The Email Marketing Show

Do you worry about your unsubscribe rate? Do you obsessively log into your email marketing software to check it and then panic over it? If you do, you need to stop that. Your unsubscribe rate is actually a good thing! Want to know why? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:48) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?(4:10) Why you want to build a list of people who want to buy from you.(6:50) Your email marketing should be on your terms.(9:06) When people unsubscribe from your list, they improve your email deliverability.(10:00) Why you should aim to make a profit from your email list as a whole (and not look at individual subscribers).(12:30) Email marketing is about building relationships with people.(13:16) Why you want to keep your email list lean.(14:46) Look at people unsubscribing from your list as the ultimate way of niching down.(16:54) Why you want to create an environment of zero competition.(18:20) Subject line of the week.Build a list of people who want to buy from youWe know getting notifications that say people have unsubscribed from your email list is scary. But it shouldn’t be. Subscribers are not Pokémon – you don't have to collect them all!The truth is when people unsubscribe from your list they're doing you a favour. Because list building isn't about having the biggest list in the world. It’s about having a list of people who want to hear from you and buy from you. If they're not going to buy from you (ever), they might as well not be on your list! You don't need more friends. And you don’t need more people on your list that drag you down.In fact, that unsubscribe link at the end of your emails is useful. It's like a self-cleaning feature. This is your email list cleaning itself and telling you who’s not interested. Your subscribers are telling you that your business isn’t for them. And that's a good thing!Your email marketing should be on your termsBecause your emails are landing in people's email inboxes, it's easy to think you are interfering with their day - that you're being intrusive. But let's turn this around for a minute. Imagine your email marketing is your house, and you’ve invited people in for a cuppa.Effectively, you've put a thing on the internet (a lead magnet) that told people you send an email out as often as you do about the things you want to sell. If people want to receive that email, they’re welcome to come on in and make themselves at home. You’ll even put the kettle on, won’t you?And if at any point they don't like what they see in your house, they can leave. And that’s okay. In case they get so upset they email you to say you’re spamming them, you can always unsubscribe them. So don’t get attached to the idea you have to make their inbox a better place. Because sure, your job is to do good email marketing. And that should make someone’s inbox better for them, but only if they want to be there and they’re interested in what your emails are all about. But remember - this is your house. You invited them. And if they don't like it, they can leave at any point or you can unsubscribe them. So write your emails for you. Send the emails you'd like to receive and then build an audience of people who want those emails. This allows you to focus on serving the needs of the people who want what you have to offer.When people unsubscribe from your list, they improve your email deliverabilityDid you know that email unsubscribes improve your deliverability? That's right. Because instead of doing things that tell Google and the other search engines that your emails aren't very good, the people who don't want your emails just leave.It's when they stay and start doing things like not opening your emails, not clicking your links, or not engaging, for example, that you need to worry. Because that's when your open rates and your click-through rates go down.It’s a bit like having a sad person in the corner of the room at your party - they're bringing the atmosphere down for everyone. But if they leave, the mood of the whole party lifts again.And it's the same for your email deliverability. The minute the people who weren't engaging with your emails leave, your deliverability rate starts to increase. And that's a big win! Aim to make a profit from your email list as a wholeAnother reason why high unsubscribe rates shouldn't worry you is that we shouldn't look at subscribers on our list individually. So if you're running ads, for example, you can calculate your ad spend and the number of subscribers on your list and work out how much it's costing you to acquire one subscriber. And if that person unsubscribes, you now think you've lost that amount. Then you start focusing on the fact that if you emailed less or differently, then people wouldn’t have unsubscribed, and you wouldn't have lost money. But that's the wrong way to look at it! Instead, you want to think about how email marketing works as a bigger picture. So if you're spending $1,000 in ads to get 200 subscribers, for example, you now want to make that $1,000 back with all your subscribers collectively – not looking at them one by one. Don't aim to make every single subscriber on your list profitable. You make a profit from your list as a whole.  For example, we make $12 per subscriber per month. So if we had 200 subscribers, with our business and our setup, we could make $2,400 per month. If you spend $1,000 to acquire 200 subscribers, your job is to make $1,000 (and more) from those 200 subscribers as a whole. Because that's a much better way to see where your profits or losses come from. Email marketing is about building relationships with people Let's face it - people who unsubscribe from your list are not interested in what you have to say or sell right now. There’s no point in having a huge email list that you’re too scared of emailing in case they unsubscribe.The reason why you have email subscribers is so that you can communicate with them and build relationships to a point where they invest in you or buy something from you. So please get over the idea that emailing people is something to be afraid of! Because when you email people you build relationships. And that means that when they're ready to buy from you, they will.  Keep your email list leanAnother advantage of people unsubscribing is that it keeps your email list lean. And that allows you to reduce your email hosting costs. If you’re on a package with your email platform where you get 5,000 subscribers for a certain price, as soon as you go over that number, you’re going to have to upgrade.Because email marketing is such a high return-on-investment activity, the cost of upgrading is not massively prohibitive, but you still want to avoid overspending. And if some people unsubscribe and that allows you to stay under that threshold, you get to keep your costs low. Look at unsubscribing as the ultimate niching downPeople unsubscribing from your email list is the ultimate niching down. A lot of people think that if they send an email and 98% of people don't open it, it means their open rates are bad. Even if you could trust open rates as being true (which you can’t and shouldn’t), a 30% open rate, for example, is not bad at all! But what you need to realise (instead of focusing on open rates) is that not everybody's going to resonate with your style and message, which means that when people unsubscribe you get to niche right down. Every time you send an email, some people will leave. But as they get themselves off the list, you're left with the people who resonate with your style, with the kind of words you use, and with your message. The people who stay are interested in learning more about the thing you talk about, and they're specifically interested in learning about all that from you.Just like us, you’re not for everybody. And by getting rid of the people who are not interested in you or your thing, you get to niche down to the ones who are. And those are the most profitable people to have in your world.The environment of zero competitionOnce you niche down to the people who are interested in what you sell, you get to create what we call an environment of zero competition. You're no longer competing with other people doing what you do, because your people have decided that it's you – your style, your frameworks, your personality, your way – they want to learn from. You’ve created an environment of zero competition where no one can come and sweep them away from you.So if you want more of this – if you want to see more consistent sales from your email marketing, let us hand you our library of email automations and email marketing campaigns, training, and monthly group coaching inside of our amazing community - The League of Email Marketing Heroes. That's our monthly membership, especially designed to help you sell more of your courses, bring in new members to your programmes, and win more coaching clients with psychology-based email marketing.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line of the week is “Have you got a napkin?” and it worked because it’s a question. When someone asks you a question, your brain subconsciously switches into gear and either wants to answer or wants to know more – what is it all about and why do they want to know, for example?The premise of the email was around the fact we’d heard someone say that your business model should be so simple you could draw it on a napkin. If not, it means your business is too complicated. But if you get into the weeds of your email campaigns and funnels, it can all get quite complex. And our email talked about why it's important to have a good system for building your email marketing automations so you don’t lose track of what they’re doing. And we had just the thing to help people do that. Brilliant, right?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesWhy You Need to Avoid These Email Marketing Mistakes.How to Email Your Abandoned Email List. Increase Your Email Open-Rates: 13 Email Subject Line Tips to Stand Out in An Overcrowded Inbox. FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about why you shouldn't worry about your unsubscribe rate) 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 want to know why email marketing is right at the top of the digital marketing trends for 2022? Let's face it - if it isn't already, email marketing needs to be the top priority for your business in 2022.Ready to find out why and (most importantly) what you can do to make sure you boost your sales and make more money in 2022? Let's do this! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:46) Our incredible Keap offer!(5:22) Email marketing is the highest ROI marketing activity you can do(9:12) Email is the safest place to build your business.(12:28) Email marketing helps you convert people into paying customers. (16:01) Email marketing has the shortest lead time in turning people into customers.(17:23) There's money in your existing email list.(19:54) Email marketing technology is moving forward - you don't want to miss out!(21:02) How to get results from your email marketing in 2022.(21:50) The price to join The League is going up!(24:02) Subject line of the week.Email marketing is the highest ROI marketing activity you can do That's right. It's as simple as that. Email marketing is the highest ROI (return-on-investment) marketing activity you can do. None of the other marketing strategies out there – social media marketing, video marketing, content marketing, events, speaking, podcasting, or anything in between - will give you a whopping $42 ROI for every $1 you spend. That’s an insane amount! And, according to the experts, that's just an average! When it comes to our business, for every subscriber on our email list we earn $12 per month. To figure this out, we look at the number of people who are on our email list, calculate the amount of income and sales we make, and divide one number by the other. That gives us how much each subscriber is worth to us. We call it Earnings per Subscriber per Month (or EPSPM). And knowing how much we make per subscriber every month tells us how much we can afford to pay in order to get somebody on our email list. But also, it tells us how long we're going to be out of pocket before we break even and then make a profit.So with these kinds of numbers, should you try and skimp on the marketing automation platform you choose for your small business, for example? No! Of course, we all want a great deal - no one wants to pay more than they should. But you also need to find the most effective way to do email marketing. If you're going to shoot for that $1 in, $42 out ROI, you want the best tools for the job. Because not all of the marketing platforms out there have the technology you need. Email is the safest place to build your businessSo that's the financial side of things. But another reason you want to focus on email marketing for your business growth in 2022 is to protect yourself. That's right. Because you just can't rely on social media! There's a lot of turmoil around social media platforms. What if they all disappeared? What if you get kicked out of your social media account? We definitely saw in 2021 how all the biggest social media channels had outages and went down (most of them at the same time). When that happens, that leaves you with no way to communicate with your audience. Of course, your email marketing platform could go down too. But it's likely to get back up quickly because the problems and teams tend to be smaller. Another valid reason to prioritise email marketing is that you own the data - something that's not the case with social media. If you ever had a problem, you could download all your subscribers and send them an email from elsewhere. You can keep a backup of your data because it's yours! Plus, it's safe and it’s protected.Are we saying you should come off all social media? Not at all! Far from it. Definitely use social media to build your audience. But then point your audience to your email list. That's the place where you nurture that audience and sell. And also, don't forget to use your email list to send people back to your social media content. It helps you make it more effective. We post content both via social media (our Facebook group in particular) and via email. And that helps us boost results. But by far, the safest place to build your business is by email.Email marketing helps you convert people into paying customersAnother reason why you should prioritise email marketing in 2022 is that it takes care of conversion for you. Let's explain this with a little analogy. Imagine you have a dinner plate in front of you - that represents your business. And to run it at the scale you want to run it at, you need three things on your plate:Build an audience. You can do that using social media platforms and use those as your discovery channel. You get people who haven't heard of you before to find you. Great.Conversion. Then you want to convert that audience into actual paying customers. Delivery. For us, that means showing up to support our members inside The League of Email Marketing Heroes – our membership. It’s where we deliver our service to our customers.With these three elements on your business plate to look after, there's no wonder you're so busy! But by focusing on email marketing you get to take conversion off your business plate. And the way to do that is by creating a series of email automations and showing up regularly with frequent emails. Once you've taken care of conversion through your email marketing, you can focus more of your time on building an audience and serving your customers. Or you can use that gap on the plate (i.e. that time you've freed up) for you – to do the things you love with the people you love. How about that?Email marketing has the shortest lead time in turning people into customersEmail marketing has the shortest lead time when turning strangers into customers than any other digital marketing strategy. You get a faster return, on average, than with anything else - especially when compared to social media or running ads.  Let’s think about ads for a moment. Whether it's Google ads or social media ads, a lot of people who click on your ad will bounce back without buying at first. You’ll have to re-target them for a while before they buy from you. There's definitely a period of time in between someone sees your ad and buys. And depending on what you sell, this can be weeks, months, or even longer!Whereas with email, on average we turn a new subscriber into a paying customer within 9-15 days. It takes a bit longer for some people, but it’s not weeks or months. That means we get a much faster ROI. And that’s important because the longer you're out of pocket, the more trouble you could get into as a business. We all know you need good cash flow, right?   There is money in your existing email listYou must have heard us say this before, but there's money in your email list. No matter what you sell or how small your existing list is, there's money in there. We know this is true because we see it with people inside The League. We see them take some of the email campaigns we teach our members, run them to the list they already have, and make sales.Yes, the people on your email list are already in your world - they know what you sell and at what price. By emailing them, you’re not telling them something they don’t already know. But if you don't, they’re not just going to suddenly buy. They won't take action just because they're on your list. Not unless you do something. They need to hear from you and from a different angle – one they haven’t heard before. Because at some point the penny will drop, and the desire to buy your product becomes higher than the pain of investing in it. If you have people on your list who haven’t bought from you yet, know that there's money in your list.And isn’t that amazing? That you can use what you already have without having to add more subscribers or do more work on social media? In the space of a few hours, you could boost your sales from your existing list!Email marketing technology is moving forwardAnother reason why email marketing sits at the very top of the digital marketing trends for 2022 is that technology is moving forward. While some people claim that email marketing is dead, others are developing amazing technology, like rich content and email AMP, for example. If you haven’t already, go and check out this interview with Tom Kulzer (CEO of Aweber) to find out more about that.There’s a lot of exciting and powerful stuff going on in the world of email marketing. And if you’re already so busy that you feel you have no time, email marketing is the strategy with the biggest impact on sales and profits without having a huge impact on your time. In fact, focusing on email marketing will eat up less of your time than other activities. Email marketing will make you more money from what you already have without investing additional time into it.Get results from your email marketing in 2022Think about what your business and life would look like right now if you made email a priority at the start of 2021. Would you have achieved everything you wanted by just investing a few hours a week into it? Would you be making more sales? And would you be better at email marketing? You’d probably find it a lot easier by now, too. If you're reading this, you know email marketing is important. And by making it a priority in 2022, you could be answering yes to all those questions in a year's time! So how are you going to get results from your email marketing in 2022? If you want consistent sales from your email marketing, check out the library of trialled and tested email sequences inside our membership, The League. Our campaigns are specifically designed to help you to sell more courses, bring in new members to your programmes, or win you more coaching clients - all while using our psychology-driven marketing. On top of our training videos, we also do a couple of coaching calls every month to answer your questions and apply what we teach specifically to your business.So make sure you check it out now because the price for new members is going up at the end of January 2022. But if you join before then, you'll take advantage of the existing price and keep that for as long as you remain a member. Subject line of the weekWe always talk about subject lines that tread the line between being clickbait-y enough to make people pay attention and read but without making them feel tricked when they do. So this week's subject line is “Can we get on a call?” followed by the phone emoji.The content was around the fact we added a bonus to a deal we were running where we were offering a free group coaching call if you bought the course then. The call would be a chance for us to answer any questions about the training. So that's what the email was about and “Can we get on a call?” was the subject line that went with it. Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesEmail AMP and the future of email marketing with Aweber CEO Tom Kulzer. How to Pick an Email Automation System.Using Email Marketing to Build a Profitable Business – a Success Story from a Member of The League.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about why email marketing is right at the top of the digital marketing trends for 2022) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Do you use advertorials in your business? Hang on. Do you even know what advertorials are? Because not many people do (or know what these types of pre-sale pages are called!) So let's hear it from Rachel Mazza, who gives us the ins and outs about advertorials and shares some awesome examples of advertorials you'll want to start using in your business straight away to grow your email list and boost your sales. Shall we get going?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:18) Did Rachel 'accidentally' move in with lots of other people? (And did Rob REALLY mess this up?) (5:22) What are advertorials and what are they used for?(7:36) How to use advertorials to warm up your audience. (9:29) How to use advertorials to reach a wider audience.(11:08) Advertorials and content networks. (12:23) What format do advertorials need to be in? (14:25) Do advertorials come across as clickbait-y? (20:29) How long do advertorials need to be? (21:10) How do advertorials impact on your ad spend?(27:53) Subject line of the week with Rachel Mazza.What are advertorials and what are they used for?Advertorials, also known as pre-sale or interstitial pages, are the pages that go between the initial touchpoint where you first interact with the customer and the place where you want them to convert. Conversion here could mean buying your offer or joining your email list - whatever you need it to be. And the role of the advertorial is to warm people up before you ask them to take action.So let's visualise this. A prospective customer may have come across one of your blog posts or a Facebook ad for the first time, for example. Of course, you'll want to send them to your sales pages or your offer. But at this point, you're faced with a cold and skeptical audience (they don't know you yet!) so you need to get them into the right mindset by providing them with value and information before you ask them for something. The advertorial page sits between the first piece of content where the prospect might have come across your business or your content for the first time and the opt-in page where you ask them to join your email list or the sales page where you ask them to buy.All good so far?How do you use advertorials to 'warm up' your audience?In advertorials, you don't want to sell too hard. Because the goal of an advertorial is not to sell – it’s to give someone enough information to take the next step.There are a couple of ways to do this and move them to the next page.You can use anchor text. Let’s say you sell a weight loss product. You might have a line in your article that says, “Jenny lost 30 lbs before Christmas”. And that can become your anchor text, i.e. you add to that phrase the hyperlink to your opt-in page and lead magnet.Or you can use subtle CTA (Call to Action) at the bottom of our hypothetical advertorial example where you say something like, “If you'd also like to get results like Jenny, click here to get our free Seven Day Course”, for example. Just remember not to make it too promotional. When writing advertorial content, you're in a giving mindset - your audience wants to get something useful. And your job is to give them information, entertainment, or something they want to read. Because when it comes to advertorials, they're not interested in buying something - not yet.How to use advertorials to reach a wider audienceWhether you're buying ad space or trying to grow your audience organically, advertorials help you filter through the people who are interested in what you have to offer. Ultimately, these are the prospects who are more likely to convert.But at the same time, using advertorials allows you to cast a wider net. Because now that you have people coming in and showing an interest in your content, you can re-target them. So even if you have someone who doesn't take the next step with you just yet, at least you know they're interested in what you have to say. Maybe it wasn't the right time for them to buy. Or maybe they needed more touchpoints or a different angle - for example, because they're part of a different demographic.Advertorials allow you to test different ideas or angles fairly cheaply. And once you know what resonates with your audience, you can then carry those concepts through your sales pages or landing pages. You are testing ideas before you try and sell to someone. And by the time you do, you already know that these ideas resonate.Advertorials and content networksAdvertorials work with all traffic sources. They're a really effective strategy for paid ads because they allow you to lower your traffic cost while still converting more cold traffic.But you can also use content networks. This is still a type of ad, but you’re paying a company (like Taboola, Outbrain, or Adblade, for example) to place your content on a website where people will see it as sponsored content or featured content.If you think of the majority of the content that you see on websites like Buzzfeed, these are advertorial examples. It's content that's trying to get you to go to someone's opt-in page or sales page. What format do advertorials need to be in? Advertorials can take many forms, including listicles, editorial content, or stories. Advertorials are a form of native advertising, i.e. copy or sales material disguised as content. You can think of them as native ads.For example, the listicles we've all seen on Buzzfeed are advertorials. Each item featured in the article will then have a link to where you can buy the product, for example, or a CTA at the end that drives the readers towards an opt-in page. Listicles work particularly well for e-commerce.But a lot of advertorials look like editorial and educational articles ("How to" content) or even journalistic articles, like a press release or an announcement.Rachel's tip is to use personal stories though. You want to tell the story of someone who's just like your ideal prospect who is having a struggle but then finds a solution. And that solution happens to be yours. And if people want to find out more and take the next step with you, they can check out your offer.Do advertorials come across as clickbait-y? Advertorials are pre-sale pages. When thinking about the 5 stages of awareness (as per the work of Eugene Schwartz), which are: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware, advertorials work particularly well for the people at the unaware stage. These are the people who might not know you yet. In fact, they don't even know they have a problem yet -  let alone the fact that there's a solution out there and that you are the person with that solution!So if you write an article with a clickbait-y headline, it'll only come across that way if you're approaching someone at a different level of awareness than you intend. If someone's never heard from you and you expect them to buy, your content may come across as sales-y and off-putting because it's not pitched at the right stage. They'll feel disconnected from that content, especially if they're just browsing or looking for a potential solution to their problem.On the other hand, if you have someone who’s ready to buy (i.e. at the most aware stage), they’re looking for a great deal, so they won’t be put off by sales-y content or headlines. Clickbait-type content is relative – it all depends on the level of awareness a prospect is at, at any given time.Should you create advertorials for different stages of the awareness scale? Most definitely! You can also have more than one advertorial in your funnel. For example, you could bring people from being totally unaware to being problem aware and then solution aware. You can sometimes do that in one article, but you may need multiple articles. The first step is to make your audience realise they have a problem. Then you want them to know there are solutions out there. And this is where you want to give them more information and touchpoints - because they're not ready to buy into your solution just yet.Before-and-after case studies, listicles, and story-based articles are great examples of advertorials because they help you make a personal connection with your audience. But you can also get more creative and use different types of formats, like podcast episodes, videos, or infographics. How long do advertorials need to be?Advertorials need to be consumable, bite-sized, and catchy. You want someone who’s mindlessly scrolling on Facebook, for example, to stop, click, and read. And if they’re the right audience, then something will click – they’ll want to read it in more detail to learn more. The goal of advertorials is to get in front of as many people as you can. And those people are going to be extremely high-quality leads because they've already made several micro commitments before they even get to your opt-in page. They've clicked on your ad, for example, they've read it, and they're still interested. They've taken all these steps and are now ready to give you their email address. Awesome! How do advertorials impact ad spend? With advertorials you get in front of a very wide audience, but the people that filter through are going to be high-quality leads. This is why more and more businesses (now that ad costs are going up) use advertorials as ads. These are often long-form ads or story-based advertorials that look like content. And they normally lead to the company's low-cost, tripwire product.Compared to ads, advertorials allow you to test ideas quickly. With paid ads, conversion costs might be lower but testing is also slower. So if you want to expand your audience, you can create super-cheap awareness ads and test the ideas before you run a full-blown campaign to the advertorial.Ideally, you'll want to write some advertorial-based ads, see which ones get the most engagement, and then take that theme and write a more involved advertorial that you can publish on your website or a third-party website.What budget do you need to leverage advertorials in your business?You can run advertorials without spending any money - you can do it organically, using platforms like medium.com, which has a built-in audience. People are already on the platform looking for content. The key is to make the advertorials interesting for the reader and get out of that selling mindset - a giving mindset is going to be more efficient and effective for you. Or you can guest blog or contribute content to podcasts, for example - these platforms can act as channels for your advertorial.If you decide to spend money on ads, you're going to speed up the conversion process, but you don't have to. You could opt to use content networks to get in front of more people a lot faster. But if you don't have the budget to invest, you can do this organically by posting content on your website and using organic SEO to drive people to those articles or by publishing your content on third-party websites, which gives it a little more credibility.If you decide to use content networks, your spend is linked to the number of impressions your content gets, so you can work with any budget. It's about figuring out what works for that market. If you have a high-converting, proven offer, you might want to invest a lower budget because you know you can break even or make a return on ad spend a lot faster. In a nutshell, content networks allow you to test concepts a lot better because they're placing your advertorial where people are already consuming other content, so you might find this an even better strategy than paid ads.Subject line of the weekRachel’s subject line of the week is “Just checking..."Rachel uses this subject line when people first opt into her list. Eight hours after they've signed up, they receive an email with this subject line, where Rachel asks them to reply to let her know they got her guide.But she also uses it for someone called Dean Jackson, creator of the email marketing strategy called The Nine-Word Email. And it’s just what it says on the tin - an email with 9 words in it. Like, “Hey, are you still interested in losing weight, Rachel?” Rachel tells us it's hard to just stick to 9 words, but it's super effective!Don't you just love this? Useful Episode ResourcesAbout RachelIf you want to connect with Rachel, you can find her on her website, where you can grab her FREE guide with the exact 8 steps Rachel uses to write advertorials.Related episodesBuild Your List using Viral Ads with Dave Rotheroe from Grip Advertising.Facebook Groups Marketing – Content That Makes Sales with Christina Jandali.Courageous Content with Janet Murray.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 examples of advertorials) 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!

Is 2022 the year you're finally going to focus on building your email list? You might have heard us say this before, but once you've worked out how to maximise the amount of money you're making from your existing list, you need to also grow your list.  So... want some awesome strategies that will help you do that in the coming year? Let's find out what you gotta do!  SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:40) Our incredible Keap offer!(5:27) Add links to your Instagram Stories.(7:37) Use the question feature in your Facebook group.(9:04) Offer people products or services that best suit their needs.(12:37) Leverage other people's audiences.(15:42) Add a list-building element to your existing campaigns.(18:28) Become a podcast guest or deliver guest training. (20:55) Get endorsements from people.(23:16) Buy another business.(25:36) Subject line of the week.1. Link to your lead magnet in your Instagram StoriesThis is a new development with Instagram, which historically hasn't been the best out of all the social media channels to help online businesses share links. As you know, you can add a link to your lead magnets or sign-up forms in your bio - perhaps by using a tool like Linktr.ee or by creating your own custom link. But otherwise, links weren't clickable, and that's not great for list building. But now Instagram gives all their users the ability to include a clickable link in your Instagram Stories. And as a result of that, you can get a huge number of extra eyeballs directly to your landing page. So use your Instagram Stories to teach great content, share an idea or lesson, or tell a story. And then send people to check out your lead magnet by just clicking on the link. That's definitely going to boost traffic to your website and help with your email list building. 2. Use the question feature in your Facebook groupAnother great strategy to capture email addresses on social media is to use the question feature in your Facebook group. We do this in our own Facebook group - The Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You see, when people ask us to join the group, we ask people to give us their email address if they want to get some free resources from us. And when they accept to download the resources, they magically end up on our email list! Amazing, right? When it comes to list-building strategies, this is a great way to start building or growing your list and collect email addresses - because you can pretty much mention your Facebook group everywhere! Plus, Facebook's algorithm gives you some help every now and again by suggesting it to more of their users, too.Offer people products or services that best suit their needsBecause you can ask your target audience and potential customers up to three questions when they request to join your Facebook group, we recommend you use one of the questions to identify which of your products or services will be best suited for that person.For example, in our case, we might want to find out whether someone wants to learn how to do email marketing for their small business or online business (in which case we’ll tell them about our membership, The League, or our course, the Complete Daily Email Strategy), or whether they might want to have our email marketing writing agency write their emails for them. And if that's the case, we tell them about our agency, rather than our membership or courses. Remembe that people are at different stages in their journey, so offer them the products or services that best suit their needs.Once we have people's answers, we then use different custom fields in our email marketing software (Keap) and put our email list subscribers into different series of automations that take them down different routes. This way, people coming into our Facebook group and email list, will get the solution they need as soon as possible.And this is super useful because if we send our email subscribers a series of emails for products that don’t meet their needs, they disengage and unsubscribe. And no one wins. But by identifying someone’s needs as quickly as possible, we make the sale faster and also get to help people with what they truly need.3. Leverage other people's audiencesThe next tip is to build your audience. It's a hard and slow step for everyone, but it’s essential. And one of our favourite ways to do it is to leverage other people's audiences. Do you know of any other business owners who are not your competitors but work in a similar space to you? For us, it’s anyone who sells to course creators, membership site owners, and online businesses. We can team up with them, even if they don’t offer something that we teach.So figure out how to integrate your products and services into other businesses' funnels and get a piece of space on their land - it's a great strategy for lead generation. You could set up an affiliate programme or put up a banner on their thank you pages that points to your lead magnet so you can start growing your list.Of course, you'd have a deal with that business, where they either get a percentage commission of your sales or you pay them a flat amount. And this means you also get to benefit from whatever strategy that business is using to drive traffic to their business. By working to build their audience, you build yours as well. Similarly, you could approach membership site owners who sell to an audience who can benefit from what you do and ask if they would offer special deals on your products. By integrating your products into other people's businesses, you're able to ‘ethically steal’ their audience and direct them across to your stuff.4. Add a list-building element to your existing campaignsAnother strategy we like to use is to add a list-building element to our existing campaigns. Not all our promotions have a list-building element – a quick flash sale of your programmes wouldn’t, for example. But if you’re hosting a webinar or running a challenge, a quiz, or an online summit with lots of different speakers, you might want to add a list building element into your email campaign. For example, if you're hosting a webinar, you could ask your email subscribers to invite friends. This allows you to build trust and authority while giving people a solid outcome, but at the end of it, you’re also making an offer. Quizzes and contests are perfect for list building. And so are summits. You might have 20 different speakers there, and if everyone emails their lists about the summit, you get to increase your email signups. Their audiences get to enter your world too!So think of ways of including a list-building element in campaigns, promotions, and activities that you’re already doing, rather than thinking about these as separate entities. And in case you're interested, we have lots of campaigns (with a list-building element) ready for you to customise and use, inside our membership The League. 5. Become a podcast guest or deliver guest trainingThe next strategy is to become a podcast guest or deliver guest training in order to leverage other people's audiences and build yours really quickly.As you know, we have guests on this show but also appear as guests on other people’s podcasts. But we also do guest training - we get invited to jump into other people’s communities and deliver some training on email marketing. If the audience isn't an exact fit for us, we'll get paid a fee. But if it is (and the room is full of our ideal customers), then we do it for free because we also benefit from the opportunity.Imagine having the chance to give a 30-40 minute presentation to a group of perfectly qualified potential customers! You put that training together once and teach it over and over for different audiences. This is a great type of list-building mechanism because it builds raving fans out of people. They get to see first-hand how you can help them before they’ve given you any money. And of course, because you're invited by the owner of the membership these people are already part of (someone they trust and pay money to), you almost come recommended - and those people will trust you as a result. So find paid communities, memberships, and coaching programmes that are a good fit for you where you could deliver guest training and then pitch your products at the beginning, middle and end of that training.6. Get endorsements from peopleEver heard of endorsed mailings? This was popular years ago, and it's a powerful strategy that has made a comeback. This is where you reach out to someone who has an email list of your perfect customers and suggest they could get even better results if they used the thing you teach. So in our case, we'll approach a specific business, tell them about a great resource we have (free or paid for) and ask them to tell their audience about it. Of course, they'll either get a flat fee depending on how many clicks or subscribers they send our way. You could set up a trackable affiliate link (a business partnership, if you like), and offer them a commission when someone buys from you as a direct result of that endorsement.7. Buy another businessThe last strategy we want to share for building your email list is to acquire a business that already has an email list. We’re not talking about sharing data illegally or doing dodgy practices like swapping lists to get subscribers on your list. None of that!This is about legally and legitimally buying a business that comes with its own email list of subscribers. Where would you find this? You might know someone in your industry who wants to close down their business or is looking to hand it over to someone else to manage while they still retain a percentage of the profits, for whatever reason. If you negotiate a deal to buy that business, there’s no reason why you can’t acquire their email list and start promoting your products to that audience. Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line of the week is “Ever made one of THESE?” This is something we’ve talked about before, and it’s about taking an obscure word that references to something specific and writing that one word in capital letters.This specific email we sent out was talking about customer avatars, which is something we stand firmly against for a few different reasons (very controversially), and it had a good open rate because people were curious about what the email was all about. And that's all because the word 'THESE' was in capital letters. Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesBuild Your List using Viral Ads with Dave Rotheroe from Grip Advertising. How To Grow Your Email List Using Facebook Pages (Without Ads) – Rachel Miller Moolah Style!How to Grow your Email List When You Have Less Than 10k Instagram Followers, Helen Perry spills all.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 building your email list) 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! 

Ever wondered why retention is important in your membership? If you're focusing all your energy on acquiring new members, you want to know what our friend Liz Beadon has to say. Having worked with big brands like Virgin and Samsung, Liz is a retention and loyalty strategist. She works with membership and subscription site owners to help them improve their customer experience and retention rate and to grow their business.If you don't have a retention strategy just yet, you definitely want to know about Liz's framework (it's full of R's!)Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:20) Did Liz meet her husband the day she spilled a drink on him at the theatre? (4:53) Why is retention important for your membership?(6:45) How do you know if you have a retention problem? (8:20) Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?(10:42) Step 1 - Receive. (13:36) Step 2 - Reveal. (16:32) Step 3 - Refer. (20:12) Step 4 - Report. (22:14) Step 5 - Review.(25:30) Subject line of the week with Liz Beadon.Why is retention important for your membership?Running a membership is a great business model - you have lovely members who pay you every month and a regular income.But none of it is possible if you don't nurture your customer relationships. Because when you have a membership site (or any kind of subscription service) retention is key for profitability and revenue.When do you start nurturing loyalty in your membership?If you want to get technical, the process of nurturing loyalty starts with your acquisition methods. You need to make sure you're acquiring the right kind of members.But in terms of nurturing the relationship, this includes everything from the sales process to that first impression when they hit your membership site and see the welcome area. Liz calls it "a bit of an orchestra of experience to deliver that great first touch". We love that.How do you know if you have a retention problem?A lot of membership site owner will mostly focus on the acquisition of new members. But not many know whether they have a high turnover of members. Do you know how many people, month-on-month, leave your membership and cancel their subscription?There are two different ways that you can look at this.Your monthly churn, i.e. what percentage of your members leaves every month.Or (and Liz thinks this is more valuable) your cancellation rate, which is calculated by working out the percentage of people who are still there on month 1, month 2, etc. This gives you a great idea of when you might be seeing an increase in churn and tells you whether you have a retention issue at a specific part of the lifecycle.Of course, if you find you're losing more members than you are acquiring, you probably need to shift gears and focus on your retention strategies.Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?When people first join it’s important to create a really good experience so they feel they're being guided through a process. However, you want to be careful not to overwhelm your brand new members by sending way too much stuff by email.You want to properly onboard your members to make sure you're delivering a great experience and at the same time flag anyone who might be at risk of churn. And the best time to do this is right at the start. Because one of the most exciting times of someone joining your membership is the day that they subscribe. But that excitement naturally fatigues over time.So when onboarding your members, put the most important content at the start of the lifecycle and ensure you deliver a tangible win for your members within the first 2-3 weeks. Because that's the amount of time you have before someone considers cancelling.Typically, the first month sees a massive cancellation spike, so your first 2-3 weeks are an imperative point of the lifecycle to show the value of your membership. If they don't see value immediately (and either don't use the content or don't understand the membership), they will cancel. This is why thinking about retention in your onboarding process is crucial!Step 1 - ReceiveLiz uses a simple 5-step framework that highlights the checkpoints every membership owner should consider when delivering a best-in-class, memorable onboarding experience.The first step is Receive. This is all about making sure you're warmly welcoming your members through that initial email, where you include all the key information.How much information is too much? Keep it as short as it can be but as long as it needs to be. Call out the key elements of the membership, like login details, weekly calls, learning sections, etc.This is an important step because by reminding your members of the value of your membership, you counteract that buyer's remorse and cognitive dissonance that happens when people realise they’ve just spent money and start worrying they might not get the results they want. By delivering a great first email, you're 'reselling them' the membership, so they don't regret their purchase.And on this note, be super clear on what your membership helps people with. People don’t want a programme that does a million different things. They want to be taken on a linear journey and achieve a tangible result. Step 2 - RevealGet clear on what one thing you want to help your members achieve in the first 2-3 weeks of their membership. That first month is key to ensuring you're not haemorrhaging members so stop people from leaving because they're not getting what they need out of the membership.This is where you identify a quick win - something tangible and measurable - that you can help people get in a short period of time and then hold their hand through that process. You can do this via two or three emails where you point them to right resources and encourage them to get involved in the membership and take action.If you sell a membership that helps people achieve something that's not entirely measurable (like relationships or emotions) think of something your members can do in the first few weeks. It could be helping them ask one person on a date, for example. The aim here is to get your members to acknowledge, from a logical perspective, that they have achieved something tangible as a result of joining your membership.They haven’t reached the ultimate goal just yet. But in a short span of time they’ve got some value. And that's better than thinking three weeks have passed and they’ve done nothing with the membership. So do some customer research and ask your members what they wanted to achieve when they joined the membership. And with that, think about the first step on that journey you can help them take in the first few weeks. Make it super easy and bite-sized because analysis paralysis is a real thing - if you give people too much, they will do nothing.Step 3 - ReferThis is something a lot of memberships don't do. And it's asking new members to refer people who might benefit from the membership. The reason why Liz includes this in the onboarding programmes she helps clients with is because from a revenue perspective, having a referral scheme can be quite lucrative. It's an activity you can set up to run in the background, and it can gain you new members without any additional work.Liz talks about two kinds of referral programmes:You can give people a percentage of the initial sale when they drive a new member into the membership.Or, you can give a number of free months to both your existing member and the new person who joins.By creating a mutual benefit (and specifically through giving the new person something for free), you're making it easier for your existing members to refer people to your membership. Because by offering a freebie to someone they don't feel like they’re selling to their friends!Liz suggests you do this around week 3 and during the onboarding process because at this point members are still quite engaged and excited, and you want to retain them for as long as you can. But of course, you can also pepper in your referral programme throughout the lifecycle. You could even schedule a campaign every few months to send them a nudge. But that first month is a really great opportunity to drive people in.Step 4 - ReportThis is a touchpoint where you email your members at a specific point in the lifecycle - at day 25, for example. You send them an email and ask them how they're finding the membership. And you give them a couple of options (links) to choose from:"Loving it so far".And, "Still getting up to speed”.Depending on what they click, you then tag them and have a follow up email that corresponds to their answer. If they say they're loving it so far, brilliant! If it's a monthly member, that's a great opportunity to upsell to an annual membership. But if they say that they're still getting up to speed, this is an early indicator that someone isn't getting value from the membership yet, and it's a great opportunity for you to take that conversation off of automated and start manually engaging them to ask if there’s anything you can do to help them.What this also helps with is seeing patterns. If you get the same sort of feedback a few times, you start building that in to help people automatically in the future so you can improve the customer experience for everyone.Step 5 - ReviewThis happens around the day 31-32 mark, after they've been charged for their second month. At this point, you want to reach out and ask your members to leave a testimonial of their experience with the membership. You can even ask some additional questions to find out what's going well vs what you need to improve.Keep this super short and simple. The real objective is to get testimonials you can use on your sales pages to drive new members into the membership.Also, what's interesting from a psychology perspective here is that by giving you a testimonial, they’re technically selling your membership to somebody else. But by thinking through the process of what to say and then saying the words out loud, they resell themselves on the membership. Bonus!Subject line of the weekLiz’s favourite subject line comes from an email that was sent when she worked at Virgin. It was part of a cross-Virgin campaign going over 12 different Virgin companies, and the subject line read: “This message has been recalled by Richard Branson”. Liz said that so many people opened that email! And she's looking forward to using something similar in her business one day.Useful Episode ResourcesAbout LizIf you want to connect with Liz, you can find her on her website or on Instagram.Related episodesOnboarding Emails Examples for your Online Course.The Best Cart Abandonment Emails with Chelsea Martinus from Black Girl Boss Collective.6 Lessons We Learned From Launching And Growing Our Membership Site.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 why retention is important in your membership) 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 see people follow bad email practices all the time. And you know what? Doing the stuff we're going to talk about here holds you back from doing better and more effective email marketing and getting the results you want in your business. So are you ready to find out what the top email marketing mistakes you're making (and stop doing these things... yesterday?!)SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:10) Our incredible Keap offer!(6:16) Stop worrying about open rates.(7:07) Why open rates are wrong.(8:37) Stop using RE: or FW: in your subject lines.(12:42) Stop making it difficult for people to unsubscribe from your list.(14:16) Stop letting your subscribers down.(16:00) Stop using misleading subject lines.(17:13) Stop adding so many images to your emails.(19:33) Why emails with lots of images have worse delivery.(21:21) Subject line of the week.Stop worrying about open ratesThe first of the email marketing mistakes that a lot of people make is paying too much attention to open rates. Sure, this is a metric that all email marketing platforms share with you, and it's an obvious one to check. But that number is wrong. First of all, you probably assume that your open rate should be higher than it is. You see 34% and think it's rubbish, but actually, that's a really respectable open rate. So it's important to be realistic here. But most importantly, open rates cannot be tracked properly, so they're just plain wrong! Some Android devices are already blocking the ability to track open rates, which means your emails are showing us unopened when they probably aren't. And on Apple, they’re being shown as open even if they aren't.As more and more platforms like Apple iPhone release privacy updates that block that tracking even more strictly, the open rate metric you're looking at gets less reliable by the day. And you can't be improving a wrong number!So let's go with this - open rates don't matter. Because you can't track them and you can't measure them, you can't work on growing them! It's like trying to follow a map with a blindfold on - you can't see the map or your feet! So pleeeeease stop obsessing over open rates. (Oh, and by the way, yes you do want people to open your emails, read them, click on the link, and buy. So stick to the best practices that can help you improve your open rates. But forget about the number!)Stop using RE: or FW: in your subject linesOkay, everyone needs to stop adding a fake RE: or FW: in subject lines to make it look like the email was a reply or it was forwarded when it clearly wasn't. These things are dodgy, scummy, and dishonest. And by far this is one of the biggest and more damaging email marketing mistakes we see people make.You see, stuff like this might trick people into opening your emails, but please can we all stick to doing things that are effective and ethical?Let's remember that you want people to open your emails because they see your name popping into their inbox, they know who you are and are excited to read what you have to say. When our subscribers see emails coming from Rob//Email Marketing Heroes they know it’s going to be a funny, interesting story with a valuable lesson (and an offer) in it.So let's stop trying to build relationships with people based on bullshit. We want to get people excited, show value, and make sales. But we don't want to lie to them and make them feel ripped off. Because trying to trick your audience into thinking they're already in a conversation with you by mimicking a real, transactional email is the kind of stuff that creates resistance around buying stuff online - and specifically from emails. It's because of email marketing mistakes like these that, as marketers, we all have to work harder to make the sale. And if you're doing this because you see everyone else is, please, just STOP. Of course, when it's a genuine response and you've started a real conversation with your subscribers, by all means, carry on. But don't place that RE: or FW: there intentionally to trick people into thinking something that isn't true. Not cool. Stop making it difficult for people to unsubscribeYears ago, you'd see people adding a huge amount of lines between the end of their email and the unsubscribe link that's automatically generated at the bottom of all your emails. And we see that some people are still doing that. Please stop. If you're doing this, it's one of those BIG email marketing mistakes you want to stop making.If people want to unsubscribe from your emails, just make it easy for them. Because if you don't let them go, they're not going to suddenly start liking your emails! They'll only get annoyed. And then they'll hit the spam button. Or reply to you and shout down in the email. So you aren't winning anything by making it difficult for people to unsubscribe from your list.You want to make it hard for somebody to want to leave but make it easy for them to cancel once they're ready to. So put every bit of effort into making your email list an amazing place to be where people never want to unsubscribe. But when they do, just let them go.Stop letting your subscribers downWhen somebody subscribes to your email list, you need to show up with the value you promised. A lot of people tell us that if they sent an email to their list every day their subscribers wouldn’t like it. But if someone has given you their email address to receive your emails and you don’t send them any, you’re letting them down!If someone bought a product from you and you never sent it, that would be a scam! And it's the same thing with emails. Because emails are currency. They don't cost anything financially, but they cost our subscribers' attention, time, focus, and trust. This is what they give away when they give you their email address.So in return, you need to treat their email address with respect and show up and do the thing you said you were going to do. Because if you don't - if you promised a weekly newsletter and keep missing your deadlines - every time you don't do what you said you would - you're losing trust. And subconsciously, that doesn't work well at all when you're trying to sell something! So, can you see this is one of those email marketing mistakes you don't want to be making?Stop using misleading subject linesWe once got an email from someone that said, “My friend died of Covid”. But then the email went on to say the person wasn’t really their friend and they didn’t die. So at that point, as a reader, I feel like I've been hoodwinked. My emotional response is to feel let down by this person.And you don't want that to be your reputation. You want quite the opposite, in fact! You want to surpass people’s expectations and make them think that their experience with us is even better than what they thought it was going to be. Don't trick people and don't let them down. Instead, do amazing offer creation and come up with brilliant ways that are effective and convert. Come up with brilliant products and overdeliver. But never hoodwink people! Stop adding so many images to your emailsAnother thing we’d like people to stop doing is putting so many images in emails. When you add images, a few things happen both from a psychological perspective and from a technical perspective. From a psychological perspective, imagine you've got a new place, and your mum gave you this second-hand ‘awful’, ‘disgusting’ sofa, and you include a photo of it because it's somehow part of the story you're sharing in the email. Now, the problem with that is that once you've used those denigrative words to describe the sofa and then added a picture, anyone with a sofa like that or who likes that sofa feels automatically alienated by your email and by you as a person. You don't want that. So a much better strategy is to paint a picture with your words. That way, the reader gets to imagine what the sofa looks like. You don’t see best-selling fiction authors add photos in their books, do you? Because when we paint the pictures with words, our readers allow themselves to grow that picture in their head. And that's powerful and less alienating. Emails with lots of images have worse deliveryThe other reason why you don't want to use too many images in an email is that you'll get a lower delivery rate. If you do everything else right, and you generally have good delivery and good list hygiene, an image won't hurt. But an email with lots of images will get lower delivery because it’s more difficult to deliver than a cleaner email without images. So with fewer images in your emails, you get better delivery and a better reputation. Occasionally, we do put an image in our emails though. When we're sharing a video, for example, we'll add a screenshot or moving GIF to get more people to click and watch. What we're not doing (and we suggest you don't do either) is to litter the email with photos make it look like the new IKEA catalogue! The goal is to create streamlined emails that people can read quickly and that get good delivery.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “A really sad phone call.” For us, this subject line treads the line of what's acceptable. Because what we're always looking to do with subject lines is to create something that has enough hype, intrigue, and curiosity. You want it to trigger a knee-jerk reaction that will make people want to open your email and read it. But at the same time, they don’t want to feel let down when they read it. Now the first line in this email was, “Greg was a really lovely guy.” So that's a little preview line that helps get the email opened. Greg was a potential client we spoke to on the phone, and it turned out we couldn't help him with what he was looking for. And we ended up, sadly, turning him down as a client. That’s what the email was about. So aim to grab people’s attention but without making them feel hoodwinked. Got it?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow Will iOS 15 Change Email Marketing?Increase Your Email Open-Rates: 13 Email Subject Line Tips to Stand Out in An Overcrowded Inbox #2018.How To Get A 60% Email Open Rate – Above Average With Amy Perkins.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.Grab our Keap offerWant to take advantage of a fantastic deal for one of the best email marketing platforms on the planet? As sponsors of this show, Keap are offering all our listeners a smashing deal for 3 months. Get Keap at half price, with no setup fee, and an extra 2,000 contacts by clicking on this link.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about email marketing mistakes you need to stop making) 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! 

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!