We know that human beings buy based on urgency. That’s why sales like Black Friday do so well – because the sale is ending soon, and the opportunity is going away. But does urgency only work if you take a product off the market? What happens if you want to keep your membership or course open all the time and avoid the stress (and all the work) that comes with product launches?We do that. Our membership, The League, is always open. And today we want to share some strategies to help you create urgency (and make those sales!) without closing the doors. Ready to find out our best-kept secrets?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:55) Why we keep our membership open all the time.(8:16) Use event-based marketing.(10:42) Add a limited-time bonus.(11:25) Increase the price.(13:30) Include topical bonuses.(15:06) Create personal urgency.(18:00) Automate your email campaigns.(20:10) Use the Complete Email Marketing strategy.(22:30) How to fix the timing issue in your marketing. (24:22) Subject line of the week.Why do we keep our membership open all the time? In our membership, The League, we don’t do product launches. We don't open the cart for a few times a year and then close the doors again. We keep it open - it's an evergreen product.Why do we do that? Because, first of all, it helps take the pressure off doing proiduct launches a few times a year. But also, we strongly believe the reason we’re in business is to help people. Our customers have a problem, and we have the solution. And what would happen if people needed our help when we're closed? That's not very good, is it? Is it okay to tell people you can’t really help them right now because you only do so on your own agenda? In our book, it’s not okay. We don't like doing that because we’re genuinely here to help people when they need help.But we know that people respond well to urgency. And if you don't do product launches at all and never close the doors to your course, programme, or membership, then what can you do?You need to make your marketing urgent.And here's how you can do that. Use event-based marketingThe first thing you can do is something called event-based marketing. This means creating ‘events’ around your marketing. So you can run campaigns that take the customer on a journey for different types of events. Examples of this could be a 5-day free challenge or a virtual summit where you sell your product as part of it, or a splinter offer, where you take something out of your membership, for example, and sell it as a one-off thing.Your job is to find interesting and different ways to wrap up your offer to create an event. So for example, if you're running a 5-day challenge, that has urgency built into it because it only runs for those 5 days. And if people miss it, they can’t join until you run it again. Does it mean that after the challenge is over, they won't be able to get into your membership or join your programme? Not at all. That stays open. But the challenge helps you create momentum. When people participate to the challenge, they follow your teachings and advice for 5 days and now feel like joining your programme is the next logical step. Of course, there are many different ways to create urgency for your evergreen product through event-based marketing. We have over 20 campaigns that help us do this, and they're all available inside The League. Add a limited-time bonusAnother strategy you can use is to add a limited-time bonus that you give to people who join before a certain date, for example. This could be a coaching session, an extra course, or some cheat sheets – your pick. The key is that these bonuses are only available for a limited time. This allows you to tap into the emotional response that human beings have to urgency. Because if your audience wants to grab this thing you're offering, they have to join by a certain deadline. Increase the price over time Something we do in our membership, The League, is to increase the price once we hit certain milestones. We did that when we reached 100 members, for example. When we're about to hit a new milestone we email our list and let them know we're increasing our prices.We then give them three days to join our membership at the existing price. And it works! It helps us create this momentum of urgency but through our marketing, rather than with product launches that mean periodically shutting the doors. Include topical bonusesThe next thing you can do if you want to create urgency around your product without doing product launches is to include some topical extras (or bonuses) for people who join by a particular date.We know someone who does this very successfully – they sell Canva templates for Instagram, and if you join before the end of any given month, you get some extra templates that are relevant for that month. Like a Halloween one in October, a Christmas one for December, or a Valentine’s Day for February. You get the gist.So what could you offer your audience that's linked with a particular month or season or date? Create personal urgencyThere’s a specific type of urgency called personal urgency, which is a copywriting approach that asks your audience how long they’re prepared to keep struggling with something. You describe the problem and the situation your customers are struggling with right now and ask them how long can they wait to find a solution.This allows you to show your audience that your offer is urgent for them (hence why it's called personal urgency). In this case, the urgency isn't time-bound. The key is that whatever you mention in your marketing is emotional for that person - it pulls at their heart strings. When you tap into their feelings of frustration at the problem they're experiencing, they will want to make a change. So people join your membership or course not because you're closing the doors with quarterly product launches, but because, with your marketing, you've made them aware of how something is urgent for them. Automate your email campaignsAnother strategy we use to create urgency is to automate email campaigns that run on a specific timeframe for each individual subscriber. So let’s say that someone who joins this month gets a cool bonus for free. We have a couple of campaigns inside The League that do that – the Bribe Campaign and the Golden Cloak Campaign. So if Derek joins our list today, he’ll go through the campaign, and the deadline will be dynamically generated for him with a countdown timer. This means that in the future Derek won’t get those emails. Then if Jessica joins next week, she'll go through the same campaign on her own timeframe but a week later than Derek did. And the deadline embedded in these campaigns becomes a powerful tool to create urgency for your evergreen product without the need for any stressful product launches. The Complete Email Marketing Strategy This picture wouldn’t be full if we didn’t talk about the Complete Daily Email Strategy, which we also teach inside The League. It's about sending an email of value (that also makes an offer) to your list every day. But on top of all that, every 4-6 weeks we create some kind of event-based campaign – a bribe, a challenge, a webinar, or an online conference, for example. And what does that do? It mimics the experience of doing product launches without you having to actually do any. The other thing it does is that it helps us get new waves of members. Because in any membership or online programme you're going to lose members and participants. Churn is inevitable. And that's fine. But you need to be topping people up faster than they're dropping off in order to grow your business. This is why we create these surge-type events every 4-6 weeks to get people excited and engaged. And by having a combination of these two things (the daily emails and the 4-6 event-based campaigns), you also get to fix the one thing that marketing alone cannot fix. And that's timing. What do we mean by that? Sometimes an offer can be perfect for someone. But if the timing isn't right - if it's not right for them to join your programme right now, for whatever reason - then they won't buy. But by having the daily emails you're fixing that timing issue. How? Well, the moment someone is ready to buy, they will have received an email from you within the last 24 hours. And that means they'll have the link to buy your programme.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line of the week is “A Jack-in-the-Box from Amazon”, and the reason why Rob picked this for us is that it had a distinctly higher open and click-through rate than we typically get. But we don’t think it was an amazing subject line. Nope. Not at all.And yet, we’re calling it out because while it’s not a brilliant subject line, we firmly believe there’s a place where art meets science and science meets art. Meaning? That you can follow all the formulas and advice, but sometimes stuff won’t work. And some other times you can unexpectedly hit a home run with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. This also shows how important it is to split test your subject lines (something that in this case we hadn't done). Always come up with two subject lines for the same email and run them against each other to see which one works best. You never know - the one you would have never picked as the best might actually give you the best open and click-through rates! Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Get People To Buy Your Product Now – 2 Ways To Create Urgency.7 Sales Elements to Give You More Reasons To Email During Your Launch. How to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer. 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 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 on the podcast we interviewed former Stanford marketing lecturer and best-selling author Nir Eyal. We invited Nir to share his extensive knowledge and some of the research he conducted to write his book, Indistractable, and our conversation led to some incredible time-saving tips for email marketing that you can also apply to your life and business.So if you're struggling to find the time for email marketing (or anything that matters to you) and want to know how to eliminate distraction and finally get it done, THIS. IS.IT.Ready for the penny to finally drop? Because honestly, this is a-mazing stuff! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:12) Did a member of the British Royal Family really hold a door open for Nir? (6:41) What even is 'distraction'?(11:38) What are the triggers that drive us to distraction? (13:09) The 4 strategies to becoming indistractable.(13:36) Why recognising and mastering internal triggers is important. (15:42) Taking responsibility of your emotional states.(19:00) Does accountability work?(23:36) Do consequences and incentives matter? (25:49) Why time-boxing is better than running your life on a to-do list. (31:20) Subject line of the week with Nir Eyal.What even is 'distraction'? When it comes to email marketing, one of the biggest things that stop course creators, membership owners, and coaches and consultant from getting it done is time. We say we'll get something done, but then we don't. Why don't we follow through? We claim we get distracted, but what even is 'distraction'?Nir started us off by looking at the word distraction and its opposite, which is the word traction. Traction is any action that pulls you towards the things you do with intent and moves you closer to your values to help you become the kind of person you want to become.So dis-traction is any action that pulls you further away from your values. Anything can be a distraction if it's not what you plan to do with your time. And yes, that includes those work-related things that make us feel we're being productive!And according to Nir, this is the most dangerous form of distraction - the one that tricks you into prioritising the easy and the urgent at the expense of the important work you have to do to move your business, your career, and your life forward.This means that all the things that we typically call 'distracting' (like checking social media or playing a video game) can be traction, as long as we do them according to our values and schedules.What are the triggers that drive us to distraction? Nir explains there are two kinds of triggers:External triggers. These at the 'calls to action' that come from our outside environment - the things that others ask us to do.Internal triggers. These are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from, like fearfulness, uncertainty, boredom, loneliness, stress, anxiety, etc.People tend to blame external triggers for distraction. But did you know they only account for 10% of the time we get distracted? The other 90% of the time we get distracted because of something that happens inside of us - it's because of our internal triggers. When we experience uncomfortable emotional states we look for distractions to take our minds off them.Mind-blowing, right?The 4 strategies to becoming indistractableNir explained there are 4 steps to becoming indistractable, and all of them need to be in place if you want them to work!The 4 steps are:Mastering internal triggers.Making time for traction.Hacking back the external triggers in our environment.Preventing distraction with pacts. This is where we use a pre-commitment device to stop us from getting distracted.Why recognising and mastering internal triggers is importantSo the first step to becoming indistractable is to master your internal triggers. That's because unless you know what to do when you experience emotional discomfort, you're always going to run away from those emotions and look for some form of distraction!The truth is that social media (or whatever else we blame for getting distracted) isn't the root cause of distraction. The root cause of distraction has and will always be emotional discomfort. Why? Because discomfort is the source of all human motivation. Anything we do is because of our desire to escape discomfort, which is the core driver of every action.And the mind-blowing truth is that there's nothing wrong with you! Getting distracted isn't a character flaw. It just means we haven't learnt to deal with discomfort in a way that moves us towards traction rather than distraction.Taking responsibility of our emotional statesWhen it comes to distraction, people tend to categorise themselves in two different ways - you have the "Blamers" and the "Shamers". The "Blamers" tend to blame stuff outside themselves, like technology or the news. But these things can't really be blamed because distraction existed before them! The "Shamers", on the other hand, think there must be something wrong with them. They'll think they have a short attention span or aren't good at time management, for example. But these are just myths we make up about ourselves. And the more we do this, the more we actually conform to the perception we have of ourselves. The more we think there's something wrong with us, the more shame we feel (which is an uncomfortable emotional state) and the more distraction we go and seek! Frustrating, right?So blaming and shaming don't work. Instead, we need to start taking responsibility for how we feel. We can't control our feelings and urges. They're as natural as sneezing! But what we can control is our we respond to them. It's all about learning what to do when we feel these uncomfortable emotional states, which are perfectly normal and healthy. It's about taking that emotional discomfort and using it as rocket fuel to propel us towards traction, rather than distraction.Does accountability work?We asked Nir about an accountability exercise we started inside our membership, The League, where we share all sorts of time-saving tips for email marketing. And we created a tool to help people stay accountable, but we noticed that not everyone was using it.Nir explained that we used a very effective technique called a "pre-commitment device" to give people social accountability. This basically allows people to declare they’re going to do something so the other people in the group can hold them accountable. It’s a pact (a pre-commitment) - the one we used was a social one, but Nir explained that monetary ones are also very effective. (You might want to tune in and listen to the inspiring story of how Nir has been using a monetary pact to get himself into shape).However, the reason our accountability exercise didn't work for each and every one of our members is that using pacts to stop us from getting distracted is only the last step in becoming indistractable. Essentially, we can't stop ourselves from getting distracted unless we know what it distracted us from.In other words, if something isn't in the calendar, we can't blame distraction if it doesn't get done! The right way to do this is to put a task in your diary (make time for traction) and then remove the external triggers in your environment. Only then, the social pact will work.Do consequences and incentives matter? Following on from Nir's explanation about pacts and how they work to keep people accountable, we asked about the correlation between the consequences of not doing something and the likelihood someone has of actually following through with the action. And Nir explained that the consequences you put in place have to be something that 'hurts you' (not in a physical way, of course!). And for him, that's burning money!So the incentive has to be big enough. And to find an incentive that's big enough, you need to ask yourself if you really want this thing you said you're going to do? Do you really want to do email marketing? Do you really want to grow your email list and make money out of email marketing? Because if you do (if the stakes are high enough) then you will. And you'll be open to implementing any time-saving tips for email marketing we throw your way too!Why time-boxing is better than following to-do listsShould you do the things with the biggest impact first, like a lot of people recommend? Nir said it's a technique that works for a lot of people, and if it works for you, then great. But if it doesn't, Nir recommends a technique called time-boxing, which works by setting a schedule in advance to make sure you have dedicated time for a specific activity (like your email marketing!).To-do lists are great if you use them to write down stuff that's in your head. But, Nir says, you can't run your life on a to-do list. That's one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. Why? Because when you follow a to-do list you can feel busy and productive, but at the end of the day you'll always have stuff you haven't done. And that's because lists have no constraints - you can add more and more to them. And if you feel like a loser at the end of your day because you haven't done everything on your list, you'll just start blaming yourself! That makes you feel bad and seek distraction!So what do you do instead? Make time for traction (and that's step 2 for becoming indistractable). The key is to decide when you're going to do something and then allocate a window in your calendar to do it. If you don't, you’re not forced to make any trade-offs. Nir believes you shouldn't measure your productivity by how many boxes you tick off your to-do list. Instead, ask yourself if you stuck to a task for as long as you said you were going to, without any distractions. As it turns out, people who use time-boxing tend to be more productive than people who use the to-do list. And that’s because they consistently work without distraction.So, who's going to set themselves a task to work on their email marketing for 30 minutes tomorrow?Subject line of the week with Nir EyalThis week we want to share a little bit of wisdom from Nir about subject lines, rather than a specific subject line he used. And that's because Nir believes that your relationship with your subscribers matters more than the words you use in your subject lines.Are your subscribers receiving an email from someone they trust? Someone they're glad to hear from? Do you have credibility with your readers? If you've built a relationship based on trust and created the habit of interacting with them, then wordsmithing becomes less important because your subscribers will open your emails anyway.Clever, right? And something to think about...Useful Episode ResourcesAbout Nir If you want to connect with Nir, you can find him on his website where you can also download a totally FREE 80-page workbook. And the book is called Indistractible: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.Related episodesMaking Sales With Email Marketing, Faster.Writing Subject Lines Without Using Formulas.How To Write Email Subject Lines For Sales Emails (That Actually Work).FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingWant to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books! They 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 groupWe 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 get to 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 by applying everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to eliminate distraction so you can implement amazing time-saving tips for email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review 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. And, you know what? We also get to be discovered by more awesome people like you!

We get asked this question all the time. What's the best email automation system? How do you pick one? And you might be surprised, but there's not one single universal answer to this question! So... want to know exactly what you need to do when you're looking for the best email marketing platform for your business?Then check this out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:02) What's an email automation system?(5:45) Always get the best-in-class product for your budget.(8:36) Pay now for the business you want to have in the future.(11:40) Cost vs ROI.(13:40) How to pick your email automation platform.(13:59) Why you should try out a few email automation platforms.(14:59) Check that the email automation system you want meets your needs.(15:52) Pick the email platform you prefer.(17:40) Our email automation system recommendations. (19:00) Subject line of the week.What is an email automation system? So first of all, what is an email automation system? Back in the day, they were called autoresponders - and some people still use the term. But in short, an email automation system is a platform that allows you to do clever stuff with your email list, like making decisions based on their behaviours or creating automated sequences of emails. Very handy! Always get the best-in-class product for your budgetWhen it comes to any software platforms, you have to bear in mind that none of them will do everything you want them to do. We once almost switched to one of these all-in-one platforms that will host your membership site, allow you to deliver your programmes, do your appointment scheduling, your email marketing, etc. But in the end, we found the platform was mediocre at everything and made email marketing too difficult. So our policy is to get the best-in-class product that your budget will allow. For email marketing, we use what we think is the best-in-class for the budget we have. It has to meet certain requirements around list size and email automation, for example, but it also needs to meet our budget. And we follow the same approach with all the other software products we use. So we always advise you choose the best you can afford. Because there are always going to be bigger and better things out there. But it doesn't mean they're right for you and your business.Pay now for the business you want to have in the futureHere's something we swear by. Pay now for the business you intend to have in the future and remember that email marketing will get you the highest ROI. If you’re going to do email marketing  seriously and put effort into it,  it will make you money. The problem with some of the marketing platforms out there though is that they might lure you in with a free or super-cheap account. But once you get to 10k subscribers, hosting a list with them becomes more expensive. And moving platforms then is a real pain in the neck.So the best thing you can possibly do is to commit to taking email marketing seriously right now and invest in it accordingly. Our top tip? Invest for the list you’re going to build and get an email platform that will be affordable then. Cost vs ROIThis might surprise you, but we only have a list of 4,500 subscribers. It may be sound small, but we make about $500,000 from our list. So if our email automation platform costs us around $1,800 a year ($150 per month), we're still making a large ROI. In fact, we make on average  $12 per subscriber per month (and that’s our EPSPM – or Earning per Subscriber per Month). And even if we made the industry standard average of $1 per subscriber per month, we’d still be making $54,000 a year from an annual investment of $1,800. And that's still huge! So even if you have a small list, it’s not going to cost you the earth and sky to put them on a really good email automation platform. And that’s why we think you should never be worried about your email marketing bill. If you are, it’s only because you know you're not putting your all into your email marketing. How to pick your email automation systemHere's what you don't do. Don't go to a Facebook group and ask. Because any crowdsourced answer you get is going to be useless for you. Everyone will be talking about what their favourite platform is – what’s working for them. And that’s not necessarily what’s going to work for you and your particular situation.So here’s what you do instead.Try out a few email automation systemsThe best thing to do is to take a one-month trial for the 3-5 platforms you think you might be interested in. Some of them offer a free trial, but even if they don’t, take the risk of paying for one month. Because trying a few upfront is going to make the process of choosing one faster. And it'll be less frustrating than having to move platforms later. Also, look at how many subscribers you're expecting to have in 4-5 years’ time – because that’s the number of subscribers you need to price the monthly cost at. Remember that if you do email marketing properly (and listen to the show and apply the strategies we discuss, or, even better, if you join our membership The League) you’ll have no problems getting great results from your list.Does the email automation system meet your needs? The next thing you want to check once you have your trial account is that it meets your requirements. Does it do what you want it to do? Choose an activity and see how it works on each of the platforms. Can you easily put people into automations? Can you tag them and move them around in multiple automations at the same time? And if one of the platforms falls down at the first hurdle, then close the account because that platform is not for you.Pick the email automation system you preferThen you want to see which ones you enjoy using. If any platform makes you want to throw your laptop out of the window, then it’s not right. Which one do you like best? The biggest difference between Active Campaign and Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), for example, is that the automation builder in Keap goes horizontally - you build things in a chain from left to right. Whereas Active Campaign goes vertically – from top to bottom - and you connect things going one underneath the other. And it’s only through using the platforms that you’ll realise what you prefer - what fits better with the way your brain naturally works. What you’re trying to do here is to reduce the amount of frictional resistance to doing email marketing by having tools that align with the way you naturally think. What might also help is to see if you have people around you who do something similar to you. Do they sell courses or a membership? Do they use this particular platform you're looking at? We see that most of our members in The League use a handful of email systems. And any of those are great. So, in general, you want to make sure it’s a platform that others around you are using, rather than one that no one has ever heard about. That way when you have a question, you'll be able to get answers from real people, rather than digging around the forums.Our email automation system recommendationAnd if you really want our personal recommendation, if you’re a course creator, a membership site owner, or a coach or consultant, in our opinion, you should take a look at Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft), Active Campaign, and ConvertKit. We’d recommend you take a trial on those, and if you know someone who uses them, maybe ask them if they can show you how you use them. And if you want to try out Keap, check out this amazing promotion!Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject’s line of the week is “The 25-second advert”. And it was actually a really short email of only 10-15 lines. It was about the fact that Rob went on someone’s website and 25 seconds later, he’d left and gone to Facebook and saw the company's advert appear in his newsfeed.The point of the email was that good marketing shouldn't take very long (25 seconds). And we think the subject line worked well because of its specificity and the curiosity it triggered. Interesting stuff, right?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesUsing Email Marketing to Build a Profitable Business – a Success Story from a Member of The League.Email Marketing Automation – 6 Automations You Should Have In Your Business.How to amplify email campaigns, Clate Mask from Keap spills the beans.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to pick an email automation system) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Do you find the idea of email automation daunting? Well, you shouldn't! Because the right email campaigns can help you get awesome results in your business. This week on the podcast we chatted to Chelsea Martinus from Black Girl Boss Collective, who shared the best cart abandonment emails and tips to help you retarget your audience and increase your sales.Ready to find out Chelsea's best-kept secrets?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:46) Does Chelsea really watch the same three movies every New Year's Eve? (7:45) What is email automation?(9:46) Email marketing isn't something you do TO your subscribers. (11:35) What is a retargeting sequence?(13:20) What can an abandoned cart email sequence do for your and your subscribers? (16:18) Why timeliness is important in abandoned cart emails. (17:22) Why you need to personalise your email campaigns.(18:35) Why you want to 'nudge' your subscribers. (19:50) How to create the best cart abandonment emails for each of your products.(23:05) Subject line of the week with Chelsea Martinus. What is email automation?For Chelsea, automation is the key to a seamless client journey. When you're looking to connect with people who are a great fit for your community, you're not just sending them emails to convince them to buy, right? (Right?)Email marketing is a way of creating a connection with your audience. And the easiest way to do that is through automation.Why?Because email automation helps you foster a relationship with your subscribers and connect with them in a way that's authentic. It also helps you produce high-quality content that will get them to reach their goals.In other words, email automation allows you to build relationships that surpass a transaction and the exchange of money for services and goods. You can use email automation to let your community know they're not alone. This is you showing them they have someone in their corner they can turn to when they don’t know what to do in a particular area of their business or life.Have we convinced you about the benefits yet?Email marketing isn't something you do TO your subscribersUnfortunately, a lot of people think of email marketing as a thing they do TO their subscribers. But it's not like that at all! It's about the subscribers’ journey and their path through your email system - that's the big difference. Creating automated campaigns allows you to take all your customers on the same journey. Isn't that amazing?And the key to achieve this is to make your emails so good that your subscribers will want to be on our list because they're genuinely looking forward to our emails, rather than being there because they downloaded a cool lead magnet once.What is a retargeting sequence?A retargeting sequence is a campaign that gets sent when a subscriber has clicked on a product but hasn't bought it yet. We have a specific email sequence about this that we teach inside our membership, The League. We call it the Tell Me More sequence, and as Chelsea put it, it's probably one of the most underrated email automation campaigns for service providers. Because a lot of people think the automation stops when the subscriber buys. Or when they don’t. And that's not quite the case.Chelsea explains that if you're running a campaign and presenting an offer you believe in – one that’s going to help people solve problems - then you need to take a moment to re-engage and retarget those people. Chelsea refers to these campaigns as retargeting sequences or click sequences. If you work in e-commerce, you've probably heard the phrase abandoned cart sequence.What can an abandoned cart email sequence do for your business?Your retargeting  (or abandoned cart) campaign allows you to check in with any subscribers who clicked on your link but didn't buy. Do they have any questions? Why didn't they go ahead and purchase? Asking these types of questions gives you the chance to receive immediate feedback as to why your subscribers didn't buy. And it might be a very simple reason you can go and fix straight away - like the fact the link didn't work!But you asking questions works for your prospective customers too because it gives them a sense of security. It lets them know that for you this purchase is not all about the money. You're showing your subscribers that you care about what they think and what's important to them. And you're giving them an opportunity to get all their burning questions answered.We need to remember that email marketing is about people! And everyone's different - they're in different situations, in different stages of their journey, and have different questions. In an effort to re-engage your audience and answer some of those quesetions you can offer a free call, for example.  This adds another important layer of relationship building. And it gives a little extra touch to let your subscribers know there's a real person behind those emails who cares about them and their success. You getting in touch might give them the reassurance they need to go ahead and make the investment.What are some of the essential elements of an abandoned cart email campaign?TimelinessWhen it comes to retargeting campaigns, the first to think about (Chelsea says) is timeliness. When will you be sending these emails? Chelsea recommends leaving at least one day from the moment a subscriber has opened her email and clicked on a link (but didn’t buy).Why?Because you want to give people some time to think about the offer. But at the same time, you don't want to leave it too long - you definitely want to send them a reminder before they've forgotten all about it. Or before the offer expires!PersonalisationThe second element to consider is personalisation – for the subscriber and for yourself. When creating email campaigns, make sure you use the subscriber’s name if available. You also want to call out those specific issues they have expressed or that you know your offer will be solving.Add a personal touch to your emails by using the language and phrases you normally use. If you were trying to reassure someone and make them feel better in real life, what would you say? What type of language would you use? You want to infuse all that in your emails. Make it personable. Let your personality fly.'Nudging'And finally, retargeting campaigns give your subscribers a ‘nudge’. After all, if someone’s looking to make an investment, they might not buy the first time they go on the site. They might consider it for a while or ask for recommendations from others they trust before making a decision. And sometimes people need a little nudge.Your retargeting sequence is a way to let your prospective customers know that your offer is the right investment for them to make. It's going to solve their problem. So it's about providing the reassurance to go ahead.Proof of the fact that retargeting sequences are hugely effective is that Amazon does it. If you’ve added something to your cart but haven’t purchased yet, they nudge you with an email to remind you the product is still in your cart. And if Amazon does it, why shouldn't we all?How to create best cart abandonment emails for each of your productsIf you’re selling more than one product, a great way to handle retargeting sequences for each of your products is to add filters. This allows you to make sure you're not sending multiple retargeting campaigns to the same subscriber for different products at the same time.Chelsea's strategy is to offer one product at any given time though. This way she know she's always sending the right information to the right people. Would this work for you? Could you cut down on the number of offers you have at any given time? If not (and if you're going to run multiple offers at the same time to create different revenue streams), it’s important to create a separate re-targeting sequence for each offer. And if that means your subscribers might get multiple emails, then Chelsea suggests you focus on the most important offer at the time and filter your subscribers in such a way they don’t receive emails about each of your products. This helps you keep things easier and more streamlined and creates a better experience for your prospective customers. You don’t want your offers to compete with each other for your customers’ attention! In fact, you'd be sending out a series of potentially competing messages which would just confuse your audience.Subject line of the week with Chelsea MartinusChelsea’s choice of subject line of the week is “RE: your delivery”. It's one she received as a subscriber that stayed with her because it worked. She often thinks about how effective it was in prompting her to open the email, even though she hadn’t ordered anything! So whenever she writes subject lines, that’s the one she keeps top of mind as an example because to her it was just genius.Useful Episode ResourcesAbout ChelseaChelsea helps Black women business owners to automate their email marketing so they can build communities and make more sales online. You can find Chelsea on her website, on Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. And here’s the link to join Chelsea’s email list.Related episodesEmail Marketing Automation – 6 Automations You Should Have In Your Business.Using Email Marketing to Build a Profitable Business – a Success Story from a Member of The League.How to amplify email campaigns, Clate Mask from Keap spills the beans.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingWant to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books! They 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 groupWe 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 get to 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 by applying 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 best cart abandonment emails) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review 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. And, you know what? We also get to be discovered by more awesome people like you!

This week on the podcast we're talking about onboarding emails examples. Are you a course creator? Do you have an onboarding sequence? Or is it just one of those things that get pushed to the side at the end of a busy launch? Well, if you want to find out exactly how to use your onboarding emails to wow your customers, turn them into fans, and make more sales, we've got your back! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:23) What are onboarding emails?(4:30) Use onboarding emails to show the value of your product.(5:52) How to counteract buyer's remorse.(8:52) How onboarding emails help you build trust with your customers.(10:16) A sneak peak into our own onboarding emails.(13:00) How to use onboarding emails to hightlight the most foundational pieces of your course.(16:45) How to use the onboarding sequence to set the expectation there's more to learn from you.(18:43) How to make sure your onboarding sequence reflects the style and framework of your other emails.(20:44) Don't confuse your onboarding sequence with your welcome sequence. (23:12) Subject line of the week.What are onboarding emails?Onboarding emails are those emails you send to someone who's bought your online course or product. Why are we talking about onboarding email examples today? Because we know what it's like to launch something new. There's so much work that goes into it that often the part that follows the sale gets overlooked and forgotten. But onboarding emails are important. And you want to be doing a little more than just thanking your customer for buying the product and giving them the username and password to access it. So here are a few things that your onboarding emails can help you do. Show the value of your productThe very first thing onboarding emails allow you to do is to encourage your customers to look at the value of the product they bought from you. With these emails, you want to prompt people to take action and consume the content you've painstakingly put together. Because of course, you want them to get the results you promised them, right?  Counteract buyer's remorseAnother reason why onboarding emails matter is because they help you counteract buyer's remorse. I'm sure this has happened to you - you bought a product or downloaded a lead magnet, and when you did you felt excited.But then at some point remorse kicks in. You worry that for some reason you've made a bad decision and wasted your time or your money. Maybe you shouldn't have bought the thing in the first place. You've been there and felt like that, right?So this is where your onboardg email sequence comes in. You've got to use your onboarding emails to get your customers excited about their purchase. Why? Because this is your chance to reassure them they made a good decision, and sell them your product once again. You can do this by talking about the transformation they'll experience and the results they'll finally achieve. You can show them testimonials and case studies of people just like them. Because this helps you reinforce your subconscious reputation with that buyer and helps them see how they’re now closer to the outcome they want. Your job is to show them they made a great decision!Build trust with your customersAnother reason why we swear by onboarding emails (and we want to share some onboarding emails examples with you) is that they help your customers build trust with you and your business. By sending out emails after they bought from you, you show your customers you want them to succeed. A lot of business owners will sell something and then move on to the next thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that inherently, but it’s also important to make your customers looked after.Show them that you're not just about getting their money and leaving them to themselves. You put together the best content in this course and now you want them to use it and get the results. Because let’s face it – when people buy online courses, a lot of the accountability is on them. If they don't consume the content and implement the strategies you teach them, they won't get results. But you can (and should) definitely still play a part in this process by encouraging them to use your product. Some onboarding emails examplesFor example, when people join our membership, The League, we send them a detailed email showing them how to access it. We don’t just give them the URL, username, and password - we also include an animated GIF of where they go and click into the Members area. Because even if people haven’t accessed the content yet, we still want them to feel like they've already received value from it. Similarly, if you opt-in for one of our free lead magnets, we send you an email with the username and password with an animated GIF that shows the screen recording of a user accessing the resource. We do this because we want people to be able to access the content we promised them and do it easily. This is a critical piece of your relationship with your customer. They’ve given you their email address or their money, so don't make it difficult for them! Highlight the most foundational pieces of content Your onboarding emails will also help you highlight what you think is important for your customers to know right now and explain what it will do for them. When you sold them the course, you sold them the benefits and the transformation, so now you want to give them clarity on what to do. Now they have the course, you can be more granular and detailed in your explanations. You can pull out the particular lessons you think are important. Now you get to sell to them from the inside. Before you could only say what the course looked like and what it would do for them without giving away too much. But now you can be more specific. And it's important you do this because you can't leave your students to decide what parts of the course are the most foundational - they're not qualified to do that. They might go for the shiny parts that seem the most interesting and resonate with them the most right now, but that might be different for everyone. So it's up to you, as the course creator, to point to what's important. And don't forget to explain why. Because psychologically, anytime you communicate something, you have to give them the reasons why, or what you say will never resonate with them.Set the expectation that there’s more to learn from youYour onboarding sequence should also help you set the expectation with your customers that you can teach them more - there's more to learn here! Because let's face it - you want your onboarding sequence to serve the customer. But it needs to serve your business as well. So start sowing the seeds and talk about other courses you have. Because while you're telling them that what they have is really good, you also want them to know they don't have the full picture just yet.Make sure your onboarding emails reflect your styleAnother thing to bear in mind when it comes to looking at onboarding emails examples is that you want to maintain the same energy and style from the emails you sent to your list before they bought your product. You don't want to suddenly turn into this person who just emails them robotically about going to page 12 of your workbook, do you? In fact, you want the opposite. You want to make your subscribers feel excited about what they just bought. Your emails should be so good that if you were selling something new, they would go and buy it straight away!If you use our Daily Email Strategy from the Complete Daily Email Strategy course, you'll be familiar with our framework of Story, Lesson, and Offer. You tell a story, you make a lesson out of it, and then you make an offer. You can follow this same framework in your onboarding emails. Except that now they bought your course, you tell the story, make a lesson out of it, and then the call to action is not to buy, but to go and access your course. So make sure that people who buy from you receive the same style of emails as part of their onboarding experience. Don’t confuse your onboarding sequence with your welcome sequenceNow, there's one last point worth making. And that's that each of your products and lead magnets needs its own onboarding sequence – we’ll call it a consumption sequence. And it's not a welcome sequence! Different onboarding emails examples have something in common - they invite your customers to go and consume your content. Your onboarding or consumption sequence is a separate automated campaign. You might be familiar with our Getting to Know You Sequence, which is the welcome campaign we teach inside The League. Your new subscribers only go through it once when they first come into your email marketing platform. The onboarding sequence, on the other hand, is something a customer goes through for each one of your products. So that's how it's different from your welcome sequence.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line of the week is “Boring for two hours?” Now, regardless of what the content was, the reason this worked so well is that no one wants to be boring. Or anything that’s negative, for that matter. The subject line would have worked with any other word that has a negative connotation - simply because people don't want to be associated with anything negative.But also, adding a number in the subject line helps. That’s because numbers give specificity. And the fact it was asked as a question makes it even more engaging. Remember this - any time you turn a statement into a question it triggers ambiguity and curiosity in people. And often that drives open rates up. So there you go! Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to amplify email campaigns, Clate Mask from Keap spills the beans.Testimonials – how to write and collect them automatically to bring in more sales with Monica Snyder.Writing The Perfect Welcome Email – Saying Hello With Gavin Bell.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 giving you onboarding emails examples for your online course) 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! 

You've got an offer ready and have emailed your subscribers. Once. Maybe twice. Sure, you'd like to email them a bit more. That would help with your sales, right? But you just don't know what to email about! So here are 7 sales elements that will give you more reasons to email during your launch and help you create spikes in your sales. Ready to have your mind absolutely blown by these strategies?Let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:31) Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launch.(4:04) Give your audience a guided tour of your sales page through your emails (and learn about the pretend electoral campaign between Paddington Bear and Rupert The Bear).(11:48) Introduce a countdown timer to create urgency (but not right at the start).(14:08) Add a bonus (or more).(16:34) Combine the bonus and the countdown timer.  (17:47) Use your testimonials in your emails.(20:20) Don't introduce payment plans or down sell options at the start of your launch. (22:38) Help your customers remove overwhelm and make informed decisions.(25:03) Handle objections. (28:05) Subject line of the week.Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launchFirst thing first, how many times do your normally email your list when you launch a new product or service? The day you open the cart and then the day you close it? What happens in between? Can we just agree that two emails aren't really gonna cut it?When you’re promoting a new offer, you need to email your list more than once or twice. But how exactly can you keep talking about this thing you’re launching?Use your emails to give your audience a guided tour of your sales pageYou see, the key is to have a plan. And your plan should be all about NOT putting everything you have to say about your launch on your sales page. Hold some things back from your sales page so you have a list of valid reasons to email your list. Because during your launch, you want to use your emails to drip out pieces of your offer – email by email.This doesn't mean you're going to strip down your offer and turn it into something weak and mediocre that no one wants. Your offer needs to be amazing from day one! You're just holding off on announcing some of the stuff that most people announce at the start and breaking down the information that lives on your sales page  and giving your subscribers a guided tour of it. Your emails are the place where you pick one element of your sales page and talk about it. Why? So that you can walk people through stuff they might have missed and make them pay attention to it.By announcing new things throughout your launch, you create extra surges and spikes in your sales. Because we all know how it goes - launches are made of peaks and troughs. The peaks are the beginning and at the end. You make sales on your first day and then again on the last day before the cart closes. But in between? That's when you have your troughs. So you want to create some momentum - have an excuse to email your subscribers, give them more reasons to buy, and generate more peaks during your launch. Here are 7 things (in no particular order) that will help you do just that. Hold off introducing a countdown timerA lot of people add a countdown timer to their sales page right at the start of their promotion. We suggest you don’t do that. Why?First of all, because if you don’t put the timer on the sales page right away, it gives you a great reason to email your list later on and let them know when your cart closes.But also, a countdown timer is a mechanism to create urgency - and a very effective one at that. So don't waste it! Because you won't create any urgency if you set your timer waaaay in the future. If you tell everyone that your offer expires in 2 weeks, they have no reason to take notice now. It’s only when the hours, minutes and seconds are literally ticking that they’ll pay attention and buy. So use it wisely because this is one of the reasons to email your list during your launch.  Add a bonus (or more)Another strategy you can use is to take something you'd ordinarily include in your offer (like an additional piece of training or a worksheet, etc.) and add it as a bonus rather than including it from the start. As the days go by, you offer all these additional features as bonuses via email with a really effective subject line. Why does this work? Because it helps you draw attention to this bonus you just added and encourage someone to buy. Effectively, you're selling your bonuses in your emails. And if you position them well, some people will buy the product because of that bonus. Just make sure it's clear that everyone who has already bought gets your bonuses too - the last thing you want is loads of emails and admin from people asking you if they're included in the offer. Combine the bonus and the countdown timerWhen it comes to bonuses, you might introduce some at the start of your launch and others as you carry on with your promotion. So a strategy you can use is to add a countdown timer that will remove one of your bonuses. Pick your sexiest bonus – a mastermind or a live call, for example - and add a countdown to it. Give it a clear deadline and create some urgency around it. You want to position this as a fast action bonus – something that’s available to anyone who buys today or in the next two hours, for example. Why? It helps you create an additional surge. And, of course, make sure you then make this bonus go away when you say you will.Use your testimonials in your emailsAnother thing you want to do during your launch is to turn your testimonials into case studies. What’s the difference between the two? A testimonial is one of your customers saying they bought one of your products, and it was great. A case study goes further than that – it says that your customer was struggling with a particular problem, then they bought your fabulous course, and now their life is completely transformed. Think of the case study as the movie documentary of your customer’s life, whereas a testimonial is your customer telling you about their adventure with you.Now, it’s great to have testimonials. And a lot of people add loads to their sales pages. But your customers won't read them all, which means testimonials don't have the impact they’re meant to have. So how do you get your subscribers to pay attention?You email them.You pull out a few really good testimonials and turn them into case studies - expand on them in your emails and show people how others like them had the same problem, worked with you, and got great results. Don’t introduce payment plans or down-sell offers from the startAnother thing you might want to do at some point during your launch is to introduce payment plans or down-sell offers. Just don't do it at the start - because this will be one of the reasons to email your list during your launch. So do this after a few days and once you've had a good number of sales and are in a good cash flow position. A few days in, you can then email your subscribers and tell them about how they can pay in installments or buy a cheaper version of your product that has less live support, for example. The key is to introduce these later so you have a good reason to email your subscribers. Help your customers remove overwhelm and make an informed decisionOne of the reasons why you want to be able to email your subscribers more than once during your launch is that you want to mop up all the people who are on the fence about buying. And one of the things that get in the way and stops people from buying is confusion, especially if you sell different packages or levels of your product. Because sometimes your prospective customers look at all the options and aren’t sure about which one to go for, and they'll buy neither!So use your emails to talk about the features and advantages of your higher-end offer, explain the different packages and what they do, who they're for, and what the advantages of buying each of them are. This is about making sure people have the information they need to make a decision. Because when we sell or market anything, our job is to help people make informed decisions. Be the person that helps your subscribers get rid of overwhelm.Handle objectionsThe last thing we want to point out to help you find more reasons to email your list during your launch is something we're really passionate about. We talk about this a lot because it really works - and it's handling objections.Whenever we come up with an offer, we write down a whole bunch of objections and address them in our emails.  Just bear in mind you don’t want to handle objections by raising them. Don’t put thoughts in people’s minds – if someone is already on the fence about buying and you raise an objection in their mind, you’re only going to move them further away from that fence - and not in the right direction! When handling objections, you want to be compelling people and propelling them forward.So how do you do this exactly? We do it through Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), where we position every single thing really positively. So rather than asking the question, “What if you can’t make the live calls?” the FAQ will be worded as, “Will there be a recording of the calls?” and we'll explain how this is a really good thing because it allows people all over the world and from different time zones to access the calls. It’s a subtle difference, but it matters. So use your emails to handle objections. Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “how the sausage gets made”. Of course, this is funny to us because it's got the word sausage in it, and we think the word is hilarious because we're 12-year-olds.But jokes aside, it’s an expression, right? It’s a saying people are familiar with, and we like nothing more than to use common expressions and give them a bit of a twist. This was all about the idea of seeing behind the scenes of things, but you could the words to it to make it work for your individual business. Why does it work so well? Because it draws people in and triggers their curiosity. Awesome, right?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesAdd This Unusual Step to Your Checklist for Product Launch to Make More Sales After The Cart Closes with Marley Jaxx.The Psychology Of A Successful Email Launch – Being Desirable With Abraham Kallon. How to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer.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 7 elements that will give you more reasons to email during your launch) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Have you ever experienced a slump in sales? We know we have. But we've also learnt to read the signs so we know when one's about to happen. And we've come up with a few strategies to get ourselves out of it. So here's what we're talking about today - exactly what to look out for to spot when sales are about to slow down and how to get out of a sales slump. Ready to find out what you've gotta do?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:26) Why you need to keep an eye on the sales data in your business.(4:36) What is your EPSPM and why does it matters? (Warning: there's singing!)(7:16) Focus on making more money from your existing list.(7:57) What to do when you have a seasonal slump in sales.(10:05) All big businesses change their shop window - why shouldn't you?(12:07) How to prevent 'banner blindness'.(12:50) What to do to avoid a slump in sales. (15:24) What indicators to watch to predict a slump in sales.(18:23) How to use challenges to get out of a slump in sales.(21:14) Subject line of the week. Why do you need to keep an eye on the sales data in your business?It happens to the best of us. You put out a product, and it's not just selling as much as you feel it should. Or maybe it did sell for a while, but now... not so much. So what do you do? The first thing to do is to check the data and see what it's telling you. Is there actually a problem? You might find that yes, things are a bit quiet. But maybe you know that's because you have a very seasonal business and things are always a little quiet for you at this time of year - it's a known trend in your business. And if you find that you're making more money this month than you were last month or the one before, then great. You're winning! And definitely doing something right, so now it's a matter of working out what that is so you can make more of it. But what exactly are the metrics you should keep an eye on? What's your EPSPM and why does it matter?We go on and on about this one. But it's important. Your EPSPM (bit of a mouthful, yes) is your Earnings Per Subscriber Per Month. And it's quite self-explanatory, really. It tells you how much money you're currently making for each of the subscribers on your list.How to work it out? Look at how much you made in the last month, for example, and divide your sales by the number of subscribers you had on your list. If you made $1,000 and you have 1,000 subscribers on your list, each subscriber is earning you $1. That's the figure you want to look at - once you know that, you can easily see whether that goes up or down month on month. And you know why this is a fundamental metric in your business? Because while a lot of people are focused on growing their list, if you double your list but your EPSPM doesn't go up or, worse, goes down, then having more people on your list isn't a good thing! Because you're earning less, not more.So if this month you're making $1 per subscriber and next month you double your list from 1,000 to 2,000 people, but you're still making $1,000, you've reduced the effectiveness of your email marketing because your EPSPM is now $0.50 and not $1.Focus on making more money from your listSo here's a quick tip. Focus on making more money from the list you have rather than growing your list further. As we've said many times before, this is the exact reason why we got good at email marketing. Because we couldn't afford to build our email list by investing in ads. And we couldn't afford to upset people to the point they'd unsubscribe from our list either! So we had to really focus on how to earn more for each subscriber.So our tip to you is to track this metric (the EPSPM) and make sure it's not going down as your list grows. Worst case scenario, you want it to stay the same. But ideally, you want that number to grow as your list grows. What do you do when you have a slump in sales?So let's say you are tracking your EPSPM, and it is indeed going down. It's time to change things up. Because most of the time the reason why there are slumps in sales is that your audience has stopped listening to what you're saying. They feel they heard your message and know what it is. And if you have people like that in your audience who haven't bought from you yet, then it's time for you to start thinking about a different way of saying what you need to say. In other words, you need a new shop window. Think about physical shops on the high street. They do this - they change their windows regularly and multiple times a year. Big companies with an online presence do the same by refreshing the look and feel of their website or changing their logos. Even Google does this, often displaying different graphics or animations to celebrate and commemorate historic events, occasions, or anniversaries. As a user and a consumer, things like that help you pay attention and build a deeper relationship with the brand. And if the big names do it, why shouldn't small business owners like us do the same? How to prevent 'banner blindness'We often talk about this idea of banner blindness or ad blindness which has to do with the fact that if you have the same stuff on your website or the same copy in your ads all the time, people just become blind to it. If you don't change your 'shop window', people become blind to your general messaging. For example, we love the Complete Daily Email strategy - our approach to sending an email every day and having it make sales all the time. But our main product is our membership - The League. Most of the time we just send emails about The League, and that just works a treat. But every now and then, when we feel there's a slump in open rates, click-through rates, or sales rates, the only way to fix that is to do something different - to veer off. To zag instead of zigging.Sometimes you have to stop talking about the thing you've been talking about and talk about something different instead. For example, instead of sending people to your sales page every day, you could start sending them to a free video first. And then you could re-target the people who watched that video with email. It's all about changing the shop window and the way to do that is by thinking about the different ways you can put an offer together. How else can you present the thing that you want to sell? Could you, for example, put together a bundle, run a webinar, do a live event, run a challenge, or a week of live streams? Whatever you do, think about a different window dressing for the same shop. How to predict a slump in salesWhy get caught unprepared though? What if you could see the sales slump coming and could do something about it before you get in that situation? You could start watching out for the indicators that might suggest a slump is coming. If you're selling stuff by email, you might be able to see a slow decline in the number of people opening your emails and then clicking on your links. So your click-through rate is something to keep an eye on. Because if you see that going down it means that, for whatever reason, your messaging isn't convincing your audience. So this is where you need to act and think about what to do differently. Change things up - talk about something different so that what you're saying becomes different and interesting again.How to use challenges to get out of a slump in salesOne of our favourite ways to drive people to something unique and different is to use a 5-day challenge. They work really well, but you need to get people to participate and convert. We spent a couple of years coming up with a way to run challenges that work. We perfected it and refined it until we got it completely nailed. And we created something called the Dual Reality Challenge.It's a really cool automated way to have these challenges run for you via email. You can build them and run them as often as you want. You just drop your subscribers in and get people to register, participate, and then buy from your business. So if you want to grab that, here's the link. It will give you an instant way to change up the shop window in your business and start selling more of your stuff with challenges.Oh, there's some small print stuff. You can grab this and have every single email and every bit of influence in the psychology that we build into our email campaigns. But this is only available for 5 of 6 days from the date this episode goes live on the 13th October 2021. So if you're listening or reading in the future, this offer will have expired, and the only way to get this campaign will be to join our membership, The League. Subject line of the week This week's subject line of the week is "Leave me alone." This was done as part of a split test against another subject line, and "Leave me alone" was the winner. Why? Because it's an interesting contradiction, bearing in mind we are the email marketers bombarding with emails - not the other way round!The whole premise of this email was about the fact most people get really annoyed by SMS text message marketing. This email was prompted by a particular situation when Rob got fed up with a marketing text message, and he went on to talk about the right way to use SMS marketing along with your email marketing. Quite interesting, right?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to turn data into amazing outcomes – learn about Measuring Marketing with Chris Mercer.How to amplify email marketing campaigns with SMS messages, Clate Mask from keap. 17 No Cost Ways To Build Your Email List.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to get out of a sales slump) 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! 

Janet Murray is the Queen of Courageous Content. This week she's back on the show as our first returning guest - talking about how to come up with content ideas to promote your products and services. So, are you ready to find out how to create courageous content, with the amazing Janet Murray?Grab pen and paper (or whatever you make notes on) and get ready for this. There's some awesome stuff in this episode that you just don't want to miss!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:13) How Rob REALLY feels about Email Marketing Wednesday! (3:00) Did Janet think her car had been stolen (but something else really happened)? (5:18) How does Janet create so much epic content so easily? (7:38) Always start with what you're selling - your products or services. (9:00) How to look at the bigger picture first and then break it down. (11:56) Why you should always start with the end in mind. (13:10) Janet's framework for courageous content creation. (20:36) How to use awareness days to come up with courageous content ideas. (27:12) What percentage of our content should be sales content? (30:10) Subject line of the week with Janet Murray.How does Janet create so much content so easily? Creating tonnes of amazing content is what Janet does best. It's what she's known for. But how does she do it so well and so easily?Well, first of all, Janet says she enjoys it - she loves creating content. And that's got to make a difference, right? But she's also so good at this because she has a background in journalism. And when you're a journalist, she says, you can't just say you have no good ideas for a piece. It just doesn't work like that! So in her previous career, Janet came up with processes and systems to ensure that she'd always have content ideas to pick from. Isn't that clever?So what are some of these amazing strategies that Janet uses to come up with courageous content?Always start with what you're sellingThe first thing that Janet recommends (and something a lot of business owners don't do) is to start with what you're selling. So every year Janet works out what she's going to be selling over the upcoming year. She calls this 'overhead planning', and she teaches her clients this exact method too. Except that some of them struggle with this. And when they do, Janet says, it's because they have a business problem, rather than a content problem. Why? Because, quite simply, if you're a business owner and don't know what you're selling in the next 3-6 months or over the next year, do you really have a business? (Something to ponder here!)Thinking about what you're going to be selling in the short to medium term allows you to look at the bigger picture - at the 'wide shot view' of your business. And once you have that, you can then break that down into quarters, then months, then weeks. This is where planning your content becomes a lot easier to do. It's also less overwhelming than doing what Janet calls 'linear planning', where you look at the month ahead to work out what you're going to share on a daily basis. Overhead planning also gives you plenty of time to get organised to ensure you're able to create the right type of content.Isn't that super cool? For us, it's a bit like when we try and teach our members to write email subject lines. A lot of people focus on trying to come up with interesting and engaging subject lines before they've even worked out what the point of the email is going to be. Starting with the end in mind is a lot easier. Once you know what the email is all about, writing the subject line is a walk in the park!A 4-step framework for courageous content, with Janet MurrayAccording to Janet, a lot of entrepreneurs create too much content, which is part of what makes the process so overwhelming. This is why Janet thinks it helps to have a structure, and on this note, she's created a framework based on 4 different types of content:Educational content. This is content that helps your clients solve a problem and answers their questions.Inspiring content. As the name suggests, this is all about sharing stories or anecdotes that will encourage your audience to take some sort of action.Community content. Something that people do really well on their own personal social media accounts is building relationships with others. But sometimes people forget to do that on their business pages! You can't just jump in and ask for the sale all the time - it's about creating content that helps you build relationships with people first.News and trends. The final type of content is all about news and trends that relate to your industry, niche, or product and service. Janet recommends you regularly check the media for interesting pieces that relate to your industry that you may be able to share or interpret for your audience.So if you were to create just 4 pieces of content a week (one for each type), Janet says, that would be more than enough content over the course of a month and then a year. You'd find it less overwhelming and much easier to do because you'd be following a structure. Using a framework like Janet's might also help you become more consistent with your content, rather than yo yo all year round by posting frequently for a few weeks and then disappearing for months, for example.Of course, in order to do this, you also need to know your audience, what they're interested in, and what they need help with. You'll also find different people on different platforms, so it helps to do a bit of experimentation and testing. But once you have a structure to work with, you can then bend the rules to suit your audience and your business.How to use awareness days to come up with courageous content ideasJanet is amazing at using awareness days to create awesome content ideas, but a lot of people don't do it the right way, Janet says. If every other business decides to ask their audience about their favourite type of sausage on Sausage Day, it can get boring very quickly, especially if the topic isn't even relevant to your business, right? So how can you stand out from the crowd and use awareness days to create courageous content?The key, Janet says, is to use awareness days as jumping-off points to produce content that relates to your business. Always add a business angle to it. If the awareness day has to do with sleep, for example, we could talk about how to 'wake up' your email list. Or it could be about asking what skills people can do in their sleep. It doesn't have to be exactly about sleep. Consider awareness days as prompts that you need to think about creatively, and it'll make things more fun for you as a content creator and for your audience too.What percentage of your content should be sales content?We asked Janet what her take is on sales content, and she told us content should be 100% related to your products or services. Every piece of content you create should be leading towards the products you want to sell. A lot of Janet's content, for example, is about educating people on why they might need a content planner (because she sells one!). She won't just constantly ask people to buy her planner, obviously, but months in advance she'll share educational content about why people might need it. Or she'll ask her audience for feedback about her artwork, for example.Every piece of content needs to have a call to action to help you move that relationship with your audience further. That doesn't mean creating 'salesy' content every time. It's about producing deliberate content that moves your audience towards taking a specific action.Subject line of the week with Janet MurrayIn Janet's experience, any subject line that has a poo emoji tends to get better open rates. But also more unsubscribers! (Would you be offended by the poo emoji? We're definitely not!)But one of Janet's better subject lines is "you might regret this". And it's something she uses fairly regularly when she's about to close the cart for a launch, for example. Can you believe she's had people accusing her of bullying with that subject line? But that's the key to why it works. And no, not because it's bullying, but it because it triggers strong emotions in people, and it's one that always tends to do well for Janet. Interesting stuff, right?Useful Episode ResourcesAbout JanetIf you enjoyed this episode aboput courageous content with Janet Murray and would like to connect with Janet, head over to her website (where you can buy her Courageous Content Planner), Instagram, or tune into her new podcast.Related episodesEmail Content That Hits A Nerve – Journalism Hacks From Janet Murray.What should I talk about in my emails? Email marketing content ideas you’ll use.How To Plan 3 Months Of Email Content In An Afternoon.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingWant to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books! They 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 groupWe 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 get to 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 by applying 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 creating courageous content, with Janet Murray) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review 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. And, you know what? We also get to be discovered by more awesome people like you!

In today's episode, we do something a little bit different and share a success story from one of the members of The League - Gisele St. Hilaire. Gisele is a certified FeldenkraisⓇ practitioner and Assistant Trainer and the founder of Sunyata Movement Studio Inc. In other words, she helps people overcome pain and injury! Isn't that awesome? But what's even more awesome is that Gisele has been using email marketing to build a profitable business. And in today's chat, she tells us exactly how!We talk about how Gisele was using email marketing before joining our membership, what amazing results she's been getting since, how much she spends weekly on her email marketing, and more of this kind of incredible stuff.Ready to see what you could do, too?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:59) How Gisele used email marketing before joining The League.(5:35) Gisele's biggest barrier to email marketing. (8:10) A look into Gisele's systems and automations.(9:09) How Gisele cleaned up her list.(12:48) How Gisele increased Earnings Per Subscriber Per Month (EPSPM). (14:45) How email marketing has changed for Gisele's business since she joined The League.(18:20) The activity that had the most impact on Gisele's email marketing.(19:37) What's next when it comes to Gisele's email marketing?(20:42) How much time does email marketing really take? (23:46) Subject line of the week.How Gisele used email marketing before joining The LeagueGisele explained that most of her work used to be hands-on with clients. She offers a service called Functional Integration, which happens face-to-face. But she teaches Awareness Through Movement classes, where she verbally guides people through lessons. When her clients started asking her for the chance to re-watch her sessions again and again through a recording, she saw an opportunity to package her workshops into online products.So how does email marketing fit in? Gisele had given it a go a few years ago. But, to her own admission, she wasn't leveraging her list as much as she could have been. Her biggest barrier was the fact she'd email her list only when she had something to sell. So she wasn't emailing very often, and when she was, she was asking for a sale.Before joining our membership, Gisele had a trickle of new people regularly joining her list. She had a freebie in the shape of a lead magnet, and that had helped her build a list of about 1,000 subscribers. She'd email them 3-5 times in the lead up to a sale and then go quiet for about 3 months. In other words, her email marketing was driven by the things she wanted to sell at the time, rather than on where her subscribers were in their journey with her or what problem they were trying to fix. But Gisele wasn't sure how to meet them where they were. And, like many other business owners who are new to email marketing, she was afraid to email her list more often.Sound familiar?A look into Gisele's systems and automationWe asked Gisele a bit more about her systems, and she told us she's using ConvertKit as her email marketing platform. At the start, she was just broadcasting. But over time she got more sophisticated and started embracing automation to create an onboarding sequence and then a welcome sequence. And because she sells a handful of small products as well as providing free content, those sequences consist of 2-4 emails.And that's when things start to get interesting...How Gisele cleaned up her listYou see, one of the first things we encourage our members to do is to give their list a bit of a clean-up. We help our members do that through a specific campaign, which Gisele eventually used, but she also did something pretty amazing to clean up her list.And here it goes...Gisele decided to email her subscribers to let them know she'd be emailing them 3 times a week going forward. Why 3 times a week? Because she was scared of completely obliterating her list had she started sending out emails more frequently. But also, 3 times a week felt like something she could be consistent with in the long run.So in those initial emails, Gisele gave people the option to opt-out. But she also explained, very transparently, what people could do with her emails. They could read and delete or they could store and get back to them whenever they wanted. In the space of about 3-4 months, about 300 people unsubscribed.But something else also happened. A lot of people actually started to reply back to her, i.e. engage with her emails! So after she gave the option for people to leave if they wanted to, she ran our Cold Subscriber Campaign, and that's where she found the cold subscribers who hadn't engaged for three months and actively removed those people from her list. By that point, that only cut her list by a further 30-40 subscribers.So over time and by emailing more often, Gisele gave the opportunity to those less-interested subscribers to leave quietly through the back door. Her list shrunk by about 300 people, but it also became more engaged.And that's a good thing because...How Gisele's increased her Earning Per Subscriber Per Month (EPSPM) One of the metrics we encourage our members to look at is the Earnings per Subscriber per Month (or EPSPM). And that's pretty much what it says on the tin. It's how much money you earn every month for every subscriber that's on your list.Before joining The League, Gisele was making a mega respectable $1.30 per subscriber. But after cleaning up her list and implementing some of the strategies we teach, Gisele is now making an amazing $4.10 per subscriber! Isn't she awesome?!How email marketing has changed for Gisele's business since she joined The LeagueGisele tells us she feels way better about her email marketing now. Her customers aren't leaving her list (despite her emailing more regularly and often), and they're more engaged. But also, Gisele can tell she's getting better at the whole thing. Admitting she struggles with the writing side of things, she can see how she's improving and getting quicker at composing her emails as time goes on.Gisele also talked about running another one of our campaigns - the Time Lord campaign - to promote one of her standalone online products. The campaign runs over 5 days, and Gisele was hoping to get 10 sales at $79 per product. Do you know what happened? She sold 6 on day one and by day 5 she'd sold a total of 40! Plus, she also received lots of lovely comments and even some great testimonials without even having to ask for them!So let's re-cap what Gisele did right. She took her list and tidied it up first - making it smaller and narrowing it down to those people who were super engaged. She then started running campaigns and getting email marketing right by setting up processes to build a profitable business. Now Gisele is in a position to start focusing on building her list because she knows that if she was to drive hundreds or even thousands more subscribers through that her list, it's proven to work. She's tested the system, made it work, and now she's ready to add to that list.Just. Brilliant.The activity that had the most impact on Gisele's email marketingHands down, the one thing Gisele started doing that had the most impact on her email marketing, she says, is producing video. It's not always Gisele speaking on camera though - she also produces slideshows. But embracing video has been key for her - a huge step up that proved really beneficial.What's next when it comes to Gisele's email marketing? Gisele told us two things are on her to-do list when it comes to her email marketing. The first thing she wants to do is to grow her list. In the past, Gisele hadn't been comfortable with social media or putting money behind ads. But that's all about to change because she's now super confident that growing her list is going to work for her business.The second thing Gisele wants to do is to set up the right campaigns to feed into what we call The Master Controller, or her main product. And in Gisele's case, that's the membership she's launching. So she has a few email campaigns she's excited to set up and write. Cool beans!How much time does email marketing really take?  To reassure anyone who thinks they don't have time to do email marketing because they have a business to run, we asked Gisele whether embracing email marketing has taken over her life. And her answer is that it's becoming a more and more natural part of running her business. It's the one thing she now knows she's not going to give up because she can see how foundational and essential email is. Nothing is going to beat it.Gisele admits that creating and setting up campaigns took a bit of time, initially. But it's an asset that she now has in her business and can go back and improve on at any time. Writing emails can take Gisele anything between 15 minutes and half an hour, and for her, that happens 3 times a week. She then spends another couple of hours a week learning and creating campaigns and envisages needing to spend 3-4 hours a month on getting to where she wants to be, over the next couple of months. But after that, she reckons one hour a week will be plenty. And isn't that music to your ears?Subject line of the week We hope you enjoyed Gisele's story and how she is using email marketing to build a profitable business. But let's now move on to this week's subject line of the week, which is is "Kennedy's fired". And it's one we sent out recently during one of our events. It has to do with the fact that Kennedy dropped the ball and forgot to upgrade our Zoom account, so we had people kicked out of the event because we didn't have enough space for all our participants. Oh, dear.Why did the subject line work though? Because it implies there's been some sort of dispute between us. The truth is that we've been friends for over 18 years, so something like this is unlikely to really affect us. But creating comedic tension with your subject lines definitely works. Try it out!Useful Episode ResourcesAbout GiseleIf you enjoyed Gisele's story on how she's using email marketing to build a profitable business and would like to connect with her, you can find her on her website Sunyata Movement Studio.Related episodesHow to create and sell courses online that people actually want.Write Emails Like A Boss – Even If You Think You’re A Crap Writer.Who should not join The League of email marketing heroes.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingWant to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with 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 groupWe 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, where we get to 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 by applying 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 using email marketing to build a profitable business with the lovely Gisele St. Hilaire) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review 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 and get discovered by more awesome people like you.

We have reached 100 episodes of The Email Marketing Show! Whoop! To celebrate we (Rob and Kennedy) have recorded a very special behind-the-scenes episode - a week in the life here at Email Marketing Heroes. We talk about what we do on Sundays (Kennedy), Mondays, and Wednesdays, how we build our campaigns, how we write our daily emails... and how Kennedy puts his underpants on in the morning. You really don't want to miss this one... SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:15) The team at Email Marketing Heroes. (7:06) Should you make time for email marketing?(9:20) A Sunday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes. (11:08) A Monday in the life of Email Marketing Heroes.(18:15) Email Marketing Wednesday!!!(20:54) What about our daily emails?(25:58) Batching, batching, batching.(31:42) Email marketing is the one activity that will grow your business!(35:15) Did Rob and Kennedy really record this whole episode naked? (36:40) Subject line of the week. The team at Email Marketing HeroesIf you're new to the show, welcome. We are Rob and Kennedy, we run The Email Marketing Show and an awesome membership called The League of Email Marketing Heroes. Rob and Kennedy (and some of our staff) are based in the North East of England and have a remote team with members from all over the world, including India and Columbia. We are currently making mid-6 figures a year and might even be able to hit a million soon. But we don't say this to brag (honestly!) For us, how much we make is a measurement of how many people we can spread the word to about this really good email marketing stuff!Should you make time for email marketing?  As we take you behind the scenes of our working week, you'll see just how much time we spend on email marketing. And you might think: "Of course you guys spend time on email marketing. You teach the stuff!" And you'd be right in thinking that.But the real reason why we spend a lot of time on email marketing is because our business would dry up if we didn't. You see, 90% of our sales come from email marketing, so we couldn't afford not to do it. It's not a question of having time for us - in fact, we don't have time not to do it.And in our opinion, neither do you! As Rob always says, if you're not spending time on email marketing, what else are you spending it on? Are we all inventing stuff that we could be doing in order to feel like we're being productive and getting loads done? Does what you do every day really move the needle in your business? Our tip is to focus on the activities that make you sales - and that's always going to be email. With email, you can make sales now but also setting up sales for the future. And that's how your business is going to grow. So focus on building systems in your business that will make you sales both now and in the future.And with that out of the way, let's look into our week...A Sunday in the life of Email Marketing HeroesBelieve it or not, our working week starts on a Sunday, which is when Kennedy will spend a couple of hours looking at our social media channels, including our Instagram, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators Facebook Group, and our Facebook page and, in one sitting, plan the content we are going to be sharing. Kennedy will typically record around 6 videos and create a whole bunch of graphics or brief them to our awesome designer Parul. And the reason why he chooses to do it on a Sunday is that during the week we are focused on supporting our staff on Slack. On a Sunday, the team is off, so Kennedy can get in his creative zone. Plus, he finds that weekends are the best times to come up with new ideas!A Monday in the life of Email Marketing HeroesMonday marks the official start of the week here at Email Marketing Heroes. Our staff check in every morning and check out every single evening, depending on what time zone they are in the world and how many hours they work. If we have something specific or an idea we want to discuss, we (Rob and Kennedy) typically get together for a call on a Monday to talk strategy. The cool thing is - we're completely flexible with this. We value flexibility and freedom to be able to do the things we want when we want and wherever we want. But if we need a call, we'll make that happen. Otherwise, we'll just keep an eye on whatever is coming around the corner to avoid anything ever becoming urgent or critical.A Wednesday in the life of Email Marketing HeroesHang on a sec. What about Tuesday? Well, we actually don't do much work in this business on a Tuesday - or a Thursday or Friday for that matter! We can make exceptions, of course, so if there's a meeting we've been trying to make happen that can only take place on one of those days, we'll go ahead with it. But we have our own take on meetings - we'll only book one if there's a specific purpose to it. Wednesday on the other hand is a very important day... because it's Email Marketing Wednesday!!! And that's when - on the first Wednesday of every month - we record this podcast. We are able to attract some really big-name people in the world of online digital marketing, and when we let our guests know we only record one day a month, we've hardly ever had any pushbacks. But we definitely intensify our work on a Wednesday. We also do content creation, live events inside our membership, The League, and record training. We dedicate Wednesdays to email marketing because this allows us to think about it all day - about all the different email marketing strategies we can share with other people and how to best reach out and teach them. It's definitely an intense experience. But once all the podcast episodes are recorded, for example, we can pass on the activities to other members of our team to carry with their own separate tasks and make things happen simultaneously without us getting involved. What about our daily emails? This is where we truly live in the moment every single day, for the most part. As most of you know, we send an email every single day to our list - 365 days a year. There are obviously some other emails that get sent to people to our members or our customers, but in terms of our general list, the email we send daily are written live, in the moment. Or sometimes, they were written into our email marketing platform up to a maximum of 4 hours before, if we're doing a split test. Rob writes most of the emails, and on a Friday, he might want to write the Saturday and Sunday emails too, if he wants to take the days off. But not always. Because it typically only takes a whole of 10 minutes to get the email written and queued up and sent, so not long at all!Our email campaignsThe only exception to that is that every 4-6 weeks we run a new campaign that replaces our daily emails. And those emails are usually pre-written. There's no chance we'd do an email campaign live - those have a lot of moving parts, and you might risk sending the wrong emails to the wrong segments and confusing people. So running an automation and then testing it is a lot more secure. Every 6-8 weeks we come up with a new way of promoting our membership, The League, which is our main product. We try and promote it from different angles because not everyone buys it for the same reasons. And we teach our members to do the same exact thing with their email marketing and products. You'll get better results from running different campaigns every 4-6 weeks to stimulate people in new and interesting ways.When we're coming up with a new campaign, the process normally starts on a Monday when we might have a strategy call and plan the campaign out. We go through the idea and talk about ways of making it more interesting and appealing to people who haven't engaged in the past. Sometimes we get to the end of that call and realise it wasn't a good idea at all, so we throw it out. Sometimes we'll have a great idea, but it doesn't quite work as we expected. But sometimes we have great ideas that actually work. And those are the campaigns that end up making it into The League to be shared with our members. Writing our email campaigns and testingWhenever we start a new campaign, we first write all the emails in a Google Doc. At that point, we don't worry about the technology. We can both work on the document and share comments and suggestions in real-time, which works super well if you're collaborating with others. When we're happy with our final copy, we upload the emails onto our email marketing platform and then ask our designer Parul to create the graphics for that particular promotion. We like to get things done simultaneously where we can, so we can just get the work done faster.And then there's a really important step you don't want to miss here - testing. You want to go through and click on every link to make sure it's going where it's supposed to. Drop the price of your product to 50p/50 cents or £1/$1 and buy it - go through the process and see what it's like for your customers. (Just don't forget to put the price back up before you go live!) Create various email addresses and see what the experience is like for someone who goes through a certain path vs a subscriber who chooses a different route.  Bathing, batching, batching!You probably noticed that batching tasks is a big part of what we do. Even when we're running a new email campaign, for example, we'll split the tasks up. We never work on things in sequence. Take our Time Lord campaign, for example. It runs over the course of 5 days and includes several videos. The last thing you want to do is to record these videos separately and having to set up your equipment 5 different times on 5 different days! That's just not efficient and forces your brain to switch gears. What you want to do instead is to stay in the same creative zone. The same goes with writing your emails - you want to do all that in one sitting. Email marketing is the one activity that will grow your business!We spend 70% of our time doing email marketing because that's the way to turn more subscribers into customers and more customers into repeat customers than doing anything else.There's only so much you can post on social media before you start diluting the reach of your own message. So you're better off focusing on how to make your one post a day better, for example - make it more engaging so you can serve your business better. But looking at your email marketing and spending time figuring out new angles to turn people into customers will help you grow your business. Email is the one activity that will drive growth in your business, so if you're not going to make the time to do it (or have someone else do it for you), you won't be able to grow your business in the way you want.  Subject line of the week This week's subject line of the week is "Sideways underpants". This was written by Kennedy, and it was all about the fact he got himself some fancy Ted Baker underpants, only to find out that they put the tag on the side, rather than the back. And that got Kennedy all flustered and confused when getting dressed in the morning.The lesson in that? Why make things complicated for your customers? When you create products and services, don't make life difficult for them. Build on their beliefs, what they already know, and what they're already doing. And if this isn't proof that you can find email ideas absolutely everywhere, we don't know what is! Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWriting email every day vs batch writing in one go. How To Plan 3 Months Of Email Content In An Afternoon. How Often Should You Email – Emailing More Often.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 (and an insight into our week, here at The Email Marketing Heroes) 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!