Do you know how many of the email addresses on your list are invalid? What happens when your subscribers mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing? How can you improve your sender reputation and your email deliverability? And did you know that you're losing approximately 22% of your subscribers every single year? We discuss this (and more!) with Brian Minick from ZeroBounce. And we guarantee you - you want to know what Brian has to say here. So listen or read on, and you can thank us later! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks. (3:10) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (4:58) Did Brian really jump from the side of a cruise ship?(6:20) What is email validation and why do you want to do it?(9:44) Why deliverability rates aren't accurate.(11:43) The truth about disposable email addresses.(16:08) How to deal with typos.(19:50) Other reasons why email addresses aren't valid.(24:33) How to build an email list based on quality and not quantity.(26:47) Make informed business decisions with ZeroBounce.(31:40) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]What is email validation and why do you want to do it? Having validated over 18 billion email addresses over the years to check if emails to those addresses are deliverable, ZeroBounce did some research back in 2022. And they found that, on average, about 22% of email lists are decaying year on year. This means that next year you won't be able to deliver 22% of the emails you delivered this year.And part of the reason why is because of job shifts and email addresses getting shut down or abandoned. But there's more, and we're going to go into details with Brian a little later. But for now, let's let that number sink in - it's a terrifying statistic! Sure, if you have more personal accounts on your email list (rather than business ones), you're looking at a slightly slower decay. But that number could be higher if you're B2B. Brian confirmed that ZeroBounce (who are B2B) are seeing their own database reduce by 32% every year!If you've been following our work for a while, you'll know that our approach to email marketing is based on building a list over time and nurturing those people. We make offers from the start, but not everyone will buy straight away - some people can take a couple of years before they become customers. And if these people aren't even going to be on your list next year, you definitely want to sell to them quickly! You want to turn them into paying customers to keep them in your world. Because when they become customers, they're more likely to get in touch and let you know if they changed their email address, for example.But let's get into more detail... Why deliverability rates aren't accurateWhen your emails aren't getting delivered, you might see your bounce rate increase. However, Email Service Providers (ESPs) don't do a great job of explaining why that is. ZeroBounce, in their analysis, focuses on deliverability. When your emails are delivered, it means they've landed in someone's inbox. ESPs, on the other hand, will consider an email as delivered when it's left their system and has gone somewhere. In reality, it could be in someone's spam folder (blocked by a spam filter) or the Promotions folder. All it means is that the email has been sent.The reason why ESPs report on 'sent' rather than 'delivered' is that they can't tell the difference! But also, this way, they show you a great-looking number. What you really want to know though, is whether your emails end up in the subscriber's actual inbox. But what are some of the other reasons for email list decay? The truth about disposable email addresses A lot of websites out there let people create disposable email addresses - these are valid email addresses that give you access to an inbox and allow you to send and receive emails. People typically use them to get past gated content that requires an email address (like a lead magnet or a coupon) but without using their real email address. These are anonymous.But once the person has grabbed the piece of content they wanted, they leave that website, and they're gone. That email address is no longer a marketable contact. So if you send emails to that address, they'll either bounce or go unread. It's a completely useless contact because it's just like a 'burner email address' with a one-time use. The good news for us marketers is that disposable email addresses can be detected. So, as a business, you can make some decisions. If you're a charity that accepts donations from anonymous people, then this use case works for you. It’s a valid and safe scenario for accepting disposable email addresses onto your list. But otherwise, if the emails are bouncing, and you're never getting engagement, you're building a list of vapour!From a marketer’s point of view, these email addresses are a waste of space because these people won't ever buy anything from you. Plus, because the emails aren't being received, disposable email addresses are hurting your deliverability and reputation as a sender. And in the long run, this affects your ability to reach the people with legitimate email addresses who want to receive your marketing and buy from you. So it's important that you know this technology exists, and you take measures to rule these people out. How to deal with typosAnother issue that affects the decay of your email list is... typos. These are incredibly common. And a lot of people accidentally type the wrong username or domain when filling in opt-in forms. Simple errors can be detected and corrected, but that's not always possible. ZeroBounce has technology that allows the user (in real-time) to detect the error and have the chance to correct it. When a potential typo is identified, the user is presented with an additional screen where a suggestion is made about the correct email address. The user can then confirm and proceed or deny and correct the typo. This is a seamless experience that works with a message that appears on the screen on the page that immediately follows the sign-in form. And this is great news for us email marketers! It means we're not sending emails to the wrong address. And in turn, that means the emails won't bounce and hurt your deliverability. [thrive_leads id='8822']Other reasons why email addresses aren't validOther issues affecting list decay are spam traps and 'complainers' or 'abusers'. These are people who mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing. And when that happens, it negatively impacts your reputation in terms of how the email servers perceive you as a sender. If enough people are marking you as spam, you’ll potentially end up being blacklisted, and the rest of your emails might go straight into people’s spam folders.This is because email providers take feedback from their customers. And if a lot of users consider you spam, the email servers make decisions about your domain, your IP address, etc. Their job is to put content in front of their users that they actually want. So if enough people are considering you spam, they won't want to send your content to others.Of course, as an email marketer, you can't predict this behaviour - you don't know that specific subscribers will decide to mark you as spam rather than using the unsubscribe link you provide at the bottom of your emails. So what can you do? First thing first, make sure your unsubscribe links are clear and visible - don't hide them!But also, don't consider unsubscribes as something negative. The truth is when someone unsubscribes from your list, they're opening the email and clicking on a link. This is considered engagement, and it helps you build a good sender reputation. ZeroBounce can detect 'complainers'Because ZeroBounce works with a lot of sending partners, they receive data feeds that allow them to detect 'complainers' who tend to mark emails as spam rather than unsubscribe. They have a record of 5 million 'complainers', so if someone is known to ZeroBounce (and you're one of their clients) they're able to give you a heads up before you even accept someone like that on your list. Once you have access to data and statistics (and know, for example, that a certain email address is associated with someone who's 10 or more times more likely to report you as spam), you can decide whether to accept specific email addresses or not. Unfortunately, these are the types of issues that you can't deal with on your own as a business - you need the data. And ZeroBounce has access to it!How to build an email list based on quality and not quantitySo if you already have an email list, how do you find out how many of those email addresses are problematic? Brian explains it’s about quality and not quantity. Quantity is easy – anyone can add email addresses to their lists. But you want to focus on quality instead. Whatever the size of your list, what matters is that certain rates (such as bounce rates or complaint rates) stay low. It's a percentage game - stats matter for you and for the ESPs. If you've acquired your email list over time, ZeroBounce can analyse your entire email list to give you an idea of how many email addresses are undeliverable or risky. Once you get past this step, you can clean it, upload it, or send it through the ESP (depending on which one you’re using, ZeroBounce might have an integration with them) and let them run the analysis. It's a quick and easy job for ZeroBounce - they take about 45 minutes to run the data on a list of 100k email addresses and can give you information on each one. That allows you to effectively validate your list.  Make informed business decisions with ZeroBounceHistorically, ZeroBounce finds that 57% of people's email addresses are considered valid and safe to send. That leaves 43% of addresses that aren’t necessarily ‘bad’, but they need looking into in order to understand why the report highlighted them. If certain categories of email addresses are coming up for you, you have some important business decisions to make.If you have invalid email addresses, for example, you'll want to get rid of them. Because you really don't want those people in your CRM or ESP, especially if you're paying per contact! And with regards to other categories of 'bad' email addresses, you can benefit from the experience of ZeroBounce - they'll help you make decisions specific to your business. If you’re still in the early days of your list-building activity, knowing about the quality of your contacts will help you build a good sender reputation from the start. Because at the end of the day, your subject line, your content, or your offer can be great, but if your emails don't get delivered, no one will see them! So if you're a podcast listener and want to give ZeroBounce a test drive, Brian is offering 1,000 FREE validations. And if your list is smaller than that, even better! Now's the best time to be proactive and start looking at your data because doing the cleanup at a later date is going to be a lot harder. So check it out! [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “trapped in the airport.” The email was about our 36-hour journey home from Austin back in June. We drew a parallel between the intricacies of marking sure people don’t slip through the cracks in the airport and ensuring subscribers haven't slipped through the cracks of your email automation.It’s a curiosity-driven hook that leads from the storytelling in the subject line, which also starts with a lowercase - and that's curiosity-invoking in itself. It comes across as if the email was potentially rushed because you are (indeed) “trapped in an airport”. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes6 Things You Didn’t Know Your Email Marketing Platform Could Do.Warning: 6 Lies Your Email Marketing Platform Is Telling You.The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 stop landing in the spam folder and improving your email deliverability) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

What is cold email outreach? Is it a necessary technique or a spammy annoyance? And how do you even do it? Let's talk about the ins and outs of cold outreach emails. Are they really as icy as people think? Not if you do it right... So let's find out!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:23) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (4:28) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (6:17) A chilly introduction - what is cold email outreach?(7:55) Is cold email outreach the same as spam?(8:54) Why cold email outreach isn't as 'frosty' as you think.(11:29) Why do cold emails sometimes feel sleazy?(13:43) Cold outreach done wrong.(16:08) Using social proof in your cold outreach emails. (17:44) What's the difference between inbound marketing and cold outreach? (19:38) Running cold outreach to a lead magnet.(23:51) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]A chilly introduction - what is cold email outreach? A lot of people ask us about cold email outreach. And the truth is that this technique isn't really email marketing. With cold outreach, people aren't joining your list - you're emailing them out of the blue (i.e. cold). It's a type of prospecting and email lead generation. It’s about finding people you want to work with or who will buy from you.We believe that this practice only fits a certain type of business – certainly, we wouldn’t use cold outreach to try and sell a $37 course about how to send daily emails! However, we would use it (and have used it) for something specific - like being invited to speak on a podcast.Is cold email outreach the same as spam?Spam refers to unsolicited emails sent out by some sort of automation programme to people who were not expecting or wanted your email. And to be fair, the practice of cold outreach seems to fit all those parameters! Because effectively, you're taking a bunch of people, dropping them into some sort of automation system (doing it manually sounds like a lot of work and effort), and then sending them a series of emails (let's say 3-7) that they weren't expecting.And to make matters worse, there's probably no 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom because this isn't an email list they joined. If people aren’t interested in what you have to sell, you simply ask them to hit reply and let you know so you can take them out of the automation. So that's how cold email outreach works.Why cold email outreach isn't as 'frosty' as you think Despite all this, cold outreach isn’t as big of a problem as you may think. It doesn’t have to be as 'frosty' as receiving a DM from someone offering help with something that’s completely irrelevant to you!And while we’re not cold email outreach experts, we have used this technique in a specific way in order to get booked on podcasts and do training in other people’s communities. Otherwise, we use referral introductions and our network of friends and contacts we've made from being part of various groups and masterminds. It's also worth pointing out that, when we do cold outreach, we don't use our existing email marketing platform - we use a specific cold outreach email automation tool. Why? Because email marketing platforms are opt-in systems. That means that if you start loading a bunch of email addresses and send emails to people out of the blue, you'll definitely hurt your own email deliverability. So we use a specialist outreach tool and then ask people to opt into our list.Effectively, we think of outreach as another ads channel – it’s the same methodology as running Facebook or YouTube ads, for example. It's just a different type of ad that lands in people’s email inboxes. And if people want more information, then they can take a step into our world and opt-in to receive our email marketing.Why do cold emails sometimes feel sleazy? The reason why a lot of cold outreach sucks is that it’s devoid of any personality – it’s robotic and sounds like ChatGPT! So whenever we do cold outreach, we drip it in personality. Even if what we’re talking about is of no interest to the person we're reaching out to, we still want to elicit replies and give people emotional value. We want to get some sort of reaction – whether that’s to say we’re fun, crazy, or even a bit extra! We are ourselves “plus 5” in those emails - amped up. And that's because we want to grab people’s attention and make our audience feel like they can’t ignore us.And yes, we do get a handful of complaints. But that’s still good because it means our emails are so full of personality that it's only natural some people won't like them. If everyone liked us or felt indifferent to our content, it'd mean our emails are too bland and don't have enough personality. Not everyone likes our style, and if people are offended by it, that's okay - people are offended for different reasons. Cold outreach done wrongSo why is the cold outreach most people send out terrible? Because it uses personalisation in the wrong way. If you’re sending someone an email to say you liked their latest piece of content (and you simply copy and paste the title of that piece of content) most of the time, the email will just come across as bland and uninteresting.In our podcast outreach emails, we're quite far into the emails before we talk about the topic we teach. And that's because we want a whole chunk of the email opening to be about getting people to pay attention and care.A lot of outreach emails feel sleazy because they’re not talking about the person or their interests. In our emails, we’re very tongue-in-cheek about it. We're quite open about the fact that what we're sending is blatantly an outreach email. And we know the person on the receiving end knows that too! So just by talking about it in our email, we make it a lot more genuine.We always talk about selling through honesty, and so we’re honest about the fact we feel terrible reaching out in this way. But we’re doing it anyway because we really want to ask something of this person. If a cold outreach email feels sleazy is because it's disingenuous. Using social proof in your cold outreach emailsThe job of a genuine outreach email isn't to tell people how excellent you are and how much experience you have. Because everyone does that! No one would purposefully turn up in someone’s inbox and tell them they’re terrible at what they do, right? So the only way you can stand out is through personality.And with regards to using social proof, make sure you only do that when you have the person’s attention. Think about an email sales campaign or a sales page – social proof comes way down the line. So if you start a cold outreach email with social proof, people don’t care![thrive_leads id='8822']What’s the difference between inbound marketing and cold outreach?As we said earlier, cold outreach is prospecting. You’re reaching out to someone because you’ve identified them as a person who might find what you teach valuable, useful, and insightful. Something that helps their growth. But it’s still cold prospecting. So it’s great for things like getting booked on podcasts, stages, or events.Email marketing, on the other hand, is conversion. It’s the next stage from the initial prospecting. So depending on what you sell, you’re going to want to have them both. If you sell a $37 eBook, doing outreach is probably going to be a waste of your time. But if you currently have a business model that’s entirely outreach-driven, then you’d be missing a trick if you stopped doing it. If your clients have an average lifetime value of thousands of dollars, it's a technique worth testing out. Running cold outreach to a lead magnet You can also build a permission-based list where you have content you put out on the Internet or ads that drive people to a lead magnet and get them to opt into your email list. This is cold outreach to a lead magnet. So you get a list of prospects, you send them a cold outreach sequence of 4 or 5 emails, and let them know that the emails are going to stop unless people tell you they’re interested in hearing more.If they don’t, you don't get back in touch with them. But if they opt into your lead magnet and move onto your email list, then you start sending them emails through your email marketing platform. And then you turn those people into customers.So you could have a business model where you use cold outreach to attract people into your world by offering a free resource that helps with something they're struggling with, and then you use email marketing as a conversion mechanism. If you don’t do this already, test it out and let us know how it goes! [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “STOP it with the passive income.” This email was about the fact that having a course or a membership isn’t really passive income, as such. The reason why the subject line works is that, first of all, it has “STOP” in it, and the subconscious response it elicits in people is for them to stop scrolling and pay attention – it’s an embedded command.But the idea is also a contradiction to what most people think. Why would they stop doing passive income, which is something that's really sought after and a lot of people want to do? So the subject line drives curiosity. Check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Book Top Podcast Guests With Email – Outreach Done Right With James Carbary.How To Get Results From Your Email Outreach – Warming Up With Jason Bay.Little Tricks to Write Better Emails That Aren’t Boring.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 cold email outreach and how we do it) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Can email marketing help you get a crazy ROI in advertising? Brad Gouldemond - a member of The League - shows that you can. When Brad started his business, he invested in ads, he got a few thousand people to join his challenge (which he run and managed with email marketing), and the rest, as they say, is history!Well, not really.He made a lot of money.That's the rest of the story. Wanna hear it? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:18) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (3:39) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (5:27) Who is Brad Gouldemond?(8:15) When did Brad introduce email marketing in his business?(10:22) What was Brad's biggest barrier with email marketing when he first started?(13:16) What did Brad's email marketing look like before he joined The League?(15:36) How did things change for Brad when he joined The League?(21:33) How does Brad feel about his email marketing now?(23:32) What ONE thing had the biggest impact on Brad's email marketing?(25:51) Does Brad feel like email marketing has taken over his life?(32:09) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Who is Brad Gouldemond?At the time of our chat, Brad's been in business for about three years. A musician and a speaker, he started his business during Covid. Brad is now based in Nashville and mentors aspiring Christian artists and songwriters to learn how to write better songs. He gives them connections but also teaches them how to find great producers and release their music in a way that feels authentic to them. A lot of artists don't have the confidence to put themselves out there with their music and their songwriting, so Brad's membership helps with that.This shows that if you're a coach or sell courses or a membership, you're not just helping people with information, tools, techniques, and strategies. You're also giving your audience the permission, inspiration, and desire to do what they want to do. And email marketing can help with that. If you want to connect with Brad, you can find him on Instagram or sign up for his FREE Christian Music Workshop.When did Brad introduce email marketing in his business?In March 2020, Brad launched his business without an email list. All he had was $5,000 (out of his retirement fund) that he put into Facebook ads. He ended up with a whopping 3,000 people joining his challenge, and that's when he started email marketing. Because he had to welcome them and communicate with them about the challenge.After that, he soon created a page for his academy, decided how much to charge, and came up with a 5-day sales sequence. And he made TEN TIMES his ad spend back during that challenge - in one month! But what to do next? Brad could see the value of email marketing clear as day, but he had no idea how to get results intentionally, consistently, and predictably through it. What was Brad's biggest barrier with email marketing when he first started? The biggest challenge Brad had when he first got started is that he didn't know about email marketing at all. It'd worked really well for him when he first launched his business, but he felt he had no idea how to get the same results again.At the time of starting up in business (during lockdown), ad costs were low. Brad leaned into that and got a crazy ROI on advertising! But how could he take his skills in communication and music and make them work consistently for his business by using email marketing?The answer, Brad said, was to find people (just like us) who are good at what you want to learn (i.e. email marketing) and take their advice, which is what Brad eventually did...What did Brad’s email marketing look like before he joined The League?Before he joined The League, Brad’s emails were sporadic. He was running challenges three times a year and sending emails around those. But otherwise, he'd be ignoring his list for 3-4 months. And that's simply because he didn't know what to send them. As many business owners do, he was more focused on serving his paying clients (and making money) and didn't pay enough attention to nurturing people on his list. He just didn't know how to do it! So instead of sending automated email sequences, he'd create broadcast-type emails. He didn't know what worked or what to say, and he felt it was really hard for him to get the ball rolling with email marketing. At the time, Brad had an evergreen webinar he wanted to launch, but he just didn't know how to use email marketing to make that convert. Part of it was because of the (then) prohibitive cost of ads, but a big reason was down to Brad not being able to figure out his emails and copy. And that's where we come in... How did things change for Brad when he joined The League?Brad found us through a web search while looking for email marketing advice to be able to create great sequences without hiring an expensive copywriter. He came across our webpage and noticed how we stand out – our copy shows personality, it’s interesting, and the branding is amazing (Brad’s words, not ours!). And Brad wanted his emails to have personality, too!He had this specific idea of wanting to launch a flash sale sequence to convert more of the people who were coming into his world through webinar sign-ups. So when he realised we had a flash sale email campaign included in our membership The League (plus a bunch of other cool stuff), he decided to join. And, unsurprisingly, the first thing he did was to implement our flash sale campaign - the Paparazzi campaign. By that point, Brad had about 9-10k people on his list, so a good-sized list by all standards, but his audience wouldn't buy! Up until then, Brad had only been able to make about $100-$200 from the regular sales he ran to his list. And he didn't quite know what he was doing wrong. The amazing results Brad had by launching ONE campaign!So what happened after Brad launched the Paparazzi campaign? After a few tweaks to it, he made an offer for his $47 membership and made $4,460 in four days! Plus, his open rates on those emails were incredible - sky-high compared to what he was used to. The campaign gave Brad awesome results because of the psychological stacking of our campaigns and because we only use what works! We have a lot of half-baked campaigns that we’re still testing in our own business, but until they’re proven and robust enough, we don’t include them in our membership. The email sequences we give to our members are watertight – we know they work! And remember that you’re always going to get better results by sending a ‘half-good email’ than never sending that perfect email! As Brad nicely put it, "Success always leaves clues", so it's about looking for people who are successful in what you want to learn and going and learning from them! That's exactly what he did when he made the decision to join The League. How does Brad feel about his email marketing now?Brad definitely feels more confident now, and his confidence comes from taking action. Over time, and after noticing how some people got offended by a couple of his subject lines, Brad started tweaking his emails to suit his style and match his voice. Working with artists and songwriters, Brad finds his audience is sensitive, so he takes the working principles of our campaigns and tweaks them in a way that makes him feel confident. And when you see your open rates soar and the results come in, you build even more confidence!With a proven plan or roadmap to follow and clear step-by-step instructions (just like Brad did when he joined The League), you build that confidence. And it's the same for Brad's clients - by following his guidance, they get the confidence to do what they do best.[thrive_leads id='8822']What ONE thing had the biggest impact on Brad’s email marketing?Having email templates that he could tweak to put his heart and voice into was the biggest and most impactful thing for Brad. He'd tried using templates before, but that had never worked for him. Whereas our campaigns do work! Brad puts his own voice into them - he gives them a feeling of authenticity by adding a tad more gentleness to appeal to his creative and sensitive songwriters.He’s still using the principles, the mindset, and the philosophies that we teach inside The League, but, at the same time, he also makes sure the emails feel authentic to his people.  What’s next for Brad’s email marketing?The next project on the cards for Brad is automating his webinar. He’s been doing live webinars for months now, and he’s starting to get burnt out. Plus, he wants to be able to take a break! And that’s why email marketing is so important. Because it helps with time and energy management.Does Brad feel like email marketing has taken over his life?Email marketing is a priority for Brad because that's where his ROI is! You have to look at email marketing as an investment in your business - you do the work upfront, but then you've automated your processes for time to come. Email marketing gives you freedom, money, and peace of mind so you can focus your attention on other things.As Brad put it, if you take care of the bread and butter of your business (and creating emails is the backbone of your business!), then you have more time to focus on something else. So you may need to invest some initial time in setting things up. But the time and money you spend creating your email engine and writing your emails will pay off - for weeks, months, and even years! We definitely have sequences in our business that we haven't changed for years because they're automated at the right frequency, and they just work!So if you have a list but don't know how to use it or how to make money from it, you can learn. You can do it in a way that doesn't spam people, so you never have to worry about having them unsubscribe. If you're stuck in paralysis, you think you have a ‘small list’, or you’re just starting out with email marketing, you can do it! Brad went from no subscribers to making $50k in one month and he passed six figures within the first eight months. It's not just about the ROI on advertising - it's about how email marketing can enhance that exponentially.So are you ready to get some awesome results too? Check out The League! [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is the word “APPALLING service.” This one works because people want to know about "the bad" more than they want to know about "the good". That's why newspaper headlines are always so negative. People want to read on to find out who got the appalling service, what it was, etc. It’s a subject line that generates lots of questions. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow A League Member Made Over $10k With Just ONE Email Campaign – Case Study With Aidan O’Sullivan.How Sheila Went from the Starting Blocks to Total Clarity – an Email Marketing Case Study.And How Kronda Adair Made $86,500 From A Small Email List.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 one of our members got some crazy ROI on advertising when he first started out) 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 have a membership and are interested in finding out how to get more members? We all do, right? So let's talk about member growth strategies that work and will help you attract MORE customers with your email marketing.They work.Seriously.It's the stuff we do.Ready to find out more?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (4:25) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (6:12) How can membership site owners build their email list?(10:43) Do you need a big email list?(12:59) Do the things with the biggest impact for best results!(14:51) Focus on getting more out of your existing subscribers. (17:24) What strategies can membership site owners use to increase sales? (19:49) Sell from different angles and use psych sequencing. (22:30) How did we grow our membership using email marketing(24:39) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]If you have a membership, go and check out our friends Mike and Kelly over at The Membership Geeks. They run The Membership Academy, which is a membership about having memberships, and they host an awesome podcast too. You'll love them as much as we do!How can membership site owners build their email lists? As a membership site owner trying to attract more members using email marketing, your first job is to build and grow your email list. And you can do that by either investing time or money into it. You can also buy subscribers or buyers (i.e. customers who have bought something).And in reality, you probably want both. Because buyers have proven not only that they’re interested in your niche and what you sell, but also that they’re willing and able to pay for it - they have the disposable cash to invest right now.Driving traffic to a low-cost offerOne way to grow your email list is to drive traffic to a low-cost offer. For example, we run ads from Facebook and YouTube into our Splinter offer to a piece of software called Countdown Hero. It’s a low-cost item, and through our email campaigns, we offer people a bunch of upsells to upgrade what they get with the tool and, ultimately, to join our membership, The League.Driving traffic to a free opt-inAnother way to build your email list is to drive traffic to a free opt-in. You add people to your list, and you then make them an offer for a paid product. And if they don't buy it, they go into what we call our SCORE email engine. We do that because it's important that you turn subscribers into members as fast as humanly possible - the longer it takes for people to buy from you for the first time, the less likely they are to buy from you ever. So this is really key!The moment people make their first contact with you is when they're at their highest level of intent - what you sell is the most important to them. So your job is to send them to a free lead magnet and then try and convert them as soon as possible. These strategies all work, but it’s about bringing the right types of people in, i.e. those who show the highest level of intent to solve the issue you address with what you sell. Do you need a big email list? A membership can feel like a huge, ongoing commitment. And a lot of people think that in order to sell one, you need a big email list. That's what we're being told by marketers everywhere. But that’s simply not true. The truth is that you need to make more money from every subscriber you already have on your list. It's about maximising sales from your existing audience, and that's what we teach inside our very comprehensive membership, The League. Do the things with the biggest impact for best results!So what do you do to make more money from every subscriber? You need to have your email marketing do the heavy lifting for you. Let's look at some figures as an example. If you sell a membership for $27 per month, and the average time someone stays with you is 3 months, that customer will make you less than $100. So you can't afford to spend more than $100 to acquire a new lead. Plus, once they're gone, you need to start again. But when your email marketing does the work for you, then every subscriber you have becomes more profitable. And at that point, it doesn't matter if the cost of ads grows. Because you know you can convert well. So the key is for you to have a great conversion system that allows you to make money from someone in the first 7 days. The more money you make from each subscriber-turned-customer, the more you can spend on your ads to make sure your offers get seen over someone else's. Focus on getting more out of your existing subscribersWe made our first 6 figures in our business from about 2,000 subscribers on our list. People often think that because we live and breathe email marketing we must have a monster list. But we don’t. We do well because we focus on how we serve and on creating the most value for the list we have.And what even is a big list anyway? List size is all relative, and it depends on the niche you're in and what you sell. If you sell paper clips, you'll need a big list. If you sell aeroplanes, not so much. And if all or most of your subscribers are also buyers, you need less of them. Because they're all paying for what you sell. So rather than focusing on the size of your list, work out how much you can make from every subscriber on your list so you can start to grow it and know, predictably, that the amount of money you make will grow too. When you know in advance how much you make per subscriber per month, you'll also know how much you can afford to spend to get more subscribers.And remember - the subscribers who are 'pre-qualified' (i.e. who have shown interest and are willing to pay) are worth more. So what you don't want to do is to go into this blind, i.e. spending a lot of money and effort in building your list, and then hoping for the best. [thrive_leads id='8822']What strategies can membership site owners use to increase sales?So what can you do to increase sales from your existing email list? First thing first, ask yourself how much you want to earn from your membership right now. Once you know that, take a look at your:Conversion rate - how many subscribers turn into paying customers.Retention rate - how long members stay with you.A member's lifetime value - how much a customer makes you while they stay as members. So, for example, if your membership costs $500 per month, and your average retention rate is 3 months, it means that a member is worth around $1,500 to you. And that’s what you have to play with. It means you can’t spend more than that to acquire someone new.And once you know those numbers, you reverse engineer how many subscribers you need in order to get the members you want. How much can you pay to get that many subscribers? How much can you invest in your lead acquisition? The beautiful thing is that a membership gives you recurring revenue, so if you capitalise on that through the value you give, you can definitely increase those numbers. Sell from different angles and use psych sequencingA key strategy to use if you want to grow your membership is to use email marketing to sell from different angles because people buy for different reasons and from different types of marketing. Let's take our membership, The League, as an example. Some people join it because they want access to our email campaigns. Others because they want to join our coaching calls. And while some people will ask us questions, others will just listen. We also have people who join because they want access to our software.So we talk about each of the elements of the membership from different angles. We mention the gain, the fear of loss, the pain people experience, the case studies of people who had success, etc. It's a strategy called psych sequencing, which is our unique method of using lots of different email marketing campaigns one after the other. The campaigns we give our customers inside The League are the ones we created to sell our own products from different angles and perspectives. We use different hooks to appeal to people in different ways. We stack the reasons why people buy side by side to create the most conversions.How did we grow our membership using email marketing?We talked more about how we've grown our membership back in the episode How to Create Urgency For an Evergreen Membership or Course Without Product Launches. But what it all boils down to is using strategies to grow your email list and maximise the sales you make from every subscriber. That’s how people can afford the increasing ad costs. Once you know you can convert your subscribers predictably into customers, you never have to worry about the size of your list. But you have to get your numbers dialled in. If you're already inside The League, go and put our campaigns to use. They're based on psych sequencing, which allows you to appeal to different psychological angles and needs. And if you're not already a member, go and check it out. You’ll get immediate access to the whole framework - our SCORE method. All you have to do is to implement the campaigns. But if you want to know more about them and understand the psychology behind them, we give you training and coaching too.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is the words: “Quick. OVER THERE…” with a little chevron that looks like an arrow pointing off to one side.The hook of the email was this idea of us vs them, and it’s about shady marketing that tries to distract consumers away from the truth in order to buy a product. It's not a good technique. And obviously, it’s the language of the subject line here that grabs the reader's attention. It’s funny, and the arrow pointing to the side adds curiosity to it. So check it out! Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesEverything You Need To Know About Our Membership The League (THE Behind The Scenes!)What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks.Why Retention is Important for your Membership, with Liz Beadon.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 super cool member growth strategies to attract more customers) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

How do you prevent buyer remorse and get your customers to buy from you over and over again? What can you do to make sure the people who buy from you never regret it? And how exactly do you turn them into repeat buyers and raving fans?!We spill ALL the beans today. Are you ready for it?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:33) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (4:34) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (6:22) What is buyer remorse?(7:43) What's the psychology behind buyer remorse and why does it happen?(11:44) Remorse is a natural physiological response.(15:48) How the heck can email marketing help with buyer remorse?(16:39) Resell people on the product to gain the ability to sell more to them!(21:03) Teach the best bits first!(22:49) How to prevent buyer remorse in your onboarding sequence.(25:44) Subject line of the week.What is buyer remorse?Buyer remorse is a sense of regret that happens at the back of people buying something. It can happen immediately, as soon as they bought the product, or after it's been delivered. But it can also kick in quite a long time down the road, like a year later, for example.What's the psychology behind buyer remorse and why does it happen? Buyer remorse can happen for a number of reasons. People don't have confidence in themselvesIf you sell a course, a membership, or coaching, buyer remorse could happen when someone loses confidence in themselves. Doubt creeps in and the person who bought your product suddenly isn't sure whether they can do the work. You (as the vendor) may have done everything you needed to do to sell it, but your customers are now doubting their own ability to get the work done. And so they start to regret buying your product.People have been burnt out beforeAnother reason why people experience buyer remorse could be that the minute the money leaves their account, they're triggered into a time when they were burnt in the past.Maybe they bought something, but the person who sold them the product didn't deliver on their promise. Or maybe the product wasn't good. We've all had bad experiences in the past, and we're all jaded somehow. So sometimes people regret buying from you, but it's not because of something you did. Rather, it's because someone else may have done something not as ethical or good as you. The product isn't what it promised to beWhat could also happen is that someone buys a course, and they're excited about it. But then they get started and realise the programme isn't what it said in the advertising. Sure - any good marketing is meant to get people excited. But that should never be to the detriment of content. People worry about what others might thinkAnother reason for buyer remorse is that people buy something but then start worrying about what others might think. This is all to do with the fear of being judged by others!Remorse is a natural physiological responseRemorse can also be a natural physiological response to all the tension and excitement that kicks in if you've been thinking about buying something for a long time, for example. At some point, you may feel apprehension, and that can be disguised as excitement. Because, physiologically, we have very little ability to tell the difference between terror, tension, or anxiety and excitement – they feel the same to us! So it's when we've paid for something (and the money's gone) that suddenly all the doubts appear, and we feel remorse.For a lot of people though, buyer remorse boils down to that moment when they start to realise that what's standing in between them and getting the results they want is their own ability to do the work - to make time to prioritise, study, and apply whatever it is they bought. People might start to understand that it's up to them to make your teachings work in their situation, and suddenly they doubt themselves. How the heck can email marketing help with buyer remorse?Over the years, we’ve come up with a few strategies to use email marketing to prevent buyer remorse. The first one is to make sure we do a really damn good job of reselling how amazing the product is. We want to tell them how it's going to help them get the outcome they want.How do you do that? You repaint the transformation you promised them. We do that in our series of Thank You videos but also in our follow-up sequence called the Refund Reduction campaign, which is available inside our membership The League. The campaign is designed to get people to consume your product. But even if they don’t consume it, they’ll still feel the benefits and won't ask for their money back. Resell people on the product in order to gain the ability to sell more to them!Basically, your marketing doesn’t stop when someone buys. Because, first of all, you want to make people feel great about what they just bought. But also, you want them to buy something else from you in the future. And it’s going to be a lot harder to get someone over the hump of buying something else if they wish they hadn’t bought anything at all! In order to buy from you again, people need to love the fact they bought from you in the first place! So in the follow-up emails that deliver the product, we signpost people to its various elements. Over a few days, you want to show people how good your product is - even if they never look at it. Why? Because you want to increase the customer value by selling more offers to the same people. That's how businesses become successful - by selling multiple products to the same customers. If someone buys from you, but you never resell them on that product, there's a chance they won't buy from you again. So your job is to remind your customers of the problem you solve. Be specific and tell them exactly how and where in your programme they can find the answer to their burning question (which ideally is what sold them on your product in the first place). Remind people that they’ve got access and give them all the details again.Teach the best bits first!Also, remember that when people buy courses, they don't always go through them or complete them. So make sure you pick the sexiest bits of your programme and tell your audience about them in your post-purchase sequence. In fact, teach the sexy bits first! Place them at the start of your programme to make it more interesting. The unsexy bits that naturally every course will have can go later, but let people get excited about the greatest parts first. They can always do the unsexy work later. For example, when people join our membership The League, we send them a link to our Getting Started videos. We tell them to watch these videos in order to get the best results. We know our customers feel good about this content because it reminds them that our programme is great and tells them what's going to happen next, what to expect, what the outcome is going to be, and why it’s important.How to prevent buyer remorse in your onboarding sequenceWhen someone joins The League, we first map out what the different elements of the membership are. We talk about our email campaigns, the automated software suite of tools that you can plug into your email marketing system, our two coaching calls a month, our members-only podcast, the video training, etc.And then we map out all the actions that we want someone to take. For example, we ask people to subscribe to the members’ only podcast, register for the next group call, get into our Facebook group, etc. After that, we need to figure out where people should start because we want to make their journey easy. Our membership has a lot of material in there, so we need to tell people where to start, in order to reduce their feelings of overwhelm.This is why, after our three Getting Started videos, we tell people to jump onto our Success Track. We don't want to leave people with no place to go. The idea is to guide them through and help them figure out what to do next because they're new to the content, and it can feel intimidating. So we give them a bit more direction. Your onboarding sequence needs to keep people moving along the path. And if you want to find out more about this, here's the episode How To Create A Member Onboarding Sequence That Your Members Will Love. So remember to address the key questions that someone might have when they join your programme - do this to prevent buyer remorse! And if you want all the details of our onboarding sequence and our Refund Reduction campaign, they’re all inside our membership The League. If you’re not already a member, go and check it out, and you’ll get instant access.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “100% discount (sort of)”. The “sort of” adds much more believability and credibility to the subject line. Plus, it makes the context of the email more curious.The email was about our campaign called The Golden Cloak, which has a bribe built into it. It talks about the fact we have this free thing, but it’s “sort of” free because it's only really free when you buy something else. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes6 Things You Didn’t Know Your Email Marketing Platform Could Do.Use THIS Free-Trial Email Sequence To Turn Your Subscribers Into Paying Customers.Everything You Need To Know About Our Membership The League (THE Behind The Scenes!)FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 prevent buyer remorse with email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

What on earth is the foot-in-the-door technique, and why does it work so bloody well every single time? If you want to find out how to make more sales with this incredibly simple technique, you're in the right place! Let's get this show on the road!  SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:25) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (3:43) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. (5:32) What is the foot-in-the-door technique?(7:22) Why does this technique work so well? (11:56 ) You get to upgrade buyers. (13:15) An example of the foot-in-the-door technique.(14:58) When does the foot-in-the-door technique fail? (27:05) Ascension vs descension marketing.(31:54) How can the foot-in-the-door technique be used in your email marketing?(37:28) How to use the foot-in-the-door technique if you sell a membership.(39:16) Subject line of the week.What is the foot-in-the-door technique? The foot-in-the-door technique is a marketing tool that gets someone to make a small commitment with you in order to increase conversions for a larger commitment. In other words, you want people to do a simple, easy thing and then you encourage them to buy something more. It's about getting people 'in motion' because something that's already moving (as opposed to something that's static) has momentum to keep going.Why does this technique work so well?It creates momentumWe all know that momentum works. It's not magic or psychology - it's just physics! If you've ever tried to push a broken-down car, getting the wheels to start turning at first is really hard. But when you get the car going (and it's in momentum) it gets much easier. And human beings are exactly the same.So as a business owner, you want to get people into motion. Because when human beings commit to something, they're more likely to be consistent with it. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and he calls it the Commitment Consistency Principle. It’s the idea that if we say or do something that makes us internally back it up, we’ll stand by it. Because we like to be seen as consistent - to ourselves and others.So if someone bought a small product from you (like an eBook or a paid-for lead magnet), they're more likely to buy a course you have on the same topic when you offer it to them. And that's because they've already committed to something and shown their interest. You only show your main offer to pre-qualified peopleAside from putting people in momentum, the foot-in-the-door technique works because it allows you to show your main offer to the people who've already told you they're interested. If you have a new programme and email your whole list about it (several times, as the case might be), some people might leave because they're not interested. But if you only email the people who already showed you they have an interest by making a small commitment (like watching a video about that topic), then you can tell them about your offer and be more confident they'll buy. For example, if you've made a video about a particular topic, and someone's watched 80% of it, they must be interested, right? So tell them about your paid offer. Because they already have their foot in the door, and they're more likely to keep going after that. You get to upgrade buyers The other benefit of using this technique is that if you have a front-end offer (smaller commitment), you can then upsell buyers and sell them something else. For example, if you have a membership that's available at a monthly offer, definitely show them the annual option too. Having said that, if you have multiple products or offers and show them all at once, people might get confused in trying to understand what they need. So rather than packaging all your products up as different options and leaving people to figure out what they need, get them to make a small commitment first, and then upgrade them later.An example of the foot-in-the-door-techniqueA good example of this comes from our friends Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital, who sell Content Marketing services around blogging and SEO. They sell blog templates for around $47 but also have a done-for-you service at a much higher price point. And 60% of the people who buy their done-for-you service bought the $47 product first. They put their foot in the door first by buying a low-resistance product and only then made a larger commitment.And this is interesting, right? Because all these people first bought templates to write blog posts themselves and then decided they didn't have the time, patience, or inclination to do it and hired an agency to do it for them. It goes to show there’s no real logic to a lot of marketing, sales, or people’s buying habits! So don't assume that because someone bought a certain product from you, they won't be interested in more. When does the foot-in-the-door technique fail? The higher-commitment offer is 'blind' or unrelatedThis technique doesn't always work. In fact, it will fail if you don't have the right thinking behind it. If the offer is 'blind', then it won't work. For example, if you create a short video about, say, the future of email marketing, and then target the people who watched that with an offer for a 3-day in-person boot camp on using AI to write sales sequences, it won't work. Because the fact they watched the video tells you nothing. It's a blind offer. It's also too unrelated - it doesn't qualify people. If you have a free lead magnet or a paid, low-cost entry product that talks about how to write a short sales sequence with AI, then it's different. The two products are on the same topic - they are related. And the smaller-commitment product helps you sell the larger-commitment one. But the link has to be explicit. A ridiculous example of something that wouldn't work is someone selling a product about dog training and then offering a service about weight loss. And while that's a ludicrous example, we see a lot of people unknowingly making this mistake. Because it's easy to think that two products are related, but the link needs to be really tight. They need to be strictly and directly correlated - a lot more than you think. What leads someone from one purchase to another is a really tight path. We have a campaign inside The League that helps you create the most tightly bridged upsell from one offer to the next, whether that’s immediate or you’re asking someone to buy something now and then another product sometime later. And when you do this right, you're looking at a conversion rate of 40% and above.You haven't qualified people for their problemLet's talk about another reason why the foot-in-the-door technique might not work for you. And we'll use the example of our Bottomless Email Strategy course, which teaches people how to send emails every day. When people buy that course, at some point, we'll also offer them our membership, The League. But without a lot of education about the difference between sending individual, broadcast emails and automated campaigns or sequences, people might not buy. They might just think that what they get with the course is enough.  But the thing is - people buy different things to solve different problems. So you have to qualify a person not for what they want or need, but for their problem. Because that's how you get them to buy multiple products. And the same principle applies when you want them to go from a lead magnet (or a lower-cost product) into a higher-commitment type offer. That's when the foot-in-the-door technique will work for you. Ascension vs descension marketingAnother point worth mentioning is this idea of ascension marketing vs descension marketing. There's a popular theory that you should sell someone something cheap and then go with something more expensive. In other words – the foot-in-the-door technique. But you don’t have to do that as your first attempt. In fact, through email marketing, you have multiple opportunities to sell people more things from different angles over time. We’ve tested this idea of ascension marketing quite extensively in our business. But we've also tested the opposite, which means we don't even attempt the foot-in-the-door technique until later. In other words, if we offered everyone a lower-cost product and only then tried to upsell our membership, The League, only the people who bought something from us in the first place would see that offer. But if we try and sell The League to everyone in our world, more people see it. And that means we make more money overall. We've also seen a technique that sits somewhere between ascension and descension marketing - a bit of a hybrid if you like. And it's about acquiring subscribers on a paid basis by asking people to buy a low-end price product. And from there, you present your highest-touch offers, such as a coaching programme or a mastermind, for example.Pure descension marketing, on the other hand, happens when you offer your customers your high-end product, and they say no. In that case, you then present them with other products at a lower price. So if you're acquiring subscribers for free (which for the longest time we were, through our Facebook group), you can sell them your core offer first (in our case, The League), and if they don't buy, then you can use the foot-in-the-door technique.How can the foot-in-the-door technique be used in your email marketing? The Daisy Chain campaignInside The League, we have a campaign called The Daisy Chain, which is the epitome of foot-in-the-door. And it’s an interesting example of getting someone to make a small commitment to increase the conversion of a larger commitment.We use this campaign for people who we've already sent a sales video to but didn't buy. So we send them another short video where they can learn something. And if they watch that, we'll send them more emails because, by this point, they've made a small commitment towards a larger one (i.e. watching a slightly longer, closely-related video). And when you put this video together, remember that it has to be a tight fit and cannot be unrelated. If done right, that second video is what sells them your offer. Using a discount couponAnother way we apply the foot-in-the-door technique in our business is to run ads to a sales page for a $99 product. On that page, at the top, we also offer a time-bound $30 coupon in exchange for someone's email address.When people enter their email addresses to claim the discount, the page refreshes. We take them to a different version of that page using our Countdown Hero software, which gives them a timed commitment. That means that for a couple of days, they can get the product for $67.And this works because we’ve legitimised the fact it’s a real discount. But also, people are now committed. By giving us their email address, they’re putting their foot forward and saying they’re interested in buying this. And they’re doing that by asking for a coupon code, which only works on our website and for this specific product and nothing else.That's why the conversion with this technique is really high - it qualifies the person as ready to buy. And of course, because we now have a name and email address, we can follow up via email and let them know that their coupon code is running out.How to use the foot-in-the-door technique if you sell a membership The Splinter campaignIf you have a membership or an ongoing subscription, we have a campaign inside our membership The League just for that. It's called the Splinter Campaign, and we use it to sell our highest commitment and primary offer first. And then, further down our email engine, if someone hasn’t bought yet, we come back to this idea of ascension marketing and apply the foot-in-the-door technique.We sell our core offer by using a hook to leverage people into it. And we do that by splitting something that’s normally inside the membership and pulling it aside. In other words, we sell it separately for a one-off price. And when people buy that, we upsell them to the membership.If you want access to a bunch of campaigns that are already trialled and tested to use this technique, go and check out our membership The League.Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is the words, “Can I take your bag [+ the little bag emoji]?” And that’s a question that someone might hear in everyday life but when it’s used in an email subject line, it seems weird.So you can pick any common phrase that you’ve heard over and over again but doesn’t naturally belong in an email. Another example is “Would you like fries with that?” It works well because it breaks the pattern but has a sense of familiarity at the same time. Check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesUse THIS Free-Trial Email Sequence To Turn Your Subscribers Into Paying Customers.How to Create 3 Big Sales Spikes During Your Launch with Mara Glazer.The Simple Formula For Coaches To Sell On Autopilot With Email Marketing.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the foot-in-the-door technique and how you can apply it to your business) 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!

Learn about the benefits and elements of a good email marketing course. Find out how it can save you time and improve your results. Discover the best email marketing and sales funnels courses to enhance your email marketing skills.

Are you a coach or consultant? Then you need to learn how to build a system that helps you sell on autopilot so you don't have to hustle to fill your next coaching group or programme. This is why we're here to tell you all you need to know about email marketing for coaches. Ready to learn how to get more of the right clients in less time and with less work? Let's do this!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (6:10) Why should coaches focus on email marketing?(8:56) How email marketing helps coaches and consultants.(13:57) Email marketing helps you move people towards buying from you.(16:31) Create an email engine to sell on autopilot. (17:55) The typical sales funnel for a coach.(21:29) What happens when people don't qualify?(24:51) The best lead magnets for coaches. (26:34) Social media vs email marketing for coaches.(29:39) How can coaches sell using email marketing?(31:37) Subject line of the week.Why should coaches focus on email marketing? Coaches who sell high-ticket items, small-group coaching, or one-on-one coaching often worry about how email marketing might apply to their specific businesses. And coaching is indeed different.First of all, as a coach, you’re selling high-ticket items, so you tend to have a much more intimate relationship with your audience. You're giving more personal attention and help. And that requires someone to have a high level of trust in you before they go ahead and spend that amount of money. For example, we have a coaching programme called The Email Engine Accelerator. This is a larger investment and an intensive experience. And we use email marketing to communicate to people that they can trust us and that the process works.Another reason why coaching businesses are different is that often service providers feel they need to hustle for the next client. Long before we were working together and even figured out how to do email marketing, we both had a high-ticket coaching business for small groups. And it always felt like we had to hustle to find the next cohort of clients or fill any spots. How email marketing helps coaches and consultantsWith email marketing, you can replace the idea of hustling. Email helps you generate leads, so you're attracting new prospects for your coaching programmes. But it also helps you nurture those leads and build both the perceived value of the outcome and people's confidence at the same time. You need to give people reassurance and make sure they believe that your progamme works and will give them results despite what they have or haven't tried before. Through simple, automated email sequences, you need to give people confidence in your, your system, the results they can get, and the fact that they can successfully follow your approach. And the way to do that is by overcoming objections. Show people how your programme works in spite of their previous failings or the fact they might have no experience of doing this before. If you have a coaching business (or have a coaching element in your business), you can write emails (once) that will move people from one place to the next. Focus on building people's confidence and moving them through the stages of becoming paying clients. The great thing is while you're busy serving your clients and delivering a round of your coaching programme, you are also nurturing future clients. You could be selling all your spots for the next cohort way in advance! With email, you no longer have to hustle because your coaching clients are already lined up. This benefits your cash flow too because people pay in advance, and you can use that money to generate more leads. With email marketing, you can sell on autopilot. Filling your coaching programmes is completely hands-off.Email marketing helps you move people towards buying from youOne of the reasons why this works so well is because with coaching often you don’t know where anybody is in your world. How close are they to buying from you? That’s why you feel you have to hustle. So the reason why we say coaches specifically should focus on email marketing is that you want to move each person towards their next step.Through email, you can send people specific content, such as a video where you pitch, for example. Or the link to a webinar or to an application form. You want to drive people towards applying to work with you, and that might have to be done in stages. First, they book a call, then you get them to attend the call, and then you close them on the call. And while all of this happens, you also want people to renew or join you for the next cohort, or whatever the case might be. It's a whole process. And if notice that people are dropping out at specific phases, maybe you need to reassess and look at what you do closely to understand where you can spot opportunities for improvement. Create an email engine to sell on autopilotThe great thing about all this is that you write your emails once, and you have a consistent process. Every single person who goes through a particular phase receives the same emails. If they work, that's great. If they don't, you go and change them. We often talk about creating what we call email engines – or chains of email sequences. This is the asset in your business that you're building. You build it once, and it turns into more sales. It gives you a bigger return than what you invested.We just gave the example of sales calls earlier, but you don’t have to do those. We have a member inside The League (Sheila Bennett) who filled a significant amount of spaces in her high-price mastermind without talking to a single person. Because with the right conversion tools, you get to move people from one stage to the next. They consume some key content, qualify, and move on to the next phase.The typical sales funnel for a coachWhen it comes to sales funnels, as a coach, you have two major options. The first one (which is something we see a lot of coaches do) is to have the prospect fill in a form that takes them straight to the coach's calendar booking system so you can book a call with them. The problem with doing that is you'll have people booking onto calls who, for whatever reason, aren't ready to work with you. At this point, you don't know much about the client, and they potentially don't know much about what you do. So what we do instead is to have people raise their hand for something - we want them to say they're interested by replying to an email, clicking on a link, watching a video, etc. Ultimately, we want them to fill in an application form where they answer a bunch of questions about who they are, what they’re looking for, why they want what we offer, etc. The questions are designed to pre-qualify them and only if they pass a set of specific filters, do they get the calendar booking system for the call.Of course, the decision is made by a system, and whichever one you use, it's always going to have limitations because it's not human! But the key here is that having an application form in our funnel pulls out people who aren't serious. And that means we get fewer and better-quality people showing up on the calls. The people you talk to are more likely to buy your stuff, and that’s what we’re looking for. What happens when people don't qualify? When someone doesn't qualify at your application form stage (for example because they're not ready to invest), you still don't want them to get to a dead end. For example, we send those people to a page where they can play a video that tells them that based on their answers, it looks like we might not be a fit to work together. But in that same video, we also explain what's involved in the programme, what the price is, etc.Now they have all the information, they still have a choice. And we present them with two buttons:The first button allows them to tell us they still want to talk to us about applying for the programme and takes them to our Calendly form to book a call.The other button is for people who think they’re not ready for this programme. But they still get access to a 2-minute summary of a down-sell offer, which, in our case, is for our membership The League. This means that the funnel doesn't have a dead end!The best lead magnets for coachesWhen it comes to lead magnets, we see a lot of coaches make the mistake of using something that doesn't attract the right people. As a coach, you want to make sure your lead magnet attracts the right people for you and pushes away anyone who doesn't want what you sell. So don't have a lead magnet that does the wrong thing!Focus on attracting people who are at the phase of fixing the issue you solve - not those who are in victim mode or still basking in their problem. Because if someone isn't searching for a solution, they're hard to sell to! So always check how your lead magnet is framed – make sure it attracts people who are looking for a solution and not those who are addicted to their own misery and still in victim mode. Social media vs email marketing for coachesWhen it comes to social media and email marketing, coaches need both. That's because you need somewhere to build an audience (social media) and somewhere to convert them (email marketing).You want to create this cool infrastructure and loop where people come through our social media, and you get them onto your email list. It's a two-directional relationship between the two. Social media and email marketing work together as long as you push the same agenda. For us, our social media focus is on our Facebook group. And we might not have a huge audience there, but we have the right audience. And from there, we use email marketing to convert. Rember that you'll always get much higher engagement and profitability from emails than you do from social media.We’re not saying that email marketing replaces social media – it simply has a different job. Email is used to sell – it’s for conversion. It allows you to know what someone is interested in because they’ve clicked on the links in your emails. So you get to create a sensible path to move people closer to buying. And that's something you can't really do on social media. This is why we recommend that coaches use email marketing to convert. If you haven't already, go and check out our membership The League. We have all the campaigns you need, such as The Temptress campaign, The Explorer High Ticket campaign, and even our Open Day campaign. This is a type of free trial campaign where you could let people sit in and maybe observe some of your sessions for free so they can try before they buy. How can coaches sell using email marketing? As a coach or consultant, these are the four things you want to do with email marketing:Identify people's specific problems and narrow them down to the specific problem you solve. Get them to raise their hand and say they're interested. Create the desire for your specific solution to that problem. You want people who are interested in what you sell, specifically. Move people onto some kind of conversion event (a webinar, a sales call, a video sales letter, etc.) and sell!So the biggest opportunity coaches have to stop this hustle mindset is to have a system that’s generating leads and converting them into coaching clients. With email marketing, you can do this time after time and on autopilot.You get to create an asset where you use emails to nurture people and move them towards the sale. If you want access to our campaigns, go and check out The League, and you can start using them immediately.  Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “This guy is selling our stuff!” followed by the shocked face emoji. And this is pretty much the definition of how we try and grab people’s attention with an opening hook.The email was about the fact we did a partnership with someone. We got in front of his audience, and he's now selling some of our products for us. Of course, this is great for us because it helps us build an audience and make money from it, too.The wording in this subject line helped people go and open the email. There’s an implication that someone might have stolen our stuff. And you can tell it's a fine balance between generating interest and curiosity and being too clickbaity, right? So go check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesStop Wasting So Much On List Building by Using Traffic Loops.Why We Started an Email Marketing Agency.How To Get Your Customers To Buy Using Buyer Psychology In Email Marketing.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The League MembershipNot sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about email marketing for coaches) 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!

Would you like to find out how our member Emily Moncuit from Emily’s Notebook made over $14k in only 7 days by using ONE of our email marketing campaigns?It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? You join a membership, do one thing, and make a whole bunch of money. And when you implement the next action, you make more money! Mindblowing!But let's hear it from Emily... SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:20) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (3:25) Who is League member Emily Moncuit?(5:59) When did Emily get started with email marketing?(8:29) What was Emily's biggest barrier to making email work for her?(9:35) What did Emily's emails look like before she joined The League?(12:54) What were the first changes that Emily made when she joined The League?(16:37) What impact has email marketing had on Emily's revenue and sales?(19:03) How does Emily feel about her email marketing now?(22:30) The one action that had the most impact on Emily's email marketing.(25:12) Subject line of the week.Who is League member Emily Moncuit?Emily teaches people how to draw (step-by-step) with a particular emphasis on supporting their well-being and integrating a drawing habit into their day. Emily used to sell a high-level ticket offer in the form of a course, but she's now transitioning into a membership model. Her business is evolving because there's a massive demand for drawing, as people have been disconnected from their creativity.Drawing is something we might be good at when we're in school, but traditionally and culturally at some point, it gets discouraged. And people are told to get "a proper job". That's when drawing becomes a hobby, and if we treat it like a hobby it's not part of our creative reasoning and evolution as human beings. So there’s a deeply rooted psychological connection that people have with drawing.When did Emily get started with email marketing?Emily started drawing in 2019 after her divorce to find a way to cope. At the time, she worked as a director in a government position where she was involved in community regeneration. Overnight, she started her creative journey by drawing every day, and at some point, she decided to do this as a career. Emily tells us her email journey before joining The League is pretty shocking. She would send emails sporadically and about once a week. Ironically, while she was used to doing a lot of face-to-face work to build communities on the ground, she didn’t know how to translate that to the online space. She had a mental block to community building and thought she needed the face-to-face, live context every week. As a result, her emails were very unfocused and with no real call to action.When she first implemented our first sequence of tasks, Emily says, it was like stepping into the light! She had a busy first month after she met us. In fact, she was as resentful as she was elated because she got results but also had loads of questions about how to do things.What was Emily’s biggest barrier to making email work for her?The biggest barrier for Emily was psychological - she didn't believe she could connect with people via email because in order to do that, people need to open your emails. And what if they don't? So she thought she needed to do social media instead. And this is no surprise because we know that everyone thinks their business and audience are different from everyone else's. What did Emily’s emails look like before she joined The League?Before she started working with us, Emily wasn't truly understanding what her audience’s challenges were or didn't know how to create a conversation with them. She was throwing spaghetti to the wall hoping it'd stick. And that approach gave her no real results and definitely no consistent revenue from email marketing.Emily was only sending one email a week, and that wasn't frequent or consistent enough. Every week, she'd publish a blog post and then send an email out with the link, encouraging people to read her work and sign up for her free weekly event. But that was it. She had no direction or strategy, and her emails felt very random. Plus, these were all live emails – Emily didn’t use any automation.  Speaking of automation and systems, that's one of the reasons Emily said she resented us when she first came into our world. She realised that her existing email marketing platform couldn't do what she wanted, and she needed to switch. Thankfully, through our amazing community, we were able to put her in touch with an expert who could help. And Emily attributes part of her success to our community as well as to our teachings. What were the first changes Emily made when she joined The League?The first thing Emily did when she joined The League was to change her email signature – she added links for paid products to her footer and found that people do click on those links! Adding links to the footer of your emails is one of the things we encourage people to do on our Success Tracker. That way, even if you have no particular way of making an offer, people can still go and check your products out. The Super Signature turns every email into a sales email.After that, Emily ran our LOL Revival Campaign. This allowed her to remove anyone who wasn't engaging with her list, and as we always say, this helps with the deliverability of your emails.  At the time, Emily was selling a high-ticket offer and doing live launches 2-3 times a year. So she'd implement our campaigns in the lead-up to launching a course. And they work! At the time of this interview, Emily was in the middle of an Overture campaign - on day 3, she'd made 38 sales thanks to the automated sequence she implemented - all while going about her day. Because that’s the beauty of an automated campaign – you set it up once and let it run without the chaos of having to post something at the last minute. We give people a strategy and a structure, and that's what email marketing is all about!What impact has email marketing had on Emily’s revenue and sales?Emily has recently changed her business model from a high-ticket offer course to a membership and a self-liquidating offer, and by using our Overture campaign, she made £11,673 (over $14k) in 7 days. She also made around £5,600 (just under $7k) in 5 days’ worth of emails in her Black Friday campaign. Not bad for a few days worth of work, don't you think? How does Emily feel about her email marketing now?Doing email marketing has helped Emily with her community building. And while she'll admit she doesn’t always understand some of the psychology that we use or implement, the interaction she’s getting with her community happens privately in her own space – not on social media. Emily doesn’t have a massive following, but she has grown her email list to just over 8,000 subscribers.Emily feels excited about email marketing now - she looks forward to thinking about what she can say. Because while people may think email marketing is quite rigid, it's actually very creative. There's a lot you can do - including questionnaires and surveys. And it helps shape how you communicate with your audience going forward. So she's excited about email being another extension of the creativity she already has in her business. Email marketing allows her to drop into people's inboxes and send them on many wonderful journeys inside her world. Emily has now built a system through email that she can put more and more people into and scale beautifully as her audience grows. The one action that had the most impact on Emily’s email marketingThe one thing that Emily recommends people focus on is growing their email list. A lot of people depend on social media, but it's really all about creating your own platform with email. So she advises people to look at their onboarding and how they're communicating with their audience from the get-go.Did email marketing take over Emily’s entire life?A lot of the emails in our campaigns, Emily says, only take 3-4 sentences, so it doesn't take Emily long to create an email sequence. Plus, the emails and campaigns are built into a structure and automated. Emily pointed out it takes less time to send an email than to do social media, so once you know what you sell and how to build it, you treat email as your sales team. Regardless of what type of trial you’re running, what should your email campaign look like?   Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “I’m leaving.” It has the curiosity element that leaves people wondering what is going on. Is someone leaving the business? Or what is he leaving? Why? When? And who exactly? So it’s all about compound curiosity. Check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow Brad Brown Made $90k By Automating Webinars.How Facebook Groups and Webinars Make Matthew Harrington a Happy Man.And How A League Member Made Over $10k With Just ONE Email Campaign - Case Study With Aidan O'Sullivan.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 create the perfect free-trial email sequence for your email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player. Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

Do you run free trials for your membership, course, or product? If you want to know if a trial offer is a good idea and want to get your hands on a free-trial email sequence for your business, here are some of the strategies we use to sell our own membership, The League. And there's some really juicy stuff in here! Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:20) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (5:00) Should you run a free trial?(8:29) Trials help with risk reversal.(11:37) A trial isn't a discount!(14:28) Should you give full or limited access?(17:38) Do you need a free-trial email campaign?(21:14) The elements to include in your free-trial email campaign.(25:54) To bill or not to bill?(28:44) Free-trial email sequence key elements.(32:13) Subject line of the week.Should you run a free trial?If you have a membership, getting people into it is probably your main focus. And trials can definitely help with that. They are exciting, and any type of trial (free or paid) will get more people into your membership.  The problem with a free trial is that many of those who join might leave afterwards. And that's because they haven't invested or overcome any sort of barrier to be there. So they're not likely to start doing the work. And without that, they can't get any results, which means there's no value for them in staying after the end of the trial. But when people invest in your membership, they'll do the work. The fact they paid money to join shows commitment because people won't want to lose the money they invested. Trials help with risk reversalOne of the big pros of running a trial is that it acts as a risk reversal strategy. In our SCORE email engine, the R stands for Risk Reversal. (And if you're wondering, the whole acronym stands for Sales, Content, Objection Handling, Risk Reversal, and Engagement). How does a trial take care of the risk reversal element?There are different ways of running a trial and lots of possibilities and combinations that go from a free trial to charging the full price of the membership. In other words, you could charge someone any amount you decide for them to join for 2 days, a week, a month, or however long you want. A trial allows people to try out the membership at a lower risk (or no risk). And how much you charge may have an impact on retention (i.e. whether people stay at the end of the trial). So you may need to play around with the duration and the price of the trial to understand what works for your business.And another decision you may want to make is around whether you give people full or limited access to your membership. The key is to find the combination that gives you the most money. If your trial is priced higher than free or $1, you're going to get fewer people signing up. But at least you get some money in your pockets. If you charge $1 or run the trial for free, then obviously you're not making much money in the process. We suggest you work out how much someone is worth to you over the lifetime of that person being a customer. And if that’s hard to calculate, try to work out on average how much someone is worth to you over a year. Look at the gross number per person.A trial isn't a discount!In our business, we currently have a $1 trial. But we've also tested offering a full-month trial as well as a 14-day trial. The idea is that you could run a trial and give access for however long you choose. What's important is the way you frame it. You want to make sure people understand they're joining for $1, for example, and that gives them access for X amount of time. But after that, they will continue staying members.Membership site owners are often reluctant to run trials because they don't want to offer discounts. But a trial isn't a discount! It's a strategy to reduce risk to help people understand whether your membership is the right choice for them. Will it work for them? Will they like it? And will they get results? By offering a low-risk trial, you help them answer these questions. So when you encourage people to take the trial, you need to use language that doesn't suggest that they'll take the trial and leave. What you do instead is to ask them to join the membership for $1 for the first month, for example, and then stay on at the full price. It sounds like the language of a discount, but the emotional trigger that makes people jump on the offer is risk reduction. Should you give full or limited access?When running trials, you also want to think about what type of access to your membership you'll give people. What we do, for example, is an access-all-areas trial for $1 for 14 days. This means we allow people to get into entire membership for 14 days for $1. It means they can join, access, implement, and run our campaigns or use our Automate Hero tools and make money during that period of time for $1. And to us, that's great. Because people who get results will want to stick around. The alternative is to run a limited-access trial. This is where you give people access to some of your content for $1 for a certain period of time. It could be that they can only consume pre-recorded content, but not the live calls, for example. Or the other way around.Another type of trial we love and run a few times a year is the Open Day. This is where someone comes along for free but with limited access. People get to attend one live group coaching call inside our membership The League and see what it's like. Do you need a free-trial email campaign? A key point to consider when running a trial is whether people should go through your standard onboarding process or whether you want a separate one that's designed to convert people so they sign up at the full price. And the answer to this question can vary. Because the job of the onboarding sequence is to get people to remain members after the trial. But if people join on a trial, you want them to understand that the membership is worth its full price. Obviously, people who sign up at the full price have already realised that your membership is worth it. But those who came in via the trial may not. So consider this - how much selling did you do upfront? Did you sell the value of the membership upfront and before people signed up for the trial? If you have, then you should be able to put people on the same onboarding sequence that you use for your new (paying) members. Where our trial offer sits in our email engineFor example, our risk reversal offer doesn't sit on the front end - it's something we offer down the line. We do this to maximise profitability by selling the membership to those people who are ready and willing to buy at full price first. And then, at some point, we make our risk reversal offer. But by then, we've already sold the value of our membership. The advantage of presenting our trial offer in that way is also to ensure we have enough things to email people about. For a period of time, day in and day out in our emails, we use loads of different angles to try and sell our membership. And when we eventually offer a trial, we do it with some urgency and for a limited period of time. That's why we use the same onboarding sequence. Because by the time we offer the trial, people have been through a full sales campaign, our content-led campaign, and an objection-handling campaign.But if you're leading with the trial offer (and haven't sold the full value of the membership upfront), then you may need a different onboarding to clarfy that the product is worth a lot more. And if everyone joins your membership via a trial, then the trial email sequence is the only onboarding you'll ever need! The key is to find the balance between reselling people and making sure you deliver a valuable onboarding experience.What to include in your free-trial email campaignRegardless of what type of trial you’re running, what should your email campaign look like?Create FOMO The first thing you want a free-trial campaign to do is to create a specific type of FOMO – the idea that they’re not in the in-crowd. For example, in our free-trial sequence, we use the same language we use inside our membership. We don't do it in a pushing or jarring way - it's very inclusive. But we might talk about our Interrogator campaign, for example, and you'd only know what that is if you're in our world because that's the terminology we created for ourselves and our clients.  Sell the outcome of the trialAnother thing you can do in your free-trial email campaign is to stack up the return on investment (or the emotional result or overall outcome) that people get during the trial. In this campaign, you're no longer selling the membership - you're telling people what can happen during the trial. We do this by sharing case studies of some of the action-takers within our community who come in, launch a campaign, and make the equivalent of 3 years' worth of our membership in a few days. So sell the outcome of the trial.  Make your trial a limited-time offerThen tell people there's a limited time to take the offer. This is another reason why we don't make our trial offer on the front end. Because it would be hard to close it down. Instead, as we already explained, we make this offer somewhere down the line and use our Countdown Hero software to let people know they have limited time to take it. This is important because people are clinical and jaded and wonder why you're doing something. If you're ever going to offer a discount, there needs to be a good reason for it. Our reason is always honest - we tell people they can join for $1, make a whole bunch of money, and then want to hang around forever. They'll want to buy all our stuff and become raving fans. In fact, we often offer the $1 trial as an upsell for people who bought something else from us. So it's important you always wrap your offer around a reason - it doesn't have to be a hugely good reason, as long as you give one.To bill or not to bill?Another decision you have to make when you run a trial is whether you want to automatically renew the membership (and bill people) as soon as the trial ends. If you're going to re-bill someone, you have to be crystal clear (not just upfront but overt) about the fact you're doing that. So, for example, we say that our membership will cost $1 for the first 14 days and then we'll bill your card for the full amount after that, and the membership will automatically continue. You don't have to do anything but can obviously cancel at any time.We're completely upfront and fair about this, so no one can feel like they’ve been misled or scammed. What you don't want is to bury this in the small print somewhere in some obscure piece of copy where it can be overlooked. You don't want anyone to have any nasty surprises because that would put you in a sticky situation. That's why we also put the information on the shopping cart. We want people to be crystal clear on what's going to happen when they give us their credit card information. And of course, the reason why we re-bill automatically is because it increases our conversion for the trial. If you don't do this, conversions are going to be very low. And not necessarily because people don't want to be in your membership, but because they don't get around to renewing when the time comes. The job of the trial is to make it easy and convenient for them. If you don't re-bill, you can send email reminders before the trial is over to tell people they're not in a contract with you and if they want to stay, they'll need to sign up and pay. But conversion will be a lot lower than with automatic re-billing. Our Open Day trialWe also run another type of trial where we allow people to come in for a day. For this type of trial, we don't ask for credit card information. It's absolutely free, and we do this because it reduces friction and increases the number of people who enrol by just providing their name and email address. Inside our membership The League, we share a great Open Day email sequence, which is designed to convert people who attend this type of trial. Free-trial email sequence key elementsSo when you put together an email campaign for a free trial (or a paid trial), remember to tell people what they're going to get during this period. Sell the outcome! If you're only selling the trial at this point and not the whole membership, then introduce urgency. Also, share some kind of reason why you're offering a trial. And remember to share case studies!Another point worth remembering is that while you may be tempted to just send one email about the trial and then move on, you should create a whole campaign out of it. This is one of the key strategies in our business and teaching. You want to take everything you’d normally put in one email and make it into a sequence.If you want to get your hands on the campaigns that we have to do this and apply this idea of risk reversal, you can grab them inside our membership The League. You'll find our Splinter campaign and our Open Day campaign in there too. Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Do this on your NEXT launch…”. This email was about us sharing the fact we were doing a live Zoom call to talk about a marketing strategy we use for scarcity. This subject line works well for two reasons. First of all, we were driving people's attention to something other than what we normally do. Most of our emails are about The League, but this one was totally different. And also, the subject line has a specific tactic-sounding ring to it - something you can do on your next launch. And people love a tactical tip. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow to Create Urgency For an Evergreen Membership or Course Without Product Launches.How To Get Your Customers To Buy Using Buyer Psychology In Email Marketing.6 Things You Didn’t Know Your Email Marketing Platform Could Do.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. 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 create the perfect free-trial email sequence for your email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player. Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!