.So before you do any more list building, please go and watch this video and implement this method! The quicker you do this, the better your list-building methods will become. Subject line of the weekThis week's subject line is “Final call for the [YOUR PRODUCT NAME]”. This is a very direct subject line, and we use it a lot. It's for the email that goes out 60 minutes before an offer closes. You can also use the wording “final call” or “last chance”. Sending this email works well because when you send an email, you get the majority of opens and clicks within the first hour. So if you only send one email on the last day of your offer, you're missing an opportunity. Because will open the email when you first send it but won't take action or go back to it. So try this and see what it does to your sales!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to Get Out of a Sales Slump. Build Your List using Viral Ads with Dave Rotheroe from Grip Advertising. Blogging for Email List Building with Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital. 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 two things to collect to improve the success rate of email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Want to find out what we get asked inside our exclusive, members-only group coaching calls? This week we're taking behind the scenes of the coaching calls we do inside our membership, The League. We're going to not only share the questions about email marketing that our members ask us, but also the exact answers we give them! Aaaaaand, we have an amazing opportunity for you. For one day only, you can join one of these exclusive calls too! Want to find out more? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (00:17) The League Open Day.(6:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(7:16) How many campaigns do I need to get started with email marketing?(10:50) What's the best frequency for email marketing?(11:15) Planning your email content. (12:52) How many emails should I send during a launch?(16:53) How do I move to a higher email frequency?(19:50) What about email marketing for the B2B industry?(22:01 ) Join us for our first Open Day!(24:58) Subject line of the week.Join us for the first Open Day inside our membership The LeagueWe’re doing an Open Day for our membership The League where you can come and hang out on one of the hotline coaching calls as our guest. It’s happening on the 11th of May 2022 at 8 pm UK time (3 pm EST).You’ll get to ask questions just like our members do and get answers from us. And if you can't think of a question, just sit there and watch - like a fly on the wall. We guarantee you’ll learn from the questions that other people ask.So if you want to get on this call, register here. We’ve never done this before, and we’re excited to see many of you joining us for this experience. So let’s pack out the room for some great learning! 1. How many campaigns do I need to implement to get started with email marketing?The first question we pulled from one of our coaching calls is from Paul, and he asked, “As long as I have the Getting to Know You sequence and your Overture sales sequence set up, am I good to begin sending traffic through my funnels?”The short answer is yes!But let's break this down. For context, we should say that we give our members inside The League new email marketing campaigns every single month. But obviously, people can’t implement them all at once! Also, for clarity, the Getting to Know You sequence is our welcome sequence. It’s a 4-day sequence for every new person who comes onto your email list. This is where you introduce them to your core product or service.  After setting up our welcome sequence Paul implemented our Overture campaign, which is a sales automation.Of course, if after setting up these two campaigns you want to stop putting people through more sequences, you can. But you can also set up as many email campaigns as you want. You don't have to wait until you have all our email marketing campaigns set up - we don't do that either! We add a new campaign every 8 weeks or so. And taking this approach is perfectly fine. Firstly because it takes some time to set the sequences up. But also because they'll serve you on an ongoing basis. You can view these two campaigns as your minimum viable engine. Just put people through them, and you'll immediately benefit from the work you've done setting them up. Think of it as a train with different carriages - more campaigns will make your email marketing train longer. But simply add a new carriage whenever you’re ready, at your own pace.2. What's the best email frequency for email marketing? Here's another question we get asked by email marketers all the time. “How do I figure out what email frequency I want to do with my email newsletters?”There’s no right or wrong answer here. We talk a lot about the fact that we send an email every single day, and we think you should too. Because we think you’ll get better results if you email at least a few times a week.Planning your email content In terms of planning your content and the frequency of your email newsletters, we do our planning quarterly. So in the middle month of any given quarter (February for Q1, April for Q2, etc.), we plan the content we’re going to share in our email newsletters. We look at what we’re going to sell, what our goals are, and what emails we’re going to send in order to take our subscribers on a journey. And then we figure out what content we need in order to make that happen. Let's say we decide to do a webinar campaign. We go into The League and grab our own template for that, just like any of our members would. And then we put it all together and run it.In short, here's what we do. Once a quarter, we plan a rough big helicopter view of everything we’re going to do and map it all out. We break it down month by month, week by week, and day by day. We create the plan once and then fulfill it, and this means we don't have to spend time every day wondering what we’re going to send out next. 3. How many emails should I send during a launch?“If I'm launching my new course, coaching programme, or membership, how many emails should send?”The answer is as many emails as you have a good reason to send! Because if you have nothing meaningful to send out, you’ll feel like you’re sharing fluff – there's nothing of substance to drive that email.So first thing first, write down on your calendar when your product is going on sale - you want the dates of when the cart opens and closes. And then you reverse engineer from there.On the last day, you’ll want to say that the cart is closing - you'll do that at least twice to give people the best opportunity to get your solution. That's why we send 3 emails on the last day. The first one tells our subscribers that today is the last day of the sale. Then later in the day, we send a reminder to say the deadline is getting closer. And then an hour before we close the offer, we send a short and simple email with the link to buy for one final time.Don't send everything at once These are great reasons to email on the last day. But there are other good reasons to email during a launch, and we talk about them in the episode called 7 Sales Elements to Give You More Reasons To Email During Your Launch. Go check it out! So our top tip is to hold things back - don't share everything in the first few emails! Use the first email to introduce your product and then, on a different day, tell them about your payment plan. Or your bonuses. Or share a video. Just don’t send everything at once because every new piece of information you share calls for a different email. It gives you a good reason to email again during your launch. Remember - you can send as many emails as you need to, as long as you have a reason to.4. How do I move to a higher email frequency? Another question we get asked is, “How can I start sending emails more often and do it in the right way?”The short answer is that you don't suddenly go from emailing once a month, once a week, or once in a blue moon to every day. Because your audience will hate you for it. And so will your email platform and the Gmails of this world. This is only going to negatively impact your email deliverability. Instead, you want to slowly increase the frequency of your emails and pre-empty this action with some warning.The way we suggest you approach this is by emailing your list and telling them you feel like you haven't been delivering as much value as you could be. You'd like to help them move forward in their journey as quickly as possible. So you tell them what to expect going forward while you slowly step up your frequency. You could go from once a month to once a week and then after a month or two, you increase to twice or three times a week, for example. And then to every day. That way you step up your frequency in stages - this is less noticeable and less likely to break things.Tell your audience how they'll benefit from your emailsWhile you do that, don't forget to tell your audience why getting more emails from you is a good thing! They’ll be feeling like they're learning more, moving forward, and being drawn closer to you. Just don't do this in a way that's apologetic or sorry, especially if you're British (because you know how we like to apologise for everything). Always sell the benefits of your emails to your list.An alternative approach would be to email your entire list a few times and give them the option to opt in to hear from you more often. To do this, you need to send them to a form where they can actively input their name and address and specifically agree to receive more of your emails. This is a gentler approach, although it’s not the one we take because you'll get fewer people opting in.With the first approach we suggested, you'll still have access to your entire list minus the people who unsubscribe. This option typically pans out better. Whereas if you choose the gentler approach and ask your subscribers to opt in, only 10-30% of your list might do that. That means a lot of people won't be getting your emails. So we suggest you step things up gradually over time with some warning first.5. What about email marketing for the B2B industry?Another question we often get asked is, “I'm in a much 'drier' industry, like B2B professional services. How do I go about adding emotion and personality into my emails?”Great question! And what we encourage our members to do is to remember that we’re all speaking to real people. None of these subscribers are robots! They are people who have feelings, families, kids, pets, and parents - they can relate to all the things that go on in your life. That means they'll relate to any personal stories you share. But if that’s not your style, you can also tell stories about your customers. Let’s say you’re in the investment space. Don’t just talk about charts, stock values, and capital. Instead, tell the story of the client who’s been paying into their retirement fund. Show what their life looks like now as a result of working with you. Share the stories of how you serve people.Where do you find these stories? You ask your clients, of course. Ask them how your business impacted their lives, make sure you have permission to share, and then tell those stories in your email marketing. This also helps you build rapport with people and deepen your relationship. They’ll see you as much more of a trusted advisor. Join our Open Day for a chance to have your own questions about email marketing answered!A lot of the questions we get asked on our hotline coaching calls inside The League are business-specific. And we love nothing more than to dig into people’s businesses to understand what they sell, who they sell to, what problems they solve, etc. That’s how we’re able to give specific answers.But the power of these calls is twofold. It's great for the person who asks the question because we’re able to give specific answers based on someone’s business, product, personality, and individual circumstances. But it's great for everyone else too! Because other people learn from us giving out these answers. They'll pick up tips and ideas they can apply to their own businesses.We host our hotline group calls every other week, and people tell us they're completely transformational. They change their business and give them better results with their email marketing. And that’s just from listening to other people’s questions and answers!So if you want that same opportunity that members of The League have, join our 90-minute Open Day call on the 11th May 2022 at 8 pm UK time (3 pm EST). You can register for FREE here and join us live on the day.Come and ask any questions, and even if you don’t have any, just listen in and absorb the information. No doubt, you’ll get some cracking new ideas you can go and apply to your own business, whether you're selling products, services, high-priced items, lower-priced items, a recurring membership, or anything in between. We look forward to seeing you there!Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “The word of the day is H_A_____”. The word, in this case, was ‘headache', but it doesn't matter what the word is! This type of subject line creates curiosity. It’s like filling in the blanks. And people have to open the email to find out what it’s all about. It's a great one, and you can use it with whatever you’re working on.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesCourageous Content with Janet Murray.How To Get Your Marketing Questions Answered by Rob & Kennedy during ‘Hotline’ Group Coaching Calls in The League.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 some key questions about email marketing we answered in our group coaching calls) 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! 

Does Artificial Intelligence have a place in email marketing? Can you use AI tools to outsource your email writing? These are some of the questions we're answering for you today after testing a few AI tools. Curious to learn what we found? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:49) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(4:58) Should you use AI to write your emails? (6:50) Where can AI be useful?(7:47) AI tools can write about features and benefits.(9:04) AI tools can't help you with ideas and stories.(11:55) AI tools can't differentiate between products. (14:32) AI can't target people with different levels of experience. (17:42 ) AI tools can't create successful email campaigns. (24:19) 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. Should you use AI to write your emails?We’ve been playing with a few AI platforms for a while now, and we have opinions about them. This isn’t about us bashing AI tools though. We believe they definitely have a place, but we’re going to get into some of the issues we found when using them. So let's start by setting the tone with a quick example. This is what we typed into one of these AI tools to see what kind of marketing email they'd write for us:“Welcome to the Email Marketing Show podcast for online course creators and membership site owners.”Simple, right? Want to see what we got? “So this is the first episode of the Z Z podcast. I am super excited about the new venture and hope you all enjoy it too.”Not quite the introduction to our podcast we had in mind. In fact, this makes no sense whatsoever! Where does the "Z Z podcast" even come from??So let's look at some of the issues we've found with these tools. And it's important to say that these findings apply to all the tools across the board. It doesn't matter how good the platform is. You might have the best one out there (and it's up to you to do your research and work out which one is the best for you), but they all have the same issues. Where can AI be useful? AI tools can be useful in what we consider to be simple copywriting - and that's where the stakes aren't massively high. So for example, if you have a membership site or a course and want to send an email to promote a new video, you might want to write a little paragraph that describes what that video is for. You'd pop the information into one of these tools, press a button, and get a few options back.Bear in mind though that once you’ve put this amount of copy into the tool, you’ve almost done the job yourself! With a bit of tweaking, you could use the best out of the options the tool gives you, and it'd probably be good enough. But this is only for a piece of copy where the stakes aren't that high. AI tools can write about features and benefits For us, it boils down to this - AI tools can only write about features and benefits. You're feeding information into these platforms, and the outcome is linear - it's features- and benefit-driven.The problem is that people don't buy just on features and benefits - they also buy on emotion. And these tools are completely devoid of personality – of your nuances and your isms (as we like to call them). They don't have any authenticity because a robot wrote them! There are no pieces of you showing in the turns of phrase and the way the emails are being worded. They're sterile - perfectly written, with no 'knack' about them. So if you want to write about basic features and benefits, by all means, you can try and use AI tools, see what they give you, and then manicure the content afterwards.AI tools can't help you with ideas and storiesThe issue with writing about features and benefits is that it's all about why you should buy a certain thing. And surely you don’t want to show up on the Internet every single day with another email that asks people to buy your product. Right? That's what so much email marketing out there already is – just bashing people over the head with offers!The problem is that's all these AI tools can do. You can't use them to craft good, compelling, interesting stories about something that happened to you. Or pull something out of the news that might be relevant to your email list. And one of the biggest struggles people have when it comes to email marketing is finding the things to write their emails about. Well, guess what? If you use AI tools as part of your email marketing strategy to write your emails, you still need to fuel the tool with ideas. And if you run out of ideas, the tools won't give you anything at all!So if you’re worried about doing email marketing because you don’t know what to write about, AI isn’t going to save the day for that. Yet. And, of course, this is true as of mid-2022. Things might change, but we think we’re years away from AI getting close to what you can do with your digital marketing with some simple techniques.AI tools require a lot of workAnother factor to take into account is that you have to learn how to use these tools. It’s a bit like learning how to play an instrument – you need to know what parameters to put in. It’s not just a case of clicking a button - it's not that simple! You need to learn how to feed information into the tools in the correct way.And once you’ve done all that, the platform will then spit out a few variations. You still need to go through them, pick the best one, and tweak it. There’s a lot of work involved!AI tools can't differentiate between different productsPlus, let's not forget that AI tools can't use your personality, can’t express things as you would, and can't talk about what goes on in your life. They can’t share the metaphors or create stories, which are the most effective marketing tool in the world to help you create connections. And if AI tools could create stories, they wouldn’t be about you at all!This means that AI tools currently can’t differentiate your product from someone else’s because they can’t communicate the unique elements of your framework. They don't know what makes it different and effective.If we were to ask one of these AI tools to spit out an email to promote our membership, The League, we’d put in that it’s a membership that helps people write better emails through psychology-driven email marketing. But if someone else comes along and inputs similar information, the tool is likely to spit out similar emails.The tool doesn't know about the five elements we teach our members. It can't know what happened during our coaching call last week. And it doesn't know about our Adaptive Offer framework that helps people put together compelling offers, which is something that sits in The Battle Plan section inside The League.We can’t teach the tool what’s different about our membership. So if you look at the email that’s generated for us and compare it to one that's written for someone who offers a similar product, there wouldn't be much difference. And that's no good. AI tools can't target people with different levels of experienceWe also noticed that if you use AI tools to write your email content, you’ll struggle to target them to the right level of experience of your audience.We tested this out by using a made-up gardening programme as an example. Initially, we tried the angle of people who might be starting gardening and would like to learn how to do it. But when we changed the parameters to address experienced gardeners, there was nothing different to target the advanced gardeners specifically. It still spoke about gardening at the most simplistic level.So if you have sections of your audience with different levels of experience and expertise, you need more persuasive email copy to address them. And what an AI tool can generate for you is very bland. The copy has no personality and therefore nobody cares – it has nothing that makes it sound interesting. It's not copy that builds relationships. It's just fact-based copy that keeps asking people to buy. And this leaves all the heavy lifting to your sales page (assuming these emails are even good enough to get your subscribers there!)In essence, what you can write with AI tools are bland emails that fit someone who hasn’t done any research into their product, their audience, their personality, or their brand values. And in this busy world, that’s not good enough anymore. You can't send emails like that expect to get results.There’s nothing emotive in these emails – there are no good adjectives in there, and they’re not written following any copywriting principles to help persuade people. So it's still quicker for you to write your own emails. Never mind having to then sift through various versions generated by the tools and having to edit them!AI tools can't create successful email campaignsThe other issue we found when testing AI tools is that they can't build campaigns. Imagine you’re going to launch a new membership, and as part of your marketing strategy, you want to send 7 emails over 7 days. Every day, you'll feed information into the tool, sift through the versions you get back, pick the best one, edit it, and send it out. You'll do this every single day for the 7 days of your launch.The problem is that your emails aren’t getting any better at handling objections or building a sales argument or conversation. They aren’t getting any more persuasive over the course of the 7 days. They're not stacking on top of each other to become more compelling - they're just going to be the same.Because the tool doesn't know you're building a journey or a campaign of emails - not like the ones we teach inside The League. It's building one email at a time. And that means you won’t be able to take your subscribers on a journey. You’re just spitting similar emails at them day after day, and we know that singular emails do not work – they don't have the same impact, and that's why we don't use them!Some examples of AI-generated emailsSo to test out these tools, we did a little experiment. The input we used to feed into the tools was:“The League is a membership which helps online course creators sell more of their online courses with psychology-based email marketing.”And this was the best example of an email generated by one of the AI tools:“Are you sick of spending hours a day working on your emails? If you're like me, you're always looking for new ways to improve your business. And one of the best ways to do that is by learning about psychology. In this course, we'll teach you the psychology of how people respond to emails. We'll show you how to use it to create the best emails you've ever sent. You can also use this information to build better relationships with your clients. It's never been easier to send emails. And it's never been more important to understand why people respond the way that they do.”When you look at this email objectively, it doesn't go anywhere. It talks around in circles and doesn’t even make an offer! You could easily take half of the words out, and the email would be as impactful. It’s full of wasted words, and while it at least makes sense, it’s not great.The worse example we got was one that made us howl with laughter. And it goes like this:“I don't have any money to spend on marketing. That's where you come in.”Now, we said at the beginning that it wasn’t our intention to bash AI tools, but this isn’t right, is it?Our final thoughts about AI tools We think AI has its place, but only when the writing is super simple. It’s more of a springboard for you to go and do something else with. You could give the output from an AI tool to your VA or someone in your team to work on, for example.But it's not a solution to outsourcing email marketing, and in our opinion, AI tools are a long way away from being anything close to that. So let’s pay attention to AI – let’s watch it. It’ll definitely do incredible and amazing things in the world, but it’s not going to revolutionise email marketing anytime soon. So for now, your time is better off spent learning how to write your own emails and campaigns, just like we teach our members inside The League.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Be less ‘Marie’” and we put the word ‘Marie’ in quotes because you always have to be a little careful when you do this type of thing. If the person receiving the email is called Marie (and you're likely to have a Marie or any other name you pick in your audience), then it might be a bit weird for them. But this particular story was about a real person named Marie, who was Rob’s best friend at one of his old workplaces. Rob and Marie lost touch for years and years until one day they bumped into each other again. So the idea was to be less ‘Marie’ in the sense that you shouldn’t lose touch with your subscribers.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesThe Therapeutic Benefits of Writing Your Own Emails.7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.Little Tricks to Write Better Emails That Aren’t Boring.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 place Artificial Intelligence has in email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

This week we're talking about the therapeutic benefits of writing your own emails. Is writing therapeutic? Absolutely! And writing emails can be just as much a therapy for you as it is a sales-making activity. So let's break down all these cool therapeutic benefits of writing your own emails. Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:16) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:38) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(5:52) Write the emails you enjoy writing.(8:53) Allow yourself to savour the moment.(11:33) Train your brain to become more mindful.(13:28) Create the habit of writing every day.(15:46) Stop worrying about the technology - focus on the psychology!(17:24) The commercial benefits of writing your emails.(18:25 ) Be you!(21:05) 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. Writing emails can be fun! Let’s talk about why email writing (and generally the act of writing) can be therapeutic for you. Because writing emails is not just a sales mechanism! The reason why loads of people put off doing email marketing is that it sounds hard. It comes across as difficult, complicated, laborious, and maybe even boring. The key word here is that it sounds like it might be all these things. And we all want to do things that are easy, don’t we?But here's what we're saying. You can turn something you’re currently putting off and think you might not like into something you enjoy!That'd be cool, right? So how do we do that? Write the emails you enjoy writingThe first thing you need to do is to write emails you enjoy writing – emails you would actually want to read. And that sounds a bit crazy because a lot of the emails in your inbox might look boring, formulaic, or braggy. But you don't want to write emails like that. And the great news is that you don't have to!You can write better emails that will also help you stand out. You do that by writing the emails you'd like to read - the ones you enjoy. Because that means you'll enjoy the process and the therapy of writing.  Kennedy, for example, started writing daily emails because he’s dyslexic. He looked at the process as a way of working a muscle. If you exercise that muscle every day, over time you’re going to get better at using it. So he told everyone on his website that he’s dyslexic, and if you join his daily emails, there will be typos. It might be all over the place when it comes to spelling, but he promised the emails would be good and valuable.So if you feel you're not great right now, the expectation of turning up 3-7 times a week with an email to your list will give you the motivation to show up and improve that skill. It’s a bit like having a personal trainer – it’s what will make you show up at the gym and do the work so you can improve your skills.  Allow yourself to savour the momentAnother benefit of writing emails is that it allows you to be present. The idea of mindfulness has become increasingly popular over the last few years. It's about being more mindful of what's going on in the present - living in the present moment. And one of the activities you can do to become more mindful is writing, which is why journaling is so popular. It's all about sitting down and writing privately to yourself about how you feel, what you're grateful for, what you've achieved or want to achieve, your goals, etc.Granted, you might not want to share your private thoughts in the emails to your list - although we’re all about being open, honest, and real with your subscribers. We always encourage you to show them what’s going on in your life and start your emails with a story. And one of the things that this enables you to do is to become more mindful of what's going on in the world around you – to savour the moment and enjoy each thing that happens to you.  Going for a walk in the woods and allowing yourself to become more aware of what’s going on around you is a satisfying thing to do. When you focus on what's going on around you (the sound and sensation of your feet on the ground or the feeling of the breeze through the trees, for example), your brain can't worry about the big stuff that’s going on in your life. Train your brain to become more mindfulRob, for example, likes to either write his emails using Google Drive or use the full-screen, distraction-free mode on his Mac, so he can write without seeing anything else - there are no other tabs open, and all he has in front of him is a screen. So he'll sit down and allow himself to get lost in the moment of writing the emails. It's almost as if he was writing to himself.And when you write the emails you want to write and read yourself, it makes you more confident in what you send. You worry less about the quality of your emails, and this forces you to become more mindful of what’s going on in your everyday life.Even though there’s nothing too exciting going on in our average day, we probably each come up with 5-10 things we could turn into an email. And that only happens because we've trained our brains to become more mindful of the things that are happening and to live more in the moment. And that also makes you more relaxed and less stressed.Create the habit of writing every dayAnother benefit of writing your own emails is that it allows you to become more consistent. It creates the habit of writing every day. And when you commit to something, it trains your brain to do it. You'll make it happen. And that can only mean positive things about the way you feel and think about yourself. In fact, it allows you to achieve more in your life, in your business, in your relationships – in everything you’re trying to do. And it's a great way of improving your own consistency through forging habits.One of the things we recommend you do if you decide to send emails more regularly is to build a daily email writing habit into your life so you can end up with more emails than you'll ever send. Just imagine you’re going to send an email every day and write them daily, even if you’ve only committed to sending 3-5 emails a week.  That’s good for two reasons:It means it means that if you’ve committed to sending 3 emails a week but you write 7, you end up with 4 emails as a backup that you can fall back on if anything goes wrong. You could tell your VA or anyone in your business to go and retrieve these emails and send them for you, in case you can’t do it yourself, for some reason.The other reason is that if you’ve written 7 emails but only send out 3 a week, for example, you could choose your 3 favourite ones and only send out those.Either way, you'll always be ahead.Stop worrying about the technology - focus on the psychology! And if you’re worried about the technology of email marketing, then don’t be! There are ways around that. You could write your emails in a Google Doc, for example, (like Kennedy does), and then have someone else in your business (in our case, Rob) send them for you.Remember that every time you log into your email platform you’re adding more cognitive load and mental calories to the activity of sending your emails. You'll get carried away and distracted by the technology, rather than focusing on the psychology of it all, as you should. So while it’s important you’re the person creating that content, it doesn’t mean you have to be the one uploading it onto your email marketing platform and physically sending those emails.So write every day. Because that allows you to accrue ‘accidental savings’, much like one of those banking apps that round up your transaction to the nearest pound so you can add the rest to your savings account. Without even knowing or noticing, you accrue savings. And it’s the same if you get into this habit of writing daily, even if you then decide not to send out all those emails. The commercial benefits of writing your emailsThere are also commercial benefits to writing your emails. You'll get to improve your copywriting skills (not just your writing skills). And that's about your ability to write emails that get people to feel things or take action. By doing this more often, you’re going to become a better writer of copy that persuades and sells and you'll build your creativity muscle. Plus, you’re going to improve your marketing savviness and find better hooks for your emails. When we have coaching calls with our members inside The League, we find marketing hooks for their emails easily and quickly because by doing this a lot, we’ve built this muscle and this savviness. Be you!All of this allows you to write emails from a much more 'selfish' perspective. Not everyone is going to love your emails. Some people are going to unsubscribe because they don't want to hear about the stories you have to share. And that’s okay. Because the majority of people in your audience do want to hear them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.So there’s no point in tailoring your entire email marketing to be dry, dull, and boring just to suit the small number of people who only want to hear from you when you have a special offer. If you go for the approach of writing emails for yourself, you get to be yourself a lot more naturally.Imagine your email list is your house. You have your own decoration and wallpaper - your own things. And if someone’s invited into your house, they can’t complain about any of it. If they didn't like it, they could have said no at the door. That’s what the unsubscribe button at the end of each email is for. It allows you to put up a little barrier. Because when you first get started with email marketing you worry about people complaining or unsubscribing and not liking what you share. Or responding back with mean things.But remember that you’re doing this for you, not for them. Email marketing isn't like social media. You don’t need to create content to please an algorithm that's based on the deep psychology of what the platform thinks people want to consume at that moment in time. With email marketing, it's not about creating content you don't want to create just so you can please the algorithm. You can write the emails that you want to read. And that will help you build the audience who will want to read your emails.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “We got RUMBLED.” This email was about the fact we were planning the launch of our mastermind “Level up”, which was going to be made available to 15 people inside of The League. The idea was to have a big launch and some clever marketing around it, ready to go live in April.But in the middle of January, somebody in one of our coaching calls asked us if we’d consider doing an accelerator mastermind. So we had to tell them there and then and sold out that mastermind in one and a half weeks. In the end, there was no marketing – we just announced it, and that was that. Hence the subject line, “We got RUMBLED.”Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesCreative Ways to Batch Your Emails.Writing email every day vs batch writing in one go.Writing Subject Lines Without Using Formulas. 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 therapeutic benefits of writing your own 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! 

Today on the podcast we chat with Cody Burch. Cody is a member of The League and helps course creators and membership site owners launch their programs with funnels and Facebook ads through agency done-for-you work, a membership, live events, and courses. He's here to tell us how he increased sales with email marketing by a whopping 1,000% just by implementing two of our campaigns. Ready to have your mind absolutely blown? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our FREE download, Click Tricks.(3:34) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(4:42) Cody's email marketing before he joined The League.(11:44) Implementing our campaigns (and increasing sales by 1,000%!)(17:57) Cody's success with the Time Lord campaign.(20:22) How does Cody feel about his email marketing now?(22:45) The one action that had the most impact on Cody's email marketing. (24:28) What's next for Cody's email marketing? (25:52) Has email marketing taken over Cody's life?(28:03) 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. Cody's email marketing before joining The League When Cody started his business over 5 years ago, he didn’t have a funnel, an email list, or any presence on the Internet. It was only about a year later, when he wrote the book The One Hour Funnel to help people create their online lead capture system quickly, that he started collecting email addresses. His book has been one of the biggest list builders for Cody - one he's been using for years. But while Cody was growing his list, he wasn't nurturing it. He wanted his emails to be perfect and was putting himself under so much pressure that he'd only send emails to his list sporadically and when he had something to promote. Even though the front end was working (and Cody was collecting leads through funnels and ads) his approach wasn’t structured - with no system or strategy behind it. He might promote something similar to what people had downloaded from him, but when that worked, it was random and lucky. Nothing horrible was happening - he wasn't getting haters or huge amounts of unsubscribed. But soon enough, Cody realised there was a gap in his marketing. His front end was working, but he had no real plan on how to nurture his list. And that was until about a year ago when Cody downloaded our Daily Email Strategy (now the Bottomless Email Strategy) and from there he eventually joined our membership, The League. What did Cody's emails to his list look like?Cody's emails weren't story-based or personal – they were completely promotional. Whether it was Cody selling his own products or sharing affiliate links, there was no backstory or consistency with his emails. He would go so long without emailing that his subscribers probably forgot who he was, what he did, or what they'd downloaded from him. And that's why people weren't opening Cody's emails or clicking his links with consistency. When somebody downloaded a lead magnet, Cody would send them three days' worth of emails trying to sell them the next relevant low-ticket offer, but other than that, he had no automation set up. His promotions were sporadic, and this meant he was making money in his business asymmetrically – people would opt-in and may or may not buy something from him over the next 6-12 months. But when he was asked what a new lead was worth to him in the first 30 days, Cody had no idea how to even track that. It wasn't until October 2021 that Cody committed to one email a day. And when he started doing that, everything Cody thought might happen didn’t happen, while everything we said would happen did happen! Amazing, right? Open rates, click-through rates, and replies went up, and he started receiving more and more replies from people saying that his emails spoke to them.Implementing our campaigns So we now know that Cody had a sporadic email strategy for about 3 years before joining our membership. After that, he started sending out 3 or 4 emails a day and getting more comfortable with the practice. But he still hadn't fully committed. As Cody described it, it was like a new baby giraffe learning how to walk. Then finally in February 2022, Cody implemented the Getting to Know sequence (our welcome sequence) and deleted his original three-email sequence. Following that, in just one night he wrote the Overture sequence (which is one of our direct sales campaigns). Since then, people who join Cody's list receive their lead magnet and over the 4-day email sequence, Cody informs them that he'll send a helpful piece of marketing advice every single day. People are of course free to unsubscribe, but if they choose to stay, they now know what to expect. How Cody increased his sales after implementing our campaignsWhen Cody looked at the data, he noticed that in January 2022 (before implementing our campaigns), he made 10 low-ticket sales. This meant that, on average, one person every 3 days would buy from Cody. Then in February 2022, after implementing our campaigns, he made 110 low-ticket item sales, and then another 97 in March - for a total of 207 sales over the course of two months. That's now an average of 3 and a half people buying from Cody per day! And that's after he generates an average of 35 new leads per day via his Facebook ads.In short, Cody spend around $7,500 on Facebook ads over the course of two months, and, for the first time ever, he generated $10,669 in revenue. The days of Cody making money asymmetrically are officially over! With a structure and a plan to nurture his leads, Cody makes money more consistently. He's also confident in the knowledge that while he spends money growing his list, he can also make that money back in no time. Cody is now cash flow positive on building his list.Cody's success with the Time Lord campaignCody also shared the story of when he decided to invest in a $10,000 one-day consulting with a mentor, and after looking at his finances, he realised he was $3,000 short on being able to pay this amount upfront. So he decided to look inside The League to see what resources he could use to generate that money, and he pulled out our Time Lord campaign. This sequence has a countdown clock within it and an incentive to sign up to an offer by a certain time. Long story short, that campaign alone made Cody $3,258 in a week in late December 2021, which meant Cody could pay for the mentoring he wanted. As a result of this, Cody now makes more offers. More often than not, he’ll hear success stories from other members of The League, look into what campaign they used, study it, and then figure out what he could sell with it. So Cody is more proactive with his email marketing – he makes better offers, he’s more creative with how he’s offering resources to his community, and he's been able to increase his subscribers' upsell average order value.  How does Cody feel about his email marketing now?Cody feels great about his email marketing! He’s been emailing every day since the beginning of the year and hasn’t missed a day. He writes his email daily and is proud of being in the discipline of collecting the dots and connecting the dots. He gathers stories and experiences daily and then connects them to something that might be relevant to his audience and that shows some of his personality.For Cody, it's just like working out a muscle. He uses Asana to collect his content marketing ideas and document everything there. So if he gets stuck at any point, he goes to his list of ideas, finds one that speaks to him, and uses it as a prompt to write his daily email. Cody is also getting a lot of positive feedback about his emails. He might be dismissive of his little stories sometimes, but people feel like they know him and know about his life. And getting feedback is extremely fulfilling – it means the world to people like Cody (and us!) who send lots of emails.The one action that had the most impact on Cody’s email marketingFor Cody, the one thing that had the most impact was letting go of his idea of perfection. He thought his emails had to be perfect – that he couldn’t send an email until every single detail was taken care of. But that was just a false belief.And Cody still finds that embarrassing to admit, considering it's what his book and podcast are all about. Things don't need to be perfect. It's about getting into the discipline of sending emails. So his top tip is to start sending an email every day with no judgement. Just hit publish with confidence because it won't be as bad as your imagination tells you.What’s next for Cody’s email marketing?Cody is now looking at ways to promote his live events and perhaps even a virtual summit through email marketing. So he has ideas for high-ticket items in the pipeline, but at the same time, he's continuously looking at increasing the average sale value for each subscriber. He's definitely committed to daily emails – he went from wanting to send more emails to deciding to send a daily email. And that switch that flipped in his brain means he's always going to find a way to send an email to his list every single day. Has email marketing taken over Cody’s life?Cody says his email marketing takes around 10-20 minutes a day to write and send an email. And that's because his ideas are already written down - otherwise, it'd take a lot longer! But now that he does this so often, he knows how to do it. He doesn’t do a lot of editing either – he just makes sure there aren’t any crazy typos in his emails and hits send.Cody also told us he chooses not to batch his emails. He writes them daily because he feels they’re more in the moment and closer to what happened on the day or the day before. And he also recommended the book Storyworthy, which talks about what stories are worth talking about and how you can build connections with people.Subject line of the week This week’s subject line of the week is “Can’t stop watching these videos on loop.” One of the things Rob tries to do with subject lines sometimes is to make it sound like the thing he’s referring to is in the email. But not in a way that makes them feel scammed or ripped off when they get into the email!This particular email had Rob talking about the TikTok addition and the fact you can’t help but just watch one video on a loop and then watch the next one and the next one and then the next one... The subject line worked because it hinted at the fact there might be something for people to look at inside the email. And when people click through and read it, he's describing the videos first and then going into the lesson and the offer as he normally would. Useful Episode ResourcesAbout CodyIf you want to connect with Cody you can find him on his website. If you enjoy the one-hour funnel idea on how to quickly build high-converting funnels, you can get a FREE copy of Cody’s book here.  Related episodesHow Dan Greef Made £9k in just 1 Day, Sending Simple Emails.How Sheila Went from the Starting Blocks to Total Clarity – an Email Marketing Case Study.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 our amazing member Cody Burch increased sales with email marketing by a whopping 1,000%) 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! 

Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks about the emails you send once people have joined your membership. Mike and Callie know everything about memberships, and they're sharing their best practice around email marketing for paying members. This conversation is all about the importance of communicating with the people who are already inside your membership. And you definitely don't want to miss it! Ready to discover the secret to serving your members through emails? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:46) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (4:45) Did Mike really once perform magic in Vegas?(6:54) Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members. (9:15) Introducing the Weekly Digest email. (10:42) Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea. (13:46) Building relationships with your members. (15:26) The benefits of segmenting your members. (17:42) The key ingredients to the Weekly Digest. (24:13) Subject line of the week with Mike and Callie.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 email marketing is crucial for your paying membersContrary to what a lot of people think, selling your membership isn't the finish line – it’s the starting pistol! That's right - it's not enough to get people inside your membership. Once they're there, you need to keep them subscribed - month after month and year after year. You need to market beyond the sale and give your members a reason to stay and use what they’re paying for. And the emails you send are critical in doing that.The challenge here is that typically you have a lot to tell them about. You have logistical emails (like reminders for live calls), payment receipt emails, emails to let people know about new content, etc. As the membership site owner, you're going to take up a lot of your members’ inboxes. And all the prompts and reminders to come and get engaged with your membership can get drowned out. So the simplest solution is to send what Mike and Callie call a Weekly Members Digest email.The Weekly Digest emailThis email is in addition to your welcome or onboarding sequence – it’s all about marketing after the sale. It’s what’s going to remind your members that you exist. Because often, when people first join a membership, they're excited and have a good look around. But then life gets in the way, weeks go by, and they haven't had a chance to log in again. So the Weekly Digest helps you remind members that you exist. It brings them back to the site and gets them to log in and feel excited again. It also enables you, as the membership owner, to keep members up to date with any content you’ve just added and signpost future value by letting them know what’s going to happen in the following week, for example.Plus, it's a chance to highlight your community and share your members' wins and progress, which in turn allows you to inspire and motivate more members. It's just one email, but it allows you to do a range of really cool things!Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome ideaIt's important you send this email every week on the same day and at the same time – for Mike and Callie, it’s on a Saturday. That creates a routine for your members – a ritual and a habit. They go into their day expecting it, and if they spend no other time on your membership over the week, this is the trigger for them to go and log in. In essence, the Weekly Digest allows your members to realise the value of your membership, even if they don’t access it too often. It enables them to keep up to date even if they’re not currently in a position to consume your content.With most memberships, there’s a lot of content being shared. So the Weekly Digest allows you to curate what you think they need to see in any given week. It also allows you to hand-pick the conversations that are happening in the community because otherwise, they might get lost. And if you’re segmenting your members based on their interests, you can also use conditional content to direct them to certain conversations based on what you know they're interested in and what their needs are.The Weekly Digest helps your members get to the most important content for them as quickly as possible. It's a service you're providing them - you're offering the convenience of a shortcut in their inbox with the key information they need.Building relationships with your membersMike and Callie shared that there have been times when they were travelling and their Weekly Digest got delayed, and they had members asking if they were okay! So the minute you, as the membership site owner, miss that routine, that causes a pattern interrupt for people.The Weekly Digest ritual is a way to stay connected with members. It's why Mike and Callie have a paragraph at the start of their email that lets people into their world. They share what they’re doing and what they’ve been working on. Plus, they invite members to share what they’re working on, and they get a lot of replies to this email. So the Weekly Digest is a way to maintain the connection and relationship with your members, so they don’t feel like a number and faceless people in the community. It means people are getting value outside of their membership too. The benefits of segmenting your membersMike and Callie tag people based on where they are in their journey. This means their members go through a roadmap. If someone's at a beginner level, Mike and Callie aren’t going to distract them by telling them about their Growth Mastermind, for example. But this means that the Weekly Digest isn’t the only email their members will receive during the week – there are others that signpost people to content that's specifically relevant to them. Using a tag-driven CRM allows Mike and Callie to not only target the emails their members will receive on any given day but also to tailor the content of some of the sections in the Weekly Digest. Having a more granular approach to the emails that members receive means that not everything needs to be piled into the Weekly Digest.And we love the fact that Mike and Callie send this email on a Saturday. Because that allows them to straddle the two weeks – you can tell members what happened last week and also what’s happening next week. It's brilliant!The key ingredients to the Weekly DigestMike and Callie tell us there are a few key sections in the Weekly Digest that should be applicable to every membership.1. An introduction to your worldThe first section of the Weekly Digest is an introduction where you let people know what’s going on in your world. This is important because it helps people build a relationship with you. It's also the perfect place to signpost anything that’s in the works - in other words, the future value of the membership. 2. The What's New sectionThe second section focuses on what’s new. It highlights what people might have missed in the last week. But if you don't have anything new, this could be something specific, like a useful resource from the archives.Or it could be topical content. For example, if the summer holidays are approaching, you could highlight a piece of existing content about how to handle your membership if you’re thinking of taking a break. It’s now new, but it’s relevant to your members right now. Or you could pull some curated content from your community that you think your members might find interesting or want to get involved in.3. The Wins sectionMike and Callie tell us this is one of the most important sections of your Weekly Digest. It's where you highlight members’ progress and wins. This obviously means you should have a way to collect these in your membership so you can shout out those members in your Weekly Digest. Doing this gives people a warm, fuzzy feeling because you’re recognising them and highlighting them to other members.Psychologically, it also shows other members that when people get stuck in, they have success from using the content from your membership. Seeing other people do well encourages those who are struggling or haven't used the resources yet to keep going. It shows that the system works.And it provides context as well. Because often in the online business space people think that in order to do well you have to be doing 7 or 8 figures. But actually, it’s about celebrating the small wins as well as the big ones. When people get over a roadblock and experience success after being stuck for months, for example, that’s worth celebrating. So this section contextualises the notion of success for your members. And it gives permission (and a little nudge) to those members, who perhaps aren't quite as actively engaged, to share.As for you, the membership site owner, it gives you the chance to talk about how great your members are and how well your membership is doing for them, rather than talking about yourself all the time. The wins section highlights the community element of your membership, and communities thrive on engagement. All communities have 'passive members' who might read other people's posts but don't share their own. And when they’re continuously signposted to existing discussions or wins from others, it encourages them to come out of the woodwork and get involved too. Subject line of the week with Mike and CallieThis week’s subject line is one that gave Mike and Callie their first hater, who took the time to reply to them and explain over many paragraphs why they hate Mike and Callie. And the subject line was no other than, “Do you remember your first time?”It was about the first time you joined a membership and had a great experience. But this person took great offense and called Mike and Callie ‘idiotic boomers’ who didn’t know a thing about marketing. Funny, huh? Useful Episode ResourcesAbout Mike and Callie If you want to connect with Mike and Callie, you can find them on their website, where they have a lot of free content and resources, including their podcast. And if you want to check out their membership, it's called Membership Academy, and (guess what?) it's about all things memberships! Related episodesTurn Problems into Opportunities – Convert Haters into Sales with Laura Belgray from The Talking Shrimp. Onboarding Emails Examples for your Online Course. 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 email marketing for paying members) 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 giving you something a little different - something that has less to do with email marketing and a lot more to do with how to run a business strategy session for your business. And to help you do just that, we're taking you behind the scenes of our own business strategy weekend in Manchester. Ready to be inspired? Because this will no doubt help you come up with some great ideas for your own business.  SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:24) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (5:04) Booking our business strategy session 'weekend'.(9:59) Creating the agenda for our business strategy session.(11:36) Are you the bottleneck in your business? (14:55) Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff.(18:19) The Love - Happy - Hate exercise.(20:59) Create the business YOU want.(29:27) Working less IN the business and more ON it. (36:09) 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. Our business strategy session 'weekend'A few months ago, we booked an Airbnb in Manchester to run our very first business strategy session. We went for two days during the week, but we like to call it a 'weekend'. Because, why not? This trip obviously came to a cost, but we wanted to give ourselves a bit of a treat and also get value from the experience. So we booked first-class train tickets and picked an apartment over a budget hotel. Why? Because we wanted somewhere comfortable and not cut any corners. We invested in this, and that put us in the mindset of working hard for it.We chose a place where we could get our heads down and do a lot of work - rather than sitting with bits of paper on a bed. Our apartment had three different areas we could work in. And that meant we could keep ourselves refreshed and our brains active instead of being trapped in a tiny room. Why Manchester? Because we purposely chose to be away from home. We wanted to get into a different mindset - think about the business in a different way. And why not make this a bit of a holiday, too? We made some time for fun, always went out to eat (rather than cooking in the apartment), and had a nice meal and some cocktails too.Another thing we did was to ask our team not to contact us unless something was on fire. Our CTO could contact us in case of an emergency, of course. But otherwise, we signed off from Slack for two days. And this gave our team some independence but also ensured we weren’t going to deal with day-to-day business questions and issues. Creating the agenda for our business strategy sessionOn the lead-up to our business strategy session, we both kept a Google Document where we listed things to discuss in Manchester. What did we put on there? We added anything that we felt was problematic in the business, like things that we were doing that we thought perhaps we shouldn't do. But we were also on the lookout for opportunities for growth - ways to maximise the profitability of the business.So we started with a very disorganised agenda for this meeting. And on the way to Manchester, we condensed it down and categorised all the items into sections. Are you the bottleneck in your business? The main thing we wanted to discuss was the fact we both felt we'd been the bottleneck in our business. We wanted to understand whether that was true and then figure out how to change this. For example, we were approving every graphic for the podcast or social media, every sales page, every lead magnet, etc. There were lots of areas in our business where our staff always seemed to be waiting for us because of how we'd set things up. Everything felt slower than it needed to be, and we felt bad for it. Plus, we worried that this could end up affecting our members and customers. It never did (because we’re both acutely aware of customer experience), but as we continue to grow our business and serve more customers, we knew these problems would only be amplified. So we started looking at the systems and people to ensure these issues wouldn’t escalate. And this is something worth remembering for anyone running a business – any issues you have now are only going to be amplified as your business grows.Ultimately the whole responsibility for our business lies with us. But during our time away we started looking at ways to delegate some of the day-to-day responsibilities so that all the decisions and checking of various areas of our business wouldn’t be with us anymore. In other words, we started thinking about how we could empower the people in our team to make decisions, own elements of the business, and have more responsibility. And this was easy because our staff is made of people we have chosen - people who are excellent and who we trust fully. Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff In order to be able to make changes to our team so we didn't have everyone reporting to us, we mapped out all our staff members. Considering we're a small business, we have quite a large team. And there's a strategic reason for that. We used to have a very lean team, which meant the few people in our team had a lot of responsibilities. And when they let, they left a big hole in our business.So now we take a different approach and have more people who focus on specific aspects of the business. The downside is that everyone would report to us, which put us in charge of all the micro-decisions in the business. And this was a mistake. A consequence of the fact that we were growing - and not just financially. We'd been adding more elements to our business (pushing Instagram more, growing our membership The League, our Facebook community, etc.), and that meant our team had been growing too.  So we created drew a hierarchy of our staff, even though we don't like to think of our team this way. Because our staff is in charge - they manage us and keep us in check, so we don't see ourselves as being above them. But this exercise allowed us to figure out who needed to report to us and who didn't.And our advice to you would be to reduce the number of people who directly work with you and put others in charge. We started that process a while back, but a few months in we're still working on implementing that plan. And that's because it takes time to unpack the thought processes in your head, give them to someone else, and have them feel confident and competent in being able to run things.The Love - Happy - Hate exerciseThe next thing we did was an exercise we call Love - Happy - Hate. This is something we'd never done together, even though we’ve been friends for about 20 years! We never had deep conversations about what makes us happy, what we want, or what our weaknesses are.So for this exercise, we divided a piece of paper into three columns under the headings Love, Happy, and Hate. And then it's pretty simple. In the Love column, you list the things you love doing in the business. For us, this is things like hosting our online coaching calls inside our membership The League, for example. In the Happy column, you list the things you’re happy to do. These are things you don’t love or hate, but if you have no one else in your business who can do them (or can't afford to outsource them), you're happy enough to do them yourself.And in the Hate column, you list the things you hate doing. For us, it's bookkeeping and accountancy. And thankfully, we already have people who take care of that. These are almost non-negotiables – things you're not prepared to do yourself.This exercise led us to some interesting revelations about ourselves, each other, and our individual strengths and weaknesses. And that cemented the fact that we are quite different in terms of the lifestyle we want and the things that make us fulfilled and happy.Create the business YOU want So even if there's no one else in your business, this is an exercise worth doing. And if you have business partners or members of staff, by all means, do this with them because it’s important to decide what you want. Often, our businesses are shaped around what we need at the time.Let's say you have to make some cash and fast, for example. You might start selling Power Hours. And that works to an extent, but before you know it, you're having more Power Hours than you can handle, and you become the bottleneck in your business. Power Hours aren't scalable, and you realise you have a business on your hands that isn't what you wanted. This is an extreme example, but it happens.So make sure you’re creating the business and life you want, rather than doing the things you have to do in order to pay the bills.For us, one of the things we both like to do is travelling. So during our business strategy session we agreed to shape the business in a way that allows us to travel. That’s how we decided to do a Mastermind in the States, for example. And we decided that at the back of paying attention to what we love doing and what we want out of our business.Plus, we also decided we wanted to get paid better because we’re not the best-paid people in our business. We have team members and agencies who work with us who get paid a lot more. So another thing to consider is whether you're paying yourself enough. You are, after all, the business owner, the founder, and the thought leader. Looking at the different parts of your businessThe next thing we did was to look at the different parts of our business. So we have our membership The League, our email writing agency, a series of standalone products, and an idea for a mastermind. We looked at how things are working in each of these areas and how much effort is going into them. Then we considered each area to check whether it was profitable, for example - and not just in cash terms. It’s important to take into account both money and time. So for the effort we put in, are we getting a good return? What's broken and what needs fixing? Is there anything that isn’t working or that we want to get rid of?For example, in 2021 we spent a lot of money on Facebook ads and lost thousands of dollars. So we decided to stop doing ads and instead amplify the things that are already working for us. Do you have any products, services, or marketing channel activities that you'd like to make a conscious decision to step away from?Mapping out the futureThen we mapped out on a huge sheet of flip chart paper where we're going as a business and where we want to be in three years from now. Because believe it or not, we'd never sat down to figure out what would be a good outcome, where we’d like to be, or where we think we need to be at the end of this year in order to be on track.And then we looked at what needs to happen in the business. We considered all the moving parts we need to operate in order for everything to be effective. And by the end of the two days, we left with 5 or 6 bits of paper which we took photographs of and stuck into Google Drive.Working less IN the business and more ON it When we got home at the end of the two days we felt we'd had a break from working in the business. And this made us realise that we were indeed working in the business probably 80% more than what we wanted to. We haven't been able to step back that much - not yet. We're still very much under the hood in the business. And the reason why we want to work less in the business is that we think we can have more of an impact on it if we do. We can focus on more creative aspects that will help us reach more people and improve their sales through the email marketing strategies we teach. Working less in the business will allow us to have the mental bandwidth to focus on those bigger-picture things, while our staff deals with the day-to-day operations. Being less in the business doesn’t mean we don’t want to talk to customers anymore – quite the opposite, in fact! We want to understand our customers more and be fully immersed in thinking about how we can supply even more amazing campaigns for members of The League and better serve our community.But we can only do that if we’re not being pulled in the minutiae of the business. Otherwise, it's hard to maintain the bigger-picture clarity we need in order to make sure the business is sailing in the right direction.Our staff doesn't need us!At the end of the two days, we reflected on our business strategy session and checked in on Slack. We'd expected to have dozens and dozens of messages and notifications pouring in about things that weren’t working and needed our attention. But interestingly, that didn’t happen. In fact, there were fewer messages than we would have had on any other 2-day period.And that made us realise our staff didn’t need us that much - not if we weren’t available. It was a big ha-ha moment for us - probably no surprise to our staff, who knew they could do this all along. They didn’t need us as much, but we'd made ourselves involved in a lot of things we shouldn't have.So if you've never had a business strategy session (or haven’t had one for a while), book yourself into a two-day trip away from your business and the environment you’re normally in and try this. Go somewhere where you won't be pulled into any of the day-to-day work because the key is to stay focused on what you’re trying to achieve. And the more you immerse yourself in this exercise, the better the results are going to be.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Joy 1, Numbers 1”. So the concept of this email from Kennedy to his list of magicians was that there are things in your business that you enjoy - so that's one score for Joy. And sometimes there are things you don’t enjoy, like (for Kennedy) - 'numbers stuff'. But you still have to do these tasks in order to be able to do the things that bring you joy. So the way you could use this concept in your own subject line would be to pick two things that you can give scores to - just like you'd do in sports. It could be any two things you want. And it’s an interesting way of grabbing people’s attention with some numbers in the subject line.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesSPECIAL 100TH EPISODE: A Week in The Life at Email Marketing Heroes (Behind The Scenes with Rob & Kennedy)Why We Started an Email Marketing Agency. Who Should Do Your Email Marketing?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...

Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital who told us all about using your blog and leveraging Google to build a whopper of an email list. So if you think blogging is dead, have tried and failed to start and maintain a blog (much like us), but want to understand how to use blogging for email list building, you just HAVE TO check this interview out. Ready to learn some tricks that will completely change the way you look at blogging? Let's do this!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (:) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(:) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (:) Did Martin and Lyndsay really meet at the Peter Pan ride queue at Disneyland Paris?(:) The benefits of turning podcast show notes into blog posts.(:) How to make your business blog more effective.(:) How to come up with effective blog post ideas.(:) What if you don't like writing?(:) How can your blog posts be found on Google?(:) How often should you blog in order for your efforts to be effective?(:) Subject line of the week with Martin and Lyndsday from Jammy Digital.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. The benefits of turning podcast show notes into blog postsAs you probably know, we’ve been podcasting for a while. In the past, we tried different types of show notes to see what would work well, but over the last year we've been providing a blog post for each podcast episode (yep - that's the one you're reading right now) that people can skim-read. This is perfect for anyone who doesn't like listening to podcasts or can't at a particular point in time. This in-depth article allows anyone to still access the information, even if they don't listen to the podcast. Pretty cool, right? So this is great in terms of user experience, but also, from our point of view, we've definitely noticed a rise in traffic from the search engines. And as a result, we're getting more people opting into our email list (because we give our readers plenty of opportunities to do this while they read our content). And that's because when it comes to search engines, podcasts aren't massively discoverable when it comes to individual episodes. Google likes written content a lot more, so it's about leveraging what the search engines favour in order to make your content more accessible. Repurpose your content to achieve your business goalsSo it's not just a matter of content repurposing. It's about tapping into what's going to make the biggest difference in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. And that's different for every business. But for Martin and Lyndsay, as well as for us, it’s about getting more email subscribers and building an audience of people that you can pre-qualify. How? They’re consuming your content. So they know you’re right for them. And that's why they’re comfortable handing over their email address to get more content from you. And creating written content (over podcast or video) is the best way to do this.So let's say you do create other types of content - a podcast, a YouTube channel, or do a lot of Facebook lives. Should you drop everything to start a blog? Absolutely not! You can do what we did - we didn't add blogging as an extra piece of work we do. Instead, we continued to produce our podcast and a member of our team takes that episode and turns it into a blog from the same piece of content. And then you can easily embed these different pieces of content into your blog, which is a piece of web real estate that you own.How to make your business blog more effectiveIf you have a blog, there are ways to make it more effective and attract more visitors. And the main tip Martin and Lyndsay have to help you be found on Google is to answer the questions your customers and audience are asking you. Sometimes these questions can make us uncomfortable, especially when they're around price. But being upfront and answering them means you’re going to get found on Google.  And that's because you know people are searching for this information, and your competitors might not be answering them and choose to shy away from those topics. So you're more likely to get rankings and traffic that way.You can address the questions people have in the decision-making stage, for example. They're trying to decide which option to go with, and a lot of businesses don't focus on this. Instead, they create content that tends to fit into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. So answering these types of questions can help you stand out. By all means, try and find the balance between creating content that sits at the awareness stage of the buyer's journey and the decision-making stage too. What about keyword research tools? Martin and Lyndsay told us that a lot of people rely on tools and try and mimic what big brands do in terms of creating long lists for their blogs. But when you try and compete with big companies, you’re going to find ranking more difficult. So instead, .focus on what your customers are asking. That gives you better chances of standing out.There might be scenarios where you get asked a question by several clients, but when you look it up on the keyword research tools, you might find it's not a popular keyword. And yet you know it's a question real people have! So remember that customers come before the data. They are the first point of call for communication and letting you know what people are struggling with. How to come up with effective blog post ideasMartin and Lyndsay recommend keeping a clean notebook at your desk so every time you have any kind of communication with a client, you can record it in your content book. Content ideas are everywhere - in the emails you receive and the questions people have. Everything is a content opportunity. And when you start to train your brain to look for them, you'll find them everywhere. The more you’re aware of it you are (and the more you look for ideas), the more you'll find. So look at any communication you've had with your clients in the past and instead of answering questions individually, answer them in a blog post. That's more efficient. It makes everything faster - even sales calls. Be conscious of them and keep a record of them, and your list of ideas will grow quickly. And in addition to that, there are tools you can use, such as Answer the Public or Quora, for example. Right now you might feel stuck for ideas, but once you start this simple process, you’ll end up with loads!What if you don’t like writing?Martin isn't a keen writer himself, he told us. But when he started writing blog posts for their business, he chose the strategy to be as direct as possible. He didn’t try to be overly fluffy with the writing - he simply focused on explaining the exact steps to someone who doesn’t know anything about the process. He wasn’t trying to be clever with words. Instead, he wanted to give people direct information.So he got his head down every week and produced a piece of content. And soon enough he realised the blog posts were longer than he initially expected them to be. Because when you go all-in on answering a particular question, you end up giving all the necessary information in your blog post.Some people think they should only share some of their knowledge, in order to get people to hire them and pay for the rest. But Martin and Lyndsay think you should let go of this mindset completely. There's no shortage of information on the Internet. So if you can be that person – that hub of knowledge for your audience – then go all in and hold nothing back. People will still pay you for implementation and extra services because you created and shared something amazing for free. Remember that people don't care about your writing per se - they're not expecting Shakespeare. They're looking for information. So they don't care if you’re not being overly clever with your writing – that’s not what they’re looking for. What matters is that you helped them. And they’ll remember that. That’s much more important than how beautiful your writing is.How can your blog posts be found on Google? Martin and Lyndsay told us that what's good for users is generally what's good for Google. They want the exact same thing. Because the people who create algorithms for Google want to provide the best result to their users – it's their job. So when you focus on delivering exceptional value to a reader, you'll give yourself the best chance of ranking on the search engine results too. When you create content that's clear, direct, and easy to read for your users, they'll spend more time on your blog. And when Google sees people reading your content and clicking on your links, they'll rank their content highly. Of course, this is an oversimplified way to look at this because there are more factors at play. But it's a great principle to live by. It works for Martin and Lyndsay, who are in the competitive niches of marketing and SEO. So if they’re able to rank on the first page of Google for lots of keywords, then you know that thinking about your users first is a strategy that works.When it comes to making things easier for your readers, Martin and Lyndsay told us it helps to have plenty of white space on the page, as well as clear headings and bullet points. People don’t want to look at War and Peace when they’re on your blog. So remember to use these strategies and jargon-free, clear, and direct language.  How often should you blog in order for your efforts to be effective?Martin and Lyndsay increased their website traffic by 10 times in the space of 12 months by blogging once every two weeks when they started in 2017. Their blog posts were generally quite long, as they wanted to deliver value. If you're specific about the actions you take and focus on delivering value, they said, you can get fantastic results. But definitely prioritise quality over quantity and don't believe that you have to blog twice a week in order to get results. Also, think about making all of your blog posts work hard for you. At the back of each article they share, Martin and Lyndsay create five or six LinkedIn posts and another eight Instagram graphics. Hardly any of their social media content is original – it’s taken from their blog posts.The advantage of starting from your blog content is that it's published on a platform your own. It's your home base – your website. So when you think about promoting your content, think about getting as many people over to your website and then onto your email list. Because once you have that, everything else becomes secondary. So promote your blog article on your website where people can sign up to your email list and you'll see blogging have the impact you want on your business.Subject line of the week with Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy DigitalThis week’s subject line (courtesy of Martin and Lyndsay) is “How Jammy is changing”. Lyndsay tells us this subject line did incredibly well and had a high click-through rate. Why? Because, Martin added, because people care about your business and the changes you make. In fact, Martin and Lyndsay found that whenever they made announcements in the past about changes in their business, they always had more views and interest. So why not try and use this format for your own business? Maybe for a product or service you sell or a promotion you’re running? Useful Episode ResourcesAbout Martin and Lyndsay - Jammy DigitalIf you want to connect with Martin and Lyndsay, you can find them on their awesome website Jammy Digital. Definitely go and check out their blog! Related episodesExamples of Advertorials to Grow your Email List with Rachel Mazza. How to Grow your Email List When You Have Less Than 10k Instagram Followers, Helen Perry spills all. How To Grow Your Email List Using Facebook Pages (Without Ads) – Rachel Miller Moolah Style!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 blogging for email list building - the Jammy Digital way) 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!