The Email Marketing Show

What's the latest in the email marketing world? Let's find out about the email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. What can we all do to make our emails work even better for our businesses?(And yes, we'll talk about AI, but probably in the way you expect us to). Ready to go? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Join our FREE Facebook group.(4:57) Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification.(7:35) The technical bits that are important for validation. (11:11) We need to focus on engagement with our list. (13:30) Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers into customers!(17:02) Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building. (20:27) Stand out by humanising your content.(24:02) Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint.(26:44) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verificationIn 2024 and beyond, email deliverability is going to become more ‘problematic’. And verification is going to be more important than ever. These two elements go hand in hand. And we recommend you have all your ducks in a row to make sure your emails get into the inboxes of your subscribers.Email marketing platforms are tightening their belts around deliverability and engagement monitoring. They're doing this so we're not all building mammoth lists of people and bombarding them with emails whether they're reading them or not.Kennedy did a little experiment recently. He had a look at the emails he receives in his inbox and was amazed at how many big brand names whose emails he hasn’t opened for ages are still emailing him. These marketers aren't taking their list hygiene and verification as seriously as they should!The technical bits that are important for validation Now more than ever, you need to focus on validation. So make sure you set up your DNS SPF and DKIM records. If you’re not familiar with these, look for some simple tutorials on how to set them up. It’s a one-time job, and yes - it's boring. You can pay someone to do it for you if you want. But get it done because people need to know for sure that the person sending emails is who they say they are. And that’s why these measures are coming into force.A few years ago, anyone could have opened an account with an email marketing platform and pretended they were an ex-president of the US. No one would have batted an eyelid! But we now live in a world where people are being scammed left right and centre. So these measures exist to protect us all. You’ll have noticed how many scams you receive via text message compared to email. That's because the world of text messaging is still unverified. You can't just ignore validation because you know you’re a good, legitimate person who isn’t scamming anyone. So do that piece of work! It's similar to what's happening on social media. You can now pay a monthly fee to receive a blue tick and show you're a verified account. More people are choosing to do this because they’re genuinely finding that others are cloning their profiles!We need to focus on engagement with our listIf you’re a customer of ours, we give you all the resources when it comes to re-engagement campaigns and processes to make sure the people on your list are those who are paying attention to your emails. Don't end up with subscribers who haven’t looked at your stuff in years!We might even start tightening up the window of time that we allow people before we consider them disengaged. We'll then put them through our re-engagement campaign, and if they don't engage we remove them from our list. Permanently.If you’re a member of our programmes, as part of our monthly calls, we’re going to keep you up to date with the latest email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. If things change in the email marketing world, we'll tell you!For example, when we started a few years ago, we would measure engagement based on open rates. At the time, that worked because they were fairly accurate. But now we measure engagement based on clicks. As always, we develop and respond to what’s working.  Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers!The next thing to consider when it comes to email marketing trends for 2024 is the cost of ads. A lot of us are building our lists using paid advertising on various channels. And you’ll notice that the cost of advertising is the highest it’s ever been! This means that the cost of getting new subscribers is going to increase. And the one skill we all need to master is our ability to monetise the subscribers on our email list.First of all, we need to build the skill of converting subscribers into paying customers for the first time. And then we also need to maximise how much we're able to earn from the subscribers on our list because if we’re paying more for each person we bring in, we have less time to make that money back. The marketers who are going to survive and win the ad game are those who manage to win the customer (not just the subscriber). The same goes for organic reach, as these costs are expected to increase as well.Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list buildingWe can't talk about email marketing trends for 2024 and not mention AI! If you work with media agencies or pay-per-click advertising, we believe they'll also change the way they work and focus more on the creative. This is because, with billions of dollars invested in Google AI, they'll always do a better job of figuring out what ads to place in front of whom, on what devices, what times, etc.There are lots of different criteria that you need to get right – it’s a complicated cocktail. But AI is going to be able to do a better job than anyone else because they're collecting data from advertisers that are way bigger than any of us. And then they use that data to optimise the process.The money in media buying is going to go to people who are good at figuring out creative artwork. And a lot of them are going to use AI to make it more engaging. It all comes down to humans with AI replacing humans without AI (rather than AI replacing humans).The big opportunity here is in your ability to use AI to analyse which ads are likely to perform best. For example, you can use AI to look at 10 bits of creative, 10 headlines, and 10 bits of body copy and work out which combination will perform the best. It’s all going to be about AI informing the creative![thrive_leads id='8822']Stand out by humanising your contentWith more development in AI, we’re going to see a proliferation of content and profiles that are non-human. So humanising your email marketing is the way to go.One of the greatest opportunities we have with content is to be human. It’s about creating things that AI cannot create, such as personal stories about what's happening in your life and how you feel about them. It’s about expressing your personal opinions - something AI cannot do (yet) because it's not in your head!AI is a content factory that’s pumping out this bland "How-To" content that might have some personality and may sound like you. It's certainly going to get better over time at understanding your style, but it's never going to know what you experience daily. Not in 2024 anyway!So when everyone on your email list is receiving so many AI-generated emails, which send people to AI-generated sales pages with AI-generated sales videos to AI-generated products, you have a huge opportunity to stand out by being human. By sharing things that aren't AI-generated. You can be different from all those content factories that create their emails, landing pages, sales videos, and even products at the push of a button.Maybe there will come a day when even podcasts will be completely AI-generated. We had an idea a while ago to start another podcast that used a combination of text-to-speech to introduce different sections and then grab bits of content that we created elsewhere and put them together. We didn't do it. But just remember that something real is going to stand out among a lot of that type of content.Come and find out more inside The Email Hero BlueprintEmail marketing has been around for a long time and will continue to be in 2024 and beyond because it's the highest return-on-investment marketing activity you can do in your business. The level of engagement you get through email marketing has not been equalled by anything else that anyone’s ever attempted. It enables long-term growth and sustainable scaling.In 2024, email remains central to everything we’re doing. We believe we all need to double down on building smaller, more engaged audiences. Our job is to deepen the relationship with our subscribers using AI where possible but never at the risk of replacing or butchering those relationships. And this could easily happen if you remove the human from the messaging.Focus on deliverability and remaining human, continue to tell stories and share personalised content, sell in every email, and increase the frequency of your emails. This is going to be the winning path through email marketing in 2024.And if you’d like to be kept up to date with the email marketing trends for 2024 (and beyond) and what's working right now, as the email platforms develop a way to respond to this massive uptake in the volume of email and AI becomes even better quality, more realistic, and more human-looking and want to know how to use AI ethically, come and check out our flagship programme, The Email Hero Blueprint.We take you through how to set up every single element of your email marketing (including the technical bits) to make it work for you so you can turn more subscribers into customers and master the central skill you're going to need in 2024 as ad prices continue to go up, and there's a proliferation of AI-generated bland content.Check out all the details of why it works, how, and what's included to get the incredible results that our students get. [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Warning: this is HOT”. It sounds like there might be something in the email that’s considered hot, like a hot recommendation, for example. But the subject line comes from the story in the email that was based on picking up a plate that was too hot (after being warned that the plate was indeed very hot!)Why does this work? The subject line is a bit cryptic, but not in a way that sounds clickbaity to the point that people feel deceived when they open the email. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesEVERYTHING You Need To Know About AI For Email Marketing.How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).Stop Landing In The Spam Folder & Immediately Skyrocket Your Email Deliverability – With Brian Minick.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 Email Hero Blueprint Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And 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 hot email marketing trends for 2024) 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!

Should you take a break from emailing your subscribers during the festive period? And should you send something different in your New Year's emails?Whether you have or haven't taken a break from your email marketing over the last few weeks, here are some ideas you can use to get your subscribers excited about your business again (and buy from you).  Ready? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Join our FREE Facebook group.(5:30) Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period?(8:30) Emails aren't just a sales tool.(12:20) New Year's emails aren't just about New Year's Resolutions!(15:10) What else can you do with your emails after New Year's?(17:52) Get people excited about your business.(20:18) Share your real-time experiences and stories.(22:27) Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emails.(24:00) Encourage people to take action and solve their problems.(26:52) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period? We believe that your subscribers can choose to take a break from reading their emails over the festive period if they want to. If anyone decides they’re not going to check their emails during the holidays, that’s up to them. But we continue to email them – our email marketing doesn’t stop.Plus, if your business is B2C or B2b (i.e. business to small business), if people are anything like us, we check our emails on our phones, regardless of whether it’s Christmas Day or New Year’s Day. If you want something, you’ll probably buy it on those days too! So we don’t think it’s unusual for your subscribers to still check their emails during the festive period.And even if you’re B2B, and your subscribers use their company email address and you get an out-of-office from them, chances are they're still checking their emails from time to time. So we recommend that you don’t take a break. Instead, carry on with your email marketing during the festive period.Emails aren't just a sales toolWe see two reasons for that. The first one is that when our subscribers first join our list, they go through automated campaigns. And we wouldn't dream of pausing those. There’s no need, anyway. Because those automations are designed to make sales, even during the holiday period.The second reason is that our thing is to email people every day. If you promise your list you're going to email them every day, then you email them every day! There’s no special condition for Christmas Day or New Year's Day! You see, our emails aren’t just a sales tool. They are a way we show up in people's lives to build deep relationships with the people who want to hear from us. We’re building human-to-human connections between us and the person reading our emails. So we want to be able to wish someone a Merry Christmas in real time. That way, we can also talk about the challenges or opportunities that a particular time of year may bring.If you help people with something, you don’t suddenly stop during the holiday period. There may be additional things you can help with because of the holiday season. You can use this time of year to push people towards reflecting on what it is you do and help them through the new struggles that this time of year brings. Regardless of what market you’re in, there will be something that applies to you and what you do. People still need the knowledge and the inspiration regardless of the time of year.New Year's emails aren't just about New Year Resolutions!Also, in the New Year pretty much everyone’s talking about New Year’s resolutions. And we know that the percentage of people following through is very low. That’s often because the reason for starting a new habit is manufactured and not based on someone's personal motivation or need. We all get told it's the time of year when you’re supposed to pull up your socks, get your act together, and stop putting things off. But if that's the only reason why we set those resolutions in the first place, it's no wonder we don't stick to them.  So by all means, you can use New Year’s resolutions (or anything that’s happening in the New Year) as an anchor for your emails. Any holiday or celebration can act as a great, pre-existing hook for your emails - people are already aware of and familiar with them, and you don’t have to explain anything.But you don't have to buy into the whole New Year’s Resolutions hype if you don’t want to. You can apply an unusual angle to it and even play opposites while riding the wave of something that already exists.What else can you do with your emails after New Year’s?One of our favourite things to do in January is to take a behind-the-scenes tour of our business. People like finding out what’s going on. So you could share a sneak peek of what’s coming up over the next year. And that allows you to do a couple of things. The first is that you can pre-frame people for what to expect, get them excited, and tease them about the cool stuff that’s going to be happening, such as the fact you’re launching something new. We’d recommend you talk about things that are coming fairly soon though because otherwise, the excitement might dwindle.But you can also use this as a good opportunity to reset the parameters, the beliefs, and the expectations around your relationship with your subscribers. For example, one of the things we talk about in our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) when someone first joins our list is to set the scene and tell them they're going to hear from us every single day. We also tell them they can come to hang out in our free Facebook group, listen to our podcast, or join our main programme - The Email Hero Blueprint.Even if you haven’t taken a break from emailing your list, you can use this time to reset the parameters and the expectations of what's to come, what you’re working on, and what the New Year means to you as a business and, as a result, what it means to your audience. How does what you do benefit people?  Plus, if you’re entering a new phase of your business, you don’t want to create a divide between the end of one phase and the start of the next one. Because that almost gives people permission to take a break and switch off, and you don’t want to do that!Instead, use this time to set people up for what to expect. This is a good opportunity to rebuild relationships with people and remind them that you’re showing up every day (or whatever your email frequency is) with something that’s going to help them move forward. That way, by the end of this year, your audience will have made significant progress with whatever area of business or life you help with.[thrive_leads id='8822']Get people excited about your businessTelling people what you have planned and what you’re excited about shows them that you have plans. You're not just chilling out, pumping out the same thing over and over again. Instead, you have new, innovative stuff coming up. And even if you don’t know what it is at this stage, give them some specifics. Don’t just talk about “new developments” or “exciting projects” with no further details. That generates zero excitement. There’s no value or emotional attachment to any of that.What you can do to generate real excitement is to say, for example, that you’re going to make an announcement the next day, which is soon enough. But also, be specific. Are you launching three new programmes this year? Tell them. If you do more, you can always over-deliver! And if you only manage one in the end, that's okay too because what you're sharing at this stage are your plans for the year.This is all great stuff because it shows your subscribers that you’re re-energised. You’re reconnecting and putting effort into your communication. Your business is evolving – it’s not just a matter of rinse and repeat.Share your real-time experiences and storiesYou can also talk about your goals or whatever's happened to you over the past few days. You may already be doing that in your emails, but if something fun happened during the festive season, and you have bonkers stories to share, don’t miss the opportunity to tell them in real-time. It humanises you.We don’t believe you should hold off telling a story because it’s Christmas Day and you’re not ‘allowed’ to send an email! Keep it real - people love hearing the real-time experience of you. And that’s another good reason to be sending at least three emails every single week. So people can follow you on this journey.If Rob sends an email from a cruise ship, we tell people. Or if Kennedy sends one while he’s in Orlando, we’ll say that. We don’t wait. Sometimes the emails are retrospective, but they don’t have to be. We aren’t the type of people to hold off our fun, interesting, novel stories until the New Year. We tell them in real-time as much as we possibly can. And we think you should, too. That way, people are running in parallel with you. They’re going through the holiday season at the same time, and they see that likeness with you.Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emailsThere’s also a big opportunity to look forwards and backwards. For example, you can share the changes, trends, and predictions about your industry or your niche that you can foresee for the coming year. Talk about how that's going to affect your subscribers and give them advice. Or, reflect on the previous year and how that relates to your customers in the lessons you learnt and things you can do differently, for example.One thing to note if you're looking backwards, is to be sure not to back reference specific emails. So, for example, we won’t mention we sent an email three weeks ago that talked about X. We don’t do that because someone may have subscribed just yesterday. And they wouldn’t know what we sent three weeks ago! But also, they might have missed that email and not know what we’re talking about. And we don’t want to make someone feel like an outsider. But you can talk about the last year in general and the things that happened or the lessons you learnt.This type of content tends to work well on social video channels and podcasts. And the same thing applies to emails. It allows you to feel timely and present. Just don't forget to link this content back to how it can help your audience.Encourage people to take action and solve their problemsRemember that before the New Year (so maybe around November or December) a lot of people may have already been thinking about solving a particular problem they’re experiencing. Maybe they're gearing up to do something about it in the New Year. So tap into that. Encourage people to take action - directly or indirectly, your emails can reignite that desire to get it done.Of course, it’s also perfectly fine to decide that your emails don’t need to take any particular shift just because of the time of year. But equally, we hope we showed you that there are plenty of opportunities you can leverage because of the New Year. It’s the same as embracing any other holiday or occasion, such as Valentine’s Day or Black Friday. You don’t want to run away from them.If you want some help with all this, we put together a programme to help people get to a point where they never have to wonder what to send, who to send it to, or when. It allows you to become fluent in email marketing. So if you want to make dramatic changes to your email marketing this year, take a look at our programme here. It’s brand new and we’re super excited about it. It gives you all the tools and resources you need to start making email marketing work for you.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is the eyes emoji followed by the words “Watching you (watching me)”. It vaguely reminds you of the Abba lyrics “Knowing me, knowing you”. Catchy song lyrics are an awesome source for interesting subject lines. So if you were in the relationship niche, for example, you could use “Spice up your wife” or something like that. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Create An Awesome Holiday Email Campaign That Gets Your Offer To Sell Like Hot Cakes So People Buy Like Crazy.How To Do Your Email Marketing While You’re On Holiday.Email Showdown! B2B Vs B2C Emails – What Are The Differences And Who Wins The Ultimate Email Marketing Crown?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 Email Hero Blueprint Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about what to send in your New Year's emails to see success in 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!

Do you track any email marketing metrics? How can you use your email marketing analytics to improve your email marketing?If this is a topic you've been avoiding, the great news is that looking at metrics, understanding them, and using them to your advantage isn't as hard as it might sound. Just collect the right data, and you'll be able to spot opportunities for improvement and growth. And yes, that means more money!So let's get into it. SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:19) Join our FREE Facebook group.(2:59) Why do email marketing analytics matter?(4:18) What email marketing metrics should you look at?(7:59) What can you do if your open rates are low?(11:55) The truth about your click-through rates.(13:25) How to increase your click-through rates?(20:51) What can you do when your conversion rate is low?(25:12) What can you do when your unsubscribe rate is high?(30:15) How can you use your email marketing analytics data?(32:44) Why you should always calculate your EPSPM.(35:46) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Why do email marketing analytics matter? Email analytics help you figure out where the biggest levers and opportunities for your email marketing are. When you look at the right metrics, you can get more from your emails. Plus, the analytics you need to track and understand aren’t that complicated and can (mostly) be found inside your email marketing platform.You probably think that one of the biggest metrics we suggest you track is the growth of your email list. And while that’s something you should look at, other metrics will tell you whether you have a well-refined engine that’s working for you. By knowing which email campaigns are doing well, you'll find out where you have room for improvement.What email marketing metrics should you look at?Open ratesIf you find that one specific email in one of your campaigns has a zero open rate, you’ll want to look at that. As we always say, open rates aren’t reliable, as such. But they’re still a good indicator in comparison to each other.So if you see a surprisingly low open rate one day or on one specific email, you may want to investigate. Could it be the timing? Or the subject line? This matters because if no one opens an email, it means they haven’t seen the link to your offers. In other words, if no one opens your emails, you won't be able to influence your click-through rate. Click-through rateClick-through rates are shown as the percentage of people who’ve clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the email to.They used to be shown as a percentage of the people who opened the email, which isn't great and something systems have moved away from. This is because the way open rates are tracked is broken. So it’s best to look at the percentage of people who clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the emails to. Email platforms have switched to this method of tracking, so if you’ve recently seen your click-through rates drop through the floor, that’s probably why - the way they're being tracked has changed. But that's a good thing!Conversion rateAnother metric you want to track is your conversion rate. How many people took action as a result of you sending an email? When we talk about 'taking action', that could mean buying your product but also registering for a webinar, for example. It's about whatever action you're asking your subscribers to take in that email.Bounce rate and unsubscribe rateYou'll also want to track your bounce rate, which looks at how many email addresses weren't deliverable.And finally, you want to track your unsubscribe rate. Every time you send an email, some people will unsubscribe - that's just a fact. That’s the cost of your email marketing but also the reason why there should always be some kind of offer in every email you send. Tracking your email marketing analyticsIf you’re inside our membership The League, you’ll know we have a piece of training that takes you through how to track your email analytics in great detail. So once you set up any email campaign, you can take a look at the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of each campaign and, overall, at the bounce rate and unsubscribe rate of your email marketing.This means you then have levers that you can start pulling on to improve your email marketing. So let's look at each metric in more detail.What can you do if your open rates are low?If you have a low open rate (10-30%) on one of the emails inside a campaign, it could be that the subject line needs tweaking. Otherwise, you should be looking at your engagement.A lot of our clients, when they first come into our world, may have massive email lists, but they'll tell us they've never done any engagement management. Once someone subscribes to their list, unless they leave of their own accord, no action is being taken by the list owner to keep an eye on who’s opening the emails, who’s clicking on the links, or who’s doing anything.Are you implementing good email list hygiene?Ordinarily, what we see when people join our programme and start implementing our campaigns is that the frequency of their emails increases. And the first thing we advise our clients to look at is who is likely to open those emails.If you have a list of 10,000 people and 1,000 of them open an email you send, you have a 10% open rate. But if only 5,000 of the people in your list are even using their email addresses (because all the others aren't valid anymore), you’re only really sending your emails to 5,000 people – not 10,000. The others are dead emails, spam traps, or people who no longer engage with you.This is why it’s important to look at your business and let go of this vanity metric of how many subscribers you have on your list. It only matters if you take the time to regularly try and revive or re-engage the people who aren’t paying attention and then delete them if they don’t re-engage with you. Deleting people might sound painful, but it’s the best possible thing for the hygiene of your list. Once you start doing that, you’ll see your click-through rate go up, and you'll be able to get your list to a point where your subscribers are people who care.The truth about your click-through ratesWhat happens if your open rates are good, but people aren’t clicking on the links to your offers? Typically, when you first present an offer, you’re going to see a higher click-through rate compared to the people who've gone through an entire email campaign that talks about your core offer. Over time, people will click on different versions of that offer, and the click-through rate will improve. Then in your day-to-day email marketing (i.e. the email you send live each day), you’re going to see a lower click-through rate when talking about that same offer.That's because the whole point of the longer-term relationship-building you’re doing with your daily emails is about waiting for the right time for people to want to buy your product. If they had an urgent need for it, they would have bought it during the first 60 days of you emailing them through your campaigns. Because that’s what those campaigns are designed to do.The reason why people haven’t bought from you yet is that it’s not yet the right time for them. So you can expect a lower click-through rate, which, of course, means a lower conversion rate too.How do you increase your click-through rates?If you want people to click on the links in your emails, make them really obvious that there's something to click on. Spell out “Click here to do X” – no matter what action you want your subscribers to take. Let people know they can click and make sure that your links look like links (i.e. blue and underlined).To make them stand out even more, you can even put them on a separate line. If your click-through rate is super low, you could use the most obnoxious-looking link for a few weeks to make sure people see it. You could even temporarily add some chevron arrows in front of it and put it all in capital letters. Once you know people are seeing it and are clicking on it, you can then dial things down again and remove all the extra bits.We’re literally obsessed with getting people to click on the links in our emails, which is why we put together a resource called Click Tricks, which you can get for FREE. It includes 12 creative ways of drawing attention to the links in your email so people don't scroll past them. We did some testing a couple of years ago, and we found situations where a lower open rate could still lead to a higher click-through rate because of what the links in your emails look like. So we know it works!Why you want to increase your click-through rate and not your open rateThink about sales calls. You're better off having fewer calls but with higher-qualified leads than lots of calls with people who aren't necessarily interested. You'll get more people buying that way. Having loads of sales calls with just anyone and everyone isn't as effective because it 'waters down' your sales process. The same thing applies to email marketing - you can get fewer but more qualified people opening your emails, and those will be the people who click on your emails.The idea that if you have a bigger list you’ll get more opens and more clicks (and therefore more sales) isn’t necessarily true. What you’re looking for is the highest click-through rate, which might not come from having more subscribers or from having a high open rate.There are lots of things you can do to increase your open rates (including using dodgy subject lines). But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get more sales. Instead, use subject lines that help you optimise the opening of the email and the clicking of the link so that, over time, you get the right pool of people. The more emails you send, the better you'll notice you become at this.  The impact of subject lines on your click-through rateYour subject lines can affect your open rate, and, in turn, that can influence your click-through rate. It's worth thinking about the level of intent of the people you’re sending emails to. Most campaigns are going to have subject lines that are suitable for people at the bottom of the funnel, which is the point where you’re telling them your programme is closing soon, for example.These aren’t the emails where you use obscure subject lines where people need to open the email to find out your offer is closing. You'll want to tell them straight up in the subject line! We call these 'label on the box' subject lines - it tells you what's in it.There will be times when a subject line needs to help you with an outcome. But then you’ll have other types of subject lines that are more ‘obscure’ – those that use compound curiosity, for example, and say exactly what's inside the email. That way, people need to open and read the email to find out. And those are the subject lines that help you increase the open rates of your emails.What can you do when your conversion rate is low? If you’re doing a good job of optimising open rates and click-through rates, but your conversion isn’t great, it’s probably nothing to do with your emails. Often, this has more to do with your offer. Maybe you have the wrong people on your list. Or maybe your offer isn’t good or is poorly presented. Perhaps it’s not conveying the value and the transformation it can deliver.If you’ve taken something super bland, put it on sale, and expect email marketing to work wonders for it, it won't happen. If you use your emails hoping to get massive click-through rates for something that’s ultimately rubbish, you won't convert. So you need to go back to the start. Have you got the right people on your list? Are they opening your emails? Are they clicking on your links?If you do, and the page isn’t converting, you’re probably not sending enough people to it. We recently noticed one of our clients who was offering a $6,000 programme telling us they only had 60 people on their list. While we always say the size of your list doesn't really matter, when you do the maths, even if you had one person on a list of 60 people buying a high-ticket price product, you’d be doing better email marketing than most people! In reality, in that case, you need more people on your list.You also need to look at your list hygiene. Are the email addresses on your list still active? Because you need a real human behind those email addresses who opens and engages with them. It's all about engagement monitoring and launching re-engagement campaigns when necessary. Don't forget that! If people aren’t engaging with your emails in a period of 60 days, put them through a revival sequence and give them one last chance to engage. If they don’t, unsubscribe them from your list.What to do when your unsubscribe rate is high? Every time you send an email, you'll have some people unsubscribe from your list. That's just going to happen. In our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) we tell people we’re going to email them every day with something that’s going to help them with their email marketing. But if that’s not for them, the door is always open, and they can leave (unsubscribe) at any time.We see a lot of email marketers who are worried about sending emails because they don’t want their subscribers to leave. And massive amounts of unsubscribes all in one go aren’t good for anyone. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for your email marketing platform. We know that. When people join our list, for example, we have the biggest spikes of unsubscribes in the first 5 days. Then the unsubscribe rate remains quite low over time, just to spike up again when we have a big influx of email marketing activity. But that's fine and to be expected. What matters is that the people who choose to say, do so for a long time. How are people joining your list?If your unsubscribe rate is generally high, and a lot of people on your list tend to leave immediately or very quickly, it’s worth looking at where the people are coming from. What’s the intention with which people join your email list? Because we can’t rely on tricking people to join – we can’t promise them something, and then give them something else. We know that some activities for acquiring new people on your email list notoriously drive high unsubscribe rates.For example, if different businesses get together and put their products into a bundle that’s advertised together, you’ll have people who opt in because they’re interested in one or more of the products. But because they don’t have a relationship with you directly, you might have a high unsubscribe rate when you start emailing them. And this might be okay for you if you know why it’s happening. You’ll expect a big exodus of people during the first few weeks after that event, but as long as you get good sales and a return on investments, you may be fine with that.Not all methods of bringing people onto your list are created equal. If you’re running cold traffic via ads to your lead magnet and never mention that you’re going to continue emailing people, you’re going to have a high unsubscribe rate. On the other hand, if you do a guest training or run an event, and people join your list because they loved what you delivered and want more of it, you’re going to have a lower unsubscribe rate.Your unsubscribe rate is going to change depending on the source where people came from. Just monitor the net outcome of each activity. You might be okay with a huge unsubscribe percentage from a certain lead source if you understand why that's happening.[thrive_leads id='8822']How can you use your email marketing analytics data? Whenever you build and run a new campaign to your email list for the first time, you may be tempted to check your sales. But you can (and should) look at your email marketing analytics too. What were the:Open rate. Click-through rate.Conversation rateAnd the unsubscribe rate for that campaign?When you then automate that campaign, you’ll have some initial data to look at. And we suggest you put a process in place to check the data every 90 days and compare it. Did you notice any changes? Is there anything you think you can improve or fix? Maybe you can tweak the hook of an email or the angle of an offer. Most of the time, you won’t have to change anything, but sometimes you'll spot things that no longer work.  This is also super helpful if your business has changed. It’s always good to check your automated campaigns from time to time in case you’ve changed your offers or the products or services you sell. Your email marketing analytics and metrics help you make your future campaigns better. You’ll have the quantitative data that tells you what needs tweaking. Over time, you’ll also get better at this and will develop a natural hunch as to what’s going to work better.Why you should always calculate your EPSPMFinally, the North Star metric that we always use is the EPSPM, which is your Earnings per Subscriber per Month. It tells you how much you're earning from your list every single month. You calculate it by dividing the amount of money you’ve made in that month by the number of subscribers you have on your list in the same period.Over time, tracking your EPSPM will show you a trend and tell you exactly how your email marketing is doing. When your EPSPM is increasing, it means you’re getting better at putting things in front of your email subscribers. It doesn’t matter how big your list gets because as long as you check this metric, you’re getting consistent data. And that helps you understand how your email marketing is doing. For us, this is the number that puts all the other email marketing metrics together.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “My humiliating webcam mishap.” This is a subject line where people immediately paint a picture in their heads. It takes only seconds for the mind of a grown adult to guess what might have happened. Sure, everyone's version of it will be a little different, but they'll want to open the email to find out what happened. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesAdvanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.

Is it possible to get awesome results from email marketing? Can email take your business from the brink of collapsing to amazing heights and success? Yes, it can. And we're getting to hear from one of our clients - the lovely April McMurtrey from Learn Reading, who's sharing how she increased her revenue by 400% in just ONE year! Pretty unbelievable, right?But it's true. Let's get the whole story from April! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:19) Join our FREE Facebook group.(2:51) Who is April McMurtrey?(5:07) When did April start using email marketing in her business?(6:42) What did April's email marketing look like when she first started?(7:54) What's the first change April made when she joined our world?(9:08) What happened when April started making changes to her email marketing?(12:55) How April got a 400% increase in sales in just 12 months.(14:32) How does April feel about her email marketing now?(16:46) What's ONE action April recommends people take when it comes to email marketing?(19:31) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Who is April McMurtrey?April is a Dyslexia and Reading Specialist who teaches struggling and dyslexic readers how to read. In a nutshell, April’s come up with a better, easier, and faster way of learning how to read. Isn't that overwhelmingly awesome?!After teaching reading for 30 years, April started her private practice as a reading specialist. She then got certified in dyslexia therapy and testing and went on to develop her programme after 25 years of experience in seeing what works and what doesn't. After creating her curriculum for dyslexic and struggling learners, she launched her business and programme (backed up by a lifetime of skill and expertise) in March 2020.When did April start using email marketing in her business?April started using email marketing about a year after she launched her business. She knew she wanted to do email marketing from the start, but we all know the learning curve at the beginning is quite steep. And April had no idea where to start. Like most, April is in business to help people – not to necessarily learn all the stuff that goes with running a business.When we asked her about her biggest barrier to getting started with email marketing, April told us she didn't know how to find someone who could help her learn. She had a lot of subscribers on her list but no idea what to do with them. April recognised the power of emails though. She could see all the professional-sounding and impressive emails landing in her inbox, and she knew the marketers who were sending those emails were following some sort of sequence to be able to sell. That's what April wanted to be able to do, too. But at the time, she just didn't know how. What did April’s email marketing look like when she first started?At the start of her email marketing journey, April would send an email once every couple of months just to tell her subscribers about any products she had for sale. People on April's list had no real idea who she was, and she's pretty sure a lot of them would unsubscribe as soon as they realised she was trying to sell to them. So her emails were sporadic, and she had no automation. What’s the first change April made when she joined our world?After spending some time trying to learn about email marketing through podcasts, April started binge-listening to ours. And that's what eventually led her to join our membership The League and start implementing our strategies.One of the first things she did was to send out daily emails. And that’s where everything changed for April. She discovered she loves the creative process of sending emails every day. She enjoys sharing what’s going on with her days and tying that into something she can teach people. Now, seeing the relationship with her audience build through daily emails is one of April’s favourite things to do.What happened when April started making changes to her email marketing? The first shift happened in April’s mindset. After joining our world, she felt she finally had the tools she’d been looking for and everything mapped out for her. She could see where she was, where she was going, and what she had to do to get there. And she was on fire with it!When April started implementing email sequences (such as our Overture campaign and our Getting to Know You sequence) things picked up for her. In particular, when April launched our Golden Cloak campaign, her sales went from trickling to skyrocketing. Finding her peopleThe combination of sending daily emails and automating a few campaigns gave April control. It filled that gap she felt she had in her business, and April discovered she loved communicating with her audience. Suddenly, because of all the emails, the subscribers on her list turned into her people – April became their reading teacher, and they started caring about her. And that was fun.Plus, because we always teach our students that you should give your subscribers something to click on (or something to do), April did just that. And people started replying to her and telling her just how much they loved hearing about her life and receiving all the little tricks she shared with them. April was pleasantly surprised at the rapport and deep connection that she started to be able to build with her people.What April has now, thanks to email marketing, is a relationship with the people on her list. She’s open and honest about her days and her ups and downs, and people are supportive and encouraging. April truly cherishes those relationships, and sending emails is one of her favourite things to do because of the connections it allows her to build. It’s like having individual relationships with 21,000 people! April’s list is not just a crowd – the connections she established feel very personal.How April got a 400% increase in sales in just 12 monthsAfter she started doing email marketing consistently, April experienced a 400% increase in sales in just one year. During this time, her social media presence also increased. But April attributes at least 80-90% of the increase in sales to what she learnt about email marketing from us. We showed her the perfect route to take, she said. Now, her social media is her traffic source. Just like we recommend, it's where she builds her audience. But she built her business through email - because that's where April gets to establish and deepen her relationship with her subscribers. With around 21k subscribers, April has a considerable list. But as we all know, having people on your list is one thing - converting them is a different game! And without the right skills and techniques, it’s a hard thing to do.[thrive_leads id='8822']How does April feel about her email marketing now?Email marketing saved April’s business. A year before our chat, April's business was 'on life support' - she felt she probably only had one month of a viable business left in the tank. Email marketing not only helped her business get off of life support but, a year later, to also thrive well beyond what April could have ever imagined. And that’s thanks to the email strategies that April learnt from us.April is a writer – she loves writing and being creative. Above all else, she loves building relationships and deep connections with her audience. And spending 10-20 minutes a day putting her hands on the keyboard and getting her brain engaged is her favourite thing to do. But it’s also the most effective thing in her business – it's what saved April’s business and got it to where it is now. If you think about it, 10-20 minutes a day is a pretty good deal!What’s ONE action April recommends people take when it comes to email marketing?The one action April recommends people take is to trust the process. It’s not all about you, what you can provide, or how you can perform. It’s the process that works – it’s the campaigns and the sequences that have been developed inside The League.So think about the expertise you have to offer. Be confident that the people on your list need what you have to offer and don’t give up. When you’re thinking about what you’re going to say in your emails, focus on your desire to help your people and the connection that will result from it. Don’t give up because the process works!In even more exciting news, April is also launching a book, and setting it up for success (with email marketing, of course) is next on her agenda. If you're interested, you can find details about the book here.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line (courtesy of Kennedy - for once) is “Insurance payout (the whole £30)” The subject line works because it has compound curiosity but also uses specificity by mentioning the exact amount of the payout - £30. Kennedy didn’t just mention the specific amount of money but also decided to contrast it with “the whole”, which makes it sound like it should be a really big number, but it’s not! First, he tries to build the whole thing up, but when you read £30, the whole idea comes crashing straight down.So as you can see, Kennedy used a few techniques here – the subject line triggers curiosity by mentioning the insurance payout. People want to know how he won because insurance companies are well known for wiggling out of it. But also, who won? What happened? And what's the £30 all about? What does this whole thing even mean? No surprise that this subject line got really good open rates. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow Cheryl Hatch Increased Her Membership Conversion Rate By 84% With Just Two Email Campaigns – A Case Study.How Our Client Jeri Anderson Made $27k In Month One Launching A Brand New Business & Starting With Zero Contacts On Her List.And How Our Client Hillary-Marie Made $16k With ONE Email Marketing Campaign (And Then Did It Again!)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 our client April increased her revenue with email marketing by 400% in just one year) 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!

Is there a difference between B2B vs B2C email marketing? What works best? And can we take some of the best strategies from B2C and apply them to B2B?Let's have a big ol' email showdown and find out which type of email marketing wins!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:29) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!(3:23) What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C?(6:50) The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing.(9:46) What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?(12:13) Who is sending your emails?(16:06) How do people join your list?(19:33) What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?(24:20) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C? We believe there are three categories of businesses when it comes to selling:B2B - business to BIG business.B2b - business to small business.And B2C - business to consumer, where you sell things to do with people's hobbies and lives.Most of the businesses we sell to are B2b, which means we sell to owner-run businesses or a one-person band. The owner may be working with a partner or a small team, but the business is small. And we consider ourselves one of those businesses too as unless you’re making more than $10 million a year, you're still a small business.The key here is that businesses in the B2b category behave like consumers. When buying products or services for their company, business owners tend to use their own money. So it's worth bearing in mind that at the end of your emails, there are human beings who expect to hear from you in a certain way.The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing Let's say you're a large government lobbying organisation to do with climate change. You'll be expected to show up in a way that's very different from the way we show up in people's inboxes, for example (i.e. with rude jokes full of innuendo and swear words!) The reason we act the way we do is because of our understanding of ourselves and our market. We show up in a way that’s acceptable by our market but that’s also different and makes us stand out.A large government lobbying organisation will communicate with its clients in a completely different way. They still have to build trust and authority, just like all of us do, but it’s done differently. If they started going off on a tangent about something silly (like we do in our emails), that wouldn’t give the right indicator for them as a company.And it’s not just about the words because those only contribute to a small percentage of the way someone may interpret that message. How you say something is what allows people to read between the lines and get the real essence of what you're like. You can build trust and authority by showing testimonials and social proof, but you can also do it through the tone in which you speak. If you get an email that reads as if a college professor wrote it, it'll have a different level of credibility than something jokey.The words aren’t that important. What matters the most are the campaign structures that you create, the stories you put together, and the tone you use. They can be ridiculous and funny (if you want to) for B2C but more authoritative and professional if your market is more serious. And the beauty of the campaigns we offer inside our membership The League is that you can take the emails and change the words without breaking the whole thing.What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?Sales cycles may take a little longer for B2B compared to B2C. With B2C (and possibly B2b), you may find that consumers have the ability and the power to buy a little faster. And yet, they will still need your product to be presented through different offers before they buy.For example, in B2B, you could use different email sequences or email engines (as we call them) for different phases of the sales cycle to move your prospective clients through the cycles. We often talk about having three email engines:The lead or subscriber engine is designed to get leads to become first-time customers.Then you have the customer engine to get people to buy from you again.And then you have the winning customers back engine, aimed at the people who haven’t bought from you for a while.With B2B, you may even have multiple phases of a sales cycle. It could be that you've identified some leads, then booked an initial meeting, then maybe booked a demo, followed by a consultation period. After that, you may need to go through Ts&Cs and the specifics of the product the client is going to buy, and then finally you seal the deal. You may even have a maintenance package after that. So you might need a bunch of email campaigns to move people from one phase to the next. That’s what email marketing helps you do. It helps you move people from where they are to the next step until they’re ready to buy. It’s a bit like a game of rounders or baseball, where you need to focus on moving from one base to the next. Who is sending your emails?Something we recommend for B2B and B2b as well as B2C is to be consistent with who the email comes from. Because people buy from people. When you send an email with the objective to move someone from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next, you want that email to be from a human being.That's why we recommend you use your name, the salesperson's name, or even a fictional character’s name if you want. Whatever you do, use an actual name, and you'll see your open rates go up. That's because the level and depth of your relationship with that person are going to increase. Relationships are established with people and things we can relate to. So both the person sending the email and the copy of the email itself have to be something that people can relate to.Think about it - on a day-to-day basis, we all get emails from a lot of institutions and organisations (such as banks or credit card companies), and they all tend to come from the company. But we think that should change - emails should come from a person. Because that allows us to establish deeper relationships and feel like we're communicating with actual humans.In the past, small companies would pretend they had several members of staff to make themselves look bigger. Faking having bigger operations was a thing! But it's not anymore, and small businesses embrace having that personal touch. The world has shifted, but big businesses continue to try and look like big businesses. Remember - there's power in being seen as an individual. In a world that's being taken over by robots and AI, you want to know that there's an actual human being behind the emails you receive. If all big businesses started doing that, it would be powerful.[thrive_leads id='8822']How do people join your list? What was your relationship with that person in the first place? If someone joins your newsletter with the expectation that John will be sending daily tips about DIY, make sure John sends daily tips about DIY! Don't have the emails suddenly come from a company people can't even recognise. Also, always remember you're sending emails to human beings. People in B2B or B2b might be buying your product because they're trying to help their business or the company they work with, but they’re also serving themselves. So how can your lead magnet, your email content, and the offers you make benefit the person directly? Can you save them time? Can you make them look better with their boss? Help them get a pay rise or a promotion?Think about serving the individual at the end of each email, even in B2B and B2b. We have a structure we teach our clients that is a way of extrapolating and communicating the benefits of something in a deep way that resonates with people. So if you're selling a solution that helps people grow their business, you can mention it'll get them more employees, or it'll afford them a better live streaming setup, for example. These are all business benefits. But because you're talking to the human being who’s running the business, you also want to mention the personal benefits to the individual.For instance, we may say that by building our SCORE email engine, you’ll be able to grow your business, but also for you personally, you’ll know that every new lead that comes in is being taken care of and always presented with the best possible offers and opportunities to buy without you having to be physically there. A great personal benefit is that you can be at home with your family and spend more time with them, for example. Your business will be growing, amplifying, and compounding the sales while you take the dog for a walk or your children swimming.What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?Largely speaking, B2B needs more personification - we need to bring some elements of B2C email marketing into it. How? You can get creative and use a mascot or someone who works in your business and push them to the forefront of your marketing. You could even create characters to establish an emotional bond with your audience because that's essential to be able to relate to someone. And without a human being, there's no connection. How can you connect with a brand if you think of their company in terms of tall glass skyscrapers in the middle of some city? People in the UK will be familiar with comparethemarket.com, which have a meerkat as the character that’s front and centre of their marketing. They personified an insurance company, which is traditionally something very dry. And that's genius because the meerkat allows us to create an immediate emotional resonance with that brand. And that takes up more space in our brains than a company without a person behind it. Or think about gocompare.com, whose face is a Welsh opera singer. You may not want to go to these extremes, but whatever you do, show up as a person.You could do that by introducing people from your team and sharing something they said, for example. If you look at a lot of what comedians do, they share naturally funny stories inspired by their family or friends. All the comedian has to do is deliver the story in a way that doesn’t remove the funny aspect of it. So you could share things that your team or your customers say. They don’t have to be funny - it's just about using natural content from what’s around you. Because these are the things that build relationships with people. It’s about humanising your content because you’re human and your customers are humans! And it’s time to push a more H2H (human-to-human) type of communication in email marketing.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “I’m spilling the tea…” which is a phrase that commonly refers to gossiping. But the story in the email was genuinely about Rob spilling a cup of tea on a plane! And this makes the subject line interesting. You take a commonly used phrase that means something, and you use it literally in your email. It doesn’t feel like a tricky subject line. But when you read the email, you find it goes in a different direction than where people expect. And that's what works well, so check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodes5 MAJOR Problems With Your B2B Email Marketing (And How To Easily Fix Them).EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Email Marketing And Storytelling To Write Emails That Sell Like Crazy.How To Send Personalised Email To All The Right People – Getting Friendly With Joe Fier.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 B2B vs B2C 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!

Ever come across the terms landing pages or squeeze pages? Interesting phrase, don't you think? So let's shed some light on this - what are landing pages for lead generation? How can you create an awesome landing page to get more people on your email list? What should and shouldn't go on there? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:23) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!(5:10) Do you really need a landing page to collect leads?(7:59) Why offer a lead magnet on your landing page?(12:31) Why do you need to put so much effort into something free?(13:53) Don't call it a FREE anything!(17:15) What should you include on your landing page for lead generation?(22:05) Tell them they're joining your email list!(24:52) Add social proof.(26:54) Time to start sending out email campaigns.(28:53) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Do you really need a landing page to collect leads? The short answer is yes. But first, let's go over what landing pages do. To us, landing pages are lead-generation tools that help business owners and email marketers capture email addresses. Some people talk about sales pages as landing pages, but we find that super confusing (and our students do too!) Let's think about this for a second - your sales pages are what you're sending people links to in your emails. And if you're emailing people, you already have their email address! So for the sake of clarity, what we're talking about here are opt-in pages, where the only thing someone can do is to put their details into a form to either register for something or grab a thing for free.The reason why you want to collect someone's email address can be wide and varied - it could be a free class, a webinar, a master class, a report, or a lead magnet. Ultimately, a landing page is a lead-generation tool.So you do need one.Because otherwise, how are you going to collect email addresses? Why offer a lead magnet on your landing page? If someone comes into your world, you want to get them on your email list, right? And that’s what lead magnets are for. You give them to people at the start of their journey with you. Once they’re on your list, if you create new lead magnets, you don’t need to send them to your existing subscribers.The only exception is if you’re doing a product launch and want to create a waiting list by asking your existing subscribers to qualify their interest for that product in advance. You're essentially asking them to raise their hands. This is useful for segmentation, or if you’re having a slight change of direction and want people to pre-qualify for something.For example, we could use a PDF or Google Doc to help us pre-qualify some of our existing subscribers for our Accelerator programme, which is a higher-ticket, more intensive, high-calibre programme. We could create a document that outlines what’s involved in the programme, and ask people to tell us they're interested so we can inform them when the doors open again. That particular lead magnet would serve a marketing collateral purpose. But we wouldn't it to our whole list. Lead generation pages are also useful to send people to a specific location. If you're doing a talk or a podcast interview, you don’t want to send people to your website. Because that’s full of information that will get them distracted. Instead, you send them to a landing page where all they can do is give you their email address.Why do you need to put so much effort into something free?Creating a lead magnet (and an opt-in page to go with it) is a lot of work. But you do need to put that work in because you want your lead magnet to appear valuable. You want to convince people that it can do something for them.  Let's not forget that an email address is a form of currency! You may be giving something away 'for free' (i.e. no money is exchanged), but people's email address does have a value attached to them. You're asking for something precious in the form of personal data. It’s a way for you to communicate directly with that person.More often than not, people read their emails on their phones, so you practically get access to that! And that's valuable, especially as you might also start sending them emails every day from now on. And they don’t know you yet - they don't know they can trust you. Believe it or not, there are people out there who make it very hard for subscribers to leave their lists. And that’s not the way to do email marketing, but it happens. Don't call it a FREE anything! A tip we’d like to share when it comes to creating the copy for your lead magnet is to never call it a “free” PDF, workbook, eBook, or whatever it might be. Instead, say something along the lines of “Get your totally free copy”. It’s a slight shift, and it makes a difference because the implication is that you created something of value, which is not free, but you’re giving it to people for free. This is an important distinction from a copywriting perspective – it makes people want your lead magnet more. Even with our resource, Click Tricks, we don't tend to say it's free. Instead, we say we're giving it to people for free. And that implies that it has high value. If you can, it’d be great for you to sell the same thing elsewhere and give people proof that you're selling it for money. What should you include on your landing page for lead generation? First of all, let's mention something you shouldn't do. Don't put your massive company logo at the top of the page. Because when it comes to opt-in pages, the message is more important. So if you want your logo on the page, have it on top but just a bit smaller. You want the thing that grabs people’s attention to be the headline – the promise that your lead magnet is going to deliver. When you design your page, don't add too many things that compete for your audience's attention. Focus on one thing and make it the most prominent - the biggest and boldest.Then, make what people are getting with your lead magnet super clear. What is it exactly? You can talk about the benefits but also the medium. Is it a PDF? Is it an instant download? Or a series of videos? Be as specific as you can be about what you’re giving them. Specificity and proof are super important. So you’ll want to say it’s a “26-page instant download”, for example, or a “12 minute and 32 seconds video training”. Build a true picture of the thing you’re going to give them so people can decide if it’s for them.Also, another objection people have to downloading something (and giving you their email address) may have to do with its quality. Especially if it’s a free thing, is it going to be good enough? Tell them how long it’s going to take for them to see results after using your resource. For example, we have a product called Batch It Crazy, which is a batching method for writing lots of emails. And we promise that by the end of 90 minutes, you’ll have 365 ideas for your emails. So make sure you tell people what outcome you can promise them and be specific about what it can do for them.[thrive_leads id='8822']Tell them they're joining your email list! A very important thing to do from the very beginning of your relationship with your subscribers is to set up the belief that they’re joining a newsletter. Be honest with people and let them know you’re giving them something for free in exchange for their email address to join your newsletter.So either say something along the lines of: “Join my newsletter and get a free copy of my thing” or “Get a free copy of my thing when you join my newsletter”. And then have some copy or a sub-heading above the opt-in box that tells people that when they give you their email address, they'll start receiving a daily hint, tip, story idea, or piece of information to help with whatever you do.Why do this? Because the days of tricking people onto your email list are long gone! If you’re clinging to that because you’re worried that people won’t want to join your newsletter, you need to have more belief in what you offer. People always have the choice to unsubscribe if they no longer want what you send out, so be upfront. They're joining your email list - make that clear and transparent.And if you get fewer people opting in as a result, be sure that the ones who do join will be higher-quality subscribers. You’ll have an easier time not having to filter them out of your list later on because they don’t engage and clog your deliverability. Just make it obvious on the page that they’re going to be added to your email list and sell them the benefit of joining – tell them how you’re going to be solving their problem even faster.Even with the design of your landing page, don’t hide anything. Make it bright and visible – do whatever you need to do to draw everyone’s eyes onto the button. Add social proofBelow the fold, you can also add social proof. Do you have testimonials? Help people decide if they want your lead magnet by showing them what others think about it. This builds on the belief that your lead magnet is a good thing, and people are getting value from it.You could even use one of the tools in our Automate Hero suite (Scarcity Hero) to tell your audience they’re joining X amount of other people who have also subscribed to your newsletter. So when people land on your opt-in page, they can see how many other people have also downloaded your lead magnet.And if you're worried that that number may be small, it doesn't matter. People will see and interpret numbers in different ways. Even if you have a small list or you’re just starting, people might view a small number as a sign they're getting more personalised attention or something unique. They’re joining a rather intimate group of people where they’re perhaps not just a number. And to them, that's a great thing!Time to start sending out email campaignsSo what do you do next? Once people have opted in, you can offer them what's often referred to as a tripwire offer. If you're already inside our membership The League, you'll know we have an email sequence called the Encore campaign, which uses reverse psychology because it involves not selling things straightaway and foreshadowing the sale.One last thing to remember is to only ask people for the information you need to be able to send them your lead magnet. For example, if you’re sending a digital download, don’t ask for their physical address. If you don’t need it, don’t ask for their phone number or gender. There needs to be a good reason for the information you request in the opt-in form. Make it congruent and ask for as little information as possible.  [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Quick. Hide the sweets” and is about Rob’s hatred for Halloween and children who go around trick or treating asking for sweets. Rob just can’t be bothered with it – he’s the bah-humbug! of Halloween. And that was the story in the email that inspired the subject line. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesCold Email Outreach – Is The Technique Sleazy or Super Effective?Fix Your Traffic Problem For Good, With Todd Brown.How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).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 landing pages for lead generation) 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 grow your business and make more money? What if you have a membership? And what if you help people in teaching and education? Yes, yes, and yes! So let's hear it from our client Cheryl Hatch from Preschool Plan It, who implemented only two of our email campaigns and increased her membership conversion rate by a whopping 84%!And there's a lot more to come for Cheryl. Want to get the full story?Let's go. SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:22) Join our FREE Facebook group. (3:13) Who is Cheryl Hatch?(5:58) When did Cheryl get started with email marketing?(7:37) What was Cheryl's biggest barrier with email marketing? (9:16) What are some of the changes Cheryl made when she came into our world?(14:07) Implementing her first automated campaigns.(18:30) What results did Cheryl get with her email marketing?(22:50) What does this increase in conversion rate mean for Cheryl?(26:12) How does Cheryl feel about her email marketing now?(28:13) What's the one action that had the most impact on Cheryl's email marketing?(30:10) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Who is Cheryl Hatch?Cheryl serves preschool teachers who work with 3 and 4-year-olds in a group setting. With two decades of experience in the education space, Cheryl launched a website jam-packed with awesome resources back in 2010 to help preschool teachers create their lesson plans. She managed to grow her audience by adding ads and affiliate links to her website. Online traffic went crazy (those were the days!), and the teachers in her audience started asking for more resources. That's why, in 2016, she turned her website into a monthly recurring membership, complete with lesson plans and professional development training.When did Cheryl get started with email marketing?When she first started her email marketing, Cheryl didn't have a lead magnet. She'd simply ask her website visitors to join her newsletter. For a long time, her email marketing consisted of sending out a monthly newsletter packed with lots and lots of information. Around 2015, Cheryl started doing more research on how she could give her audience more and perhaps launch a business.Although she had no product yet, she realised she had so much information in her newsletter that she could send it twice a month instead. That would give her a better chance to drive people back to her blog for ads and affiliates.What was Cheryl's biggest barrier with email marketing?Was that a comfortable transition for Cheryl? Not at all. Increasing the frequency of her emails was a true barrier for Cheryl - she was quite worried about annoying her audience. After all, she'd promised them a once-a-month newsletter when they first signed up, and she felt she was breaking a promise.It took her a long time to change her mindset and understand she wasn’t sending emails for the sake of sending them. She was sending emails because she could help people! And by sharing more bite-sized information, she was also giving her audience a chance to go and implement her tips in the classroom and make a difference. But until she truly realised that, emailing more frequently was her barrier.What are some of the changes Cheryl made when she came into our world?The first thing Cheryl did when she came into our world was to re-write her welcome sequence by implementing our 4-day Getting to Know You sequence. Because of the psychological tips that are at the basis of all our campaigns, Cheryl managed to increase her engagement. People started responding to her emails and telling her how much they agreed with what she was sharing. While that didn’t increase her conversions just yet, it improved her deliverability rate. Cheryl also created a lead magnet in the shape of a PDF download with some activities to help teachers create a week-long lesson plan. Her lead magnet is something that Cheryl sends out at the start of every month with inspiration for the month ahead. Another change that Cheryl made when she joined our world (courtesy of Rob) was to increase the frequency of her emails. She thought about it for 6 months, but eventually, Cheryl started sending out a second email every week on a Thursday. Because that's the point in the week when teachers feel burnt out and could do with some inspiration. So Cheryl sends out a quote and an image to wish her teachers a great rest of the week.She also added a Super Signature at the bottom of all her emails, which directs people to her website or her membership offer. There’s no call to action in the email as such – just the Super Signature. And Cheryl still gets a lot of replies from the teachers in her audience acknowledging how much they needed the encouragement.Implementing her first automated campaignsCheryl also started looking at the campaigns we offer inside our membership The League intending to increase her membership conversion rate. After becoming familiar with the idea of using a SCORE engine of email campaigns (where the acronym stands for Sales, Content-led, Objection handling, Risk reversal, and Engagement), Cheryl got to work. Because she already had the Engagement piece covered with her value-packed newsletter, she started focusing on the S (sales) and the C (content-led) campaigns first.Rather than feeling like she's bombarding people with requests to buy, Cheryl was pleased with our approach, which helps you outline what you have to offer and how it can benefit the people in your audience. This is one of the main things Cheryl learnt from us, she said. And it's this idea of talking about your product in a way that doesn't just focus on features and benefits. Instead, she's telling her audience how they can use her products to become awesome preschool teachers.As a result, Cheryl doesn’t feel salesy anymore. She knows she sells a product that helps people. And that's changed how she feels about talking about her membership. Her resources are exactly what every preschool teacher needs! So she's not scared about doing a call-to-action to her membership in her newsletter, for example. It's easy to let people know how the membership can truly help. What results did Cheryl get with her email marketing?In the 3 months between May and July 2022, Cheryl's membership conversion rate (i.e. people joining her membership from her email list) was just under 2.5%. This is when all Cheryl had in place were her lead magnet, her newsletter, and our Getting to Know You sequence.Cheryl set herself a goal to increase her membership conversion rate to 5%. So she revamped her Getting to Know You sequence and added a sales campaign to her email engine - i.e. our 6-day Overture campaign, which Cheryl chose to send out every other day instead of daily. She also put a 3-day content-led campaign in place (our Daisy Chain campaign) with pre-recorded videos that people can watch at their own pace.Now, instead of receiving 'welcome' emails for 4 days and then going into her newsletter, Cheryl’s new subscribers go through about 21 days of emails. When Cheryl looked at the same 3-month period for this year (May to July 2023), she noticed that the percentage of people joining her membership from her list is just under 4.6%, which takes her super close to an amazing conversion rate of 5%! And that’s with only two new email campaigns in place – she’s not even done yet![thrive_leads id='8822']What does this increase in conversion rate mean for Cheryl?Cheryl is now communicating how she helps people in a much better way because she's able to understand what they need. While she doesn't run live activities with her audience (because of different time zones), her emails feel ‘real’ – this is Cheryl’s voice. And people feel like they know her. What's interesting is that when looking at the conversion rates of the individual campaigns, Cheryl said, the sales aren’t immediate. They’re small numbers. But over time, she achieved a huge increase in conversion because the campaigns she implemented solidified the know, like, and trust factor for her audience. By the time people start receiving her newsletter, they already know they can trust Cheryl. And that’s when the sales happen.This is important because a lot of email marketers expect to run campaigns and make sales instantly. And to an extent, that happens. But these automations are also building the beliefs, information, context, and understanding of what someone’s offer is. The sales campaigns that are part of our SCORE email engine build the context you need for future campaigns. Our sales campaign shares the information about the offer that people need before they move on to the content-led campaign.So while you can (and should) expect to make sales in each campaign, what also matters is the knock-on effect - it’s about the bigger picture. And that's how the email campaigns, when linked together, make a real difference.How does Cheryl feel about her email marketing now?Cheryl feels great about her email marketing now, and she’s excited about the campaigns she’s created. At the time of our chat, Cheryl was putting her subscribers through her newly created objection-handling campaign. And she's looking forward to working through the finishing touches of her risk reversal campaign, which will offer a low-dollar ticket item to show people what they can get in the membership. What’s the one action that had the most impact on Cheryl’s email marketing?Cheryl thinks the one action that made the most difference was changing her mindset around why she was doing email marketing. Yes, she wants to make sales. But above all, she wants to help make a change for her audience. By keeping that in mind, Cheryl can create better campaigns to promote her membership. Suddenly, she feels she's being of service. And if people unsubscribe as a result, that’s okay - there are enough people out there for everyone. So it’s about switching your mindset and understanding that you email people because you know you can serve them. And if you talk to them like a real person (and not like some sort of sales machine), doing email marketing becomes a lot easier. [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week (courtesy of Cheryl), we're sharing not one but three subject lines that had great open rates: “He looked perplexed. What did she say?” This one plays on that curiosity we always talk about. People want to know who looked perplexed. And what did she say? And who is she anyway? And the story was about teaching preschool math!“Spiders: creepy or fascinating?” This subject line was used to promote one of Cheryl’s low-dollar one-off products. It sounds like a poll, but the email talks about the fact that some children find spiders creepy while others think they're fascinating. The email was about promoting the resource with some great activities to do with children in class so they can learn more about spiders.And “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.” This game can certainly create anxiety in some people - you hit a mole, and another one pops up. And the challenge gets harder and harder because the moles pop out faster. This email was about the feeling teachers can get in preschool when you're helping a child over here, and something else that needs your attention happens over there! The story proceeds to prove how teachers don’t have the time in their week to create lesson plans.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesLearn How To Keep Your Members Forever And Ever With THE BEST Email Marketing Membership Retention Strategies On The Planet.What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks.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 our client Cheryl Hatch increased her membership conversion rate by 84%) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Ever heard the terms cross-selling and upselling and wondered what they have to do with email marketing? Aren't these 'marketing things' that happen at checkout? Can you even do cross-selling and upselling with email marketing?Oh yes, you can.And when you use these strategies in the right way in your business, you'll start making loads more sales.So let's find out how, shall we?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:11) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.(4:05) What's the difference between cross-selling and upselling?(7:23) How we do cross-selling and upselling in our business. (12:33) Sell fast - turn subscribers into customers.(18:10) Maximise the value of your customers (quickly).(21:32) The biggest mistakes people make with cross-selling and upselling.(27:44) Putting together your cross-sell and upsell offers.(30:47) Create systems to turn customers into repeat customers.(32:46) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]What's the difference between cross-selling and upselling?When it comes to the difference between cross-selling and upselling, in our business, we use the terms fairly interchangeably. And that probably upsets a lot of people in the marketing world. So here are some definitions for you:Upselling is about selling someone a perceivably larger thing – something more expensive or of higher commitment.Cross-selling means selling people other things that are around the same hierarchy as what they already bought (or maybe even lower value). And this can also mean different offers of the same product. For example, you could sell a full-price membership but also a lower-rung type product for people who don't want to pay the full price. They pay less but also get less content or value. Fair, right?How we do cross-selling and upselling in our businessSo let’s talk about what cross-selling and upselling look like in our business. When people come into our world, we want to sell them our core product, which is our membership The League. We then upsell our members one of two things.The first product is our Accelerator programme, which is a higher-ticket, a cohort-driven programme with limited capacity we run live a few times a year.The second product is our Agency - limited capacity and much higher ticket price. But in all honesty, terminology doesn’t matter that much to us. It’s more about maximising how much someone is able to spend with you. So if people are in a transaction, you want to encourage them to upgrade their order and spend more money with you than they’d originally anticipated (in a totally ethical way, of course). That’s an upsell. But if the transaction is complete, and you’re offering this customer other products over time, that’s cross-selling territory.What we think makes a difference is that we built a business that's sustainably profitable and manageable where we don't have to create new products all the time. We have a good ecosystem whereby people join our email list (either free or paid) and go through a sequence of emails that maximise their ability to buy something. And then we upsell them to increase their customer value. That’s why we haven’t created anything new (other than for the fun of it) for ages – we don’t need to. What we have is sustainable.So if you're going to engage in activities such as teaching or speaking (we do because we love it), make sure you do it in such a way that enables you to sell more of what you already offer. The practicalities of cross-selling and upsellingSell fast - turn subscribers into customersThe first thing we recommend is that you never hold off going live with your product or service because you don’t have an upsell or cross-sell offering just yet. If you don't launch, you won't know if you can convert your front-end offer. It's tempting to wait until you've created a bigger funnel, especially if you're losing money on ads. But you're better off spending time tweaking your core offer until you find one that resonates with your audience. Cross-sell and upsell offers are great for making the economics work, but they’re part of the second phase. The first phase is to ensure you are converting your core offer. Because if you're not, you're wasting your time and money. Even if you're selling your core product at a loss at first, at least you know you can sell it. And then you can add cross-sell and upsell propositions to maximise your return on costs. In other words, sell fast. That's what we do. When subscribers come into our world, for 60 days, they go through an automated system of emails that will turn them into customers. And then in the following 90 days, they get emails that will maximise their value to our business.And it's all automated! We don't have to be in the trenches on a daily basis wondering where the next dollar is coming from. We’re out there preaching to get people in the system at the front end. But once the wheels are turning, our automated system is taking care of the rest.Maximise the value of your customers (quickly) Something that isn't hugely talked about is that a lot of us business owners end up being out of pocket because of ad spend. Acquiring subscribers has a cost, and it can be hard to get to a point where your core offer fully covers your ad spend. But the good news is that once people are in your world, with the right systems, you can make that money back. And you want to do it quickly!That's what we're really good at - getting people to buy from us fast and then maximising the value of that customer really quickly. We don't wait around - we want to get people to buy now. Our automated email engine turns subscribers into customers fast so we get our ROI. That's why we have a series of offers designed to get our customers to spend more money with us - we simply can't afford to be out of pocket!And the good thing is that it happens predictably because our system is automated. We don’t have to remember to run a promotion - our email campaigns go out automatically, even when we’re busy doing something else. We’re confident and happy to go and speak at events to bring people into the front end because we know our back-end system is predictable. Every single person who comes through our front door will go through that same system. There’s no choice - it's a chain of events (we call it a customer engine) that turns your subscribers into customers.The biggest mistakes people make with cross-selling and upsellingA mistake we often see business owners make is to present a customer with a lot of different offers at checkout, one after the other. As a rule of thumb, if someone says no twice, that's enough. Let them buy the product they want without having a never-ending chain of offers. As a customer, you don’t want to say no to something just to be offered something else and then another thing and another thing!Something else we recommend you don't do is to make offers that are not related. We're quite strict with our cross-sell and upsell offers - we want them to be tightly related, congruent, and relevant to the main product. So don't go completely off-piste and end up offering something unrelated. It's really not about shoving stuff into your funnel to make it bigger!Also, make sure you're not one of those people who are so focused on creating new products that you forget to create a system around what you already have. Instead, build an automated email marketing system that you set up once and runs forever (and makes you lots of money).Once you've done that, coming up with new products is great. But only do it when you have the freedom and bandwidth to do so - not when you don't yet have a team or automation in place. Build a system around your existing offers first and then focus on new products. There's nothing wrong with pivoting if and when your business has changed. But don't do that every few months! Because otherwise you'll hit a ceiling and won't be able to scale your business. [thrive_leads id='8822']Putting together your cross-sell and upsell offersWe think it’s important to create some sort of congruence with the offers you put together. So for example, let's say your front-end product is a series of videos for $67. You'll need a lot of positioning, marketing, and copywriting to convince people on their checkout journey to spend, say, $97 for an eBook. It’s not impossible because it always depends on how you frame it. But if your core product has more perceived value, the upsell itself will make your core product appear even more valuable. People often forget that the actual product you sell is part of the marketing - it needs to have perceived value in itself. So when pricing your upsell offers, think about the perceived increased value that it gives to your core product. If your product is $67, your upsell doesn’t have to go incrementally up. We’ve seen successful funnels where the front end might be $300, but the upsell is cheaper at $47. And that converts like crazy because of the price anchoring that’s offered by the front-end product people already bought. The other thing you can do is to go dramatically higher. So your product might be $67, but your upsell is $1,000, for example. That works too.Be careful when offering your time as an upsell! When putting together your upsell offers, we recommend you don't offer your time (such as a coaching call) as an upsell. It’s a really tempting thing to do when creating a funnel if you don't have any other products ready. But offering your time doesn’t always work. In fact, you might find it hurts your conversion because not everyone wants to talk to someone they’ve never met – some people may find that intimidating or like to be left alone!Create systems to turn customers into repeat customersCross-selling and upselling fit in your business in two places. The first place is at checkout, where you want to present your customers with congruent, well-thought-out bump offers. The second place is within your email marketing. That's the place where you use your email engine to turn those customers into repeat customers!Your job as a business owner is to maximise the value of every customer. So always look at how can scale your business and make it more profitable, rather than only focusing on the front end. When people come into your world, try to sell to them immediately. Use ongoing email automation to maximise that person’s value to your business. Because launching something new all the time isn't sustainable!  [thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “Ruining your day”. It’s a bit like that subject line you may have seen that says “bad news.” These are similar because they make people want to know what the bad news is. And subject lines like those tend to have a high click-through rate. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Create A Member Onboarding Sequence That Your Members Will Love.Best Email Marketing Campaign To Get Your Customers To Buy Again (And Again)Super Cool Member Growth Strategies To Attract New Customers 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 cross-selling and upselling and how to do it right) 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 run the perfect sales email campaign? Should you try and sell in every email you send? When do you send live, broadcast emails and when do you create automated campaigns?These are only some of the questions we answer for you today.And we're willing to bet you can't wait to get all the awesome sauce on this.So let's just get into this, shall we? Let's go!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:09) Join our FREE Facebook group.(3:59) How often should you sell in your emails?(7:40) When should you send out an email sales campaign?(12:54) What kind of emails should you include in your sales campaign?(16:50) What should you talk about in the emails inside your campaigns?(20:51) What if people unsubscribe from your sales emails?(23:31) What results should you expect from your sales emails?(24:33) How to create an 'email engine' of sales campaigns.(28:59) Join us for a FREE web class!(29:41) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]How often should you sell in your emails? We have a controversial answer to this question. Because email marketing has a cost – every time you send an email, some people will unsubscribe. You may not be selling directly in an email, but you always have to direct people to something they can buy. Because if you're not doing that, you might be losing people through unsubscribes and not making sales!But also, if you’re not selling or directing people towards your product, you’re adding more overwhelm and distraction to that person’s world. And no one needs more of that! What you want to do is to stay in your lane. You have a specialism, so take everybody on your list and on your social media through the beliefs and understandings they need to buy from you. Anything you do and say outside of selling is just more shiny object syndrome. The person is going to get distracted from what you’re talking about, which doesn’t serve you or them.Remember that the people on your list have made the decision to share their email addresses based on something they saw from you. They know you have a solution, and they're interested. So make sure that in all your emails, you send them information that moves them towards buying.  Email isn't the same as social media!The big misunderstanding is that every time you send an email you’re bothering someone - they're going to get annoyed. But even if you're selling to people (or moving people towards buying) in every single email you send, you have to remember email isn’t the same as social media. Social media platforms are a great place to teach people, and not traditionally a place where you sell.Email is different. It's designed for short, useful communication that nudges people in the right direction. It's not the place to be putting long articles or to be referring people to free content all the time. Because people are on your list to solve a problem. And the faster you can help them to get to a solution to that problem, the better.When should you send out an email sales campaign? Our daily emailsLet’s talk about the differences between day-to-day email marketing and sales campaigns. Fundamentally, our business is based on the idea that we email our subscribers every day of the year. We send a short email every day with a few hundred words in it. And it’s usually (although not always) some sort of story from day-to-day life with some kind of lesson (like a teaching moment or some inspiration) that segues into an offer. Sometimes we might ask people to go and listen to a podcast episode, for example. But generally speaking, we sell every day.And even when we don't sell, all of our emails have our Super Signature at the bottom, which has a menu of things that you might be interested in. If, on that day and at that exact moment, you’re looking to take the next steps, you have all the links to go and do that. In fact, our Super Signature makes sales every single week for us.Automated sales campaignsBut we also have sales campaigns. These are full sequences of emails where all the emails work together – they’re not standalone bite-sized pieces. If you send an email today, one tomorrow, and one the day after, it’s like throwing snowballs at someone. It’s a bit like going to watch the sequel to a movie where it doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen the first movie or not because the second movie will still make sense on its own. Daily emails work like that. Because they don’t act together.But with a sales campaign (while each email still needs to make sense on its own) they’re all part of a bigger picture. They’re not standalone. There’s an endpoint because the offer you talk about in the campaign is going to end. So all emails in that campaign lead to a specific destination. That means you have to communicate everything about this offer between the start and end date of the campaign. All the emails you send need to help you build the case, the beliefs, the excitement, the desire, and the proof for someone to go and buy from you.Plus, there needs to be a consequence at the end of this campaign. For example, the bonus ends, and the offer is gone. Or you're going to stop talking about this for a while. Let’s say you were selling an affiliate offer - that product might still be available via someone else, but you’re no longer offering it. You created a sales event out of it, and now the offer is over. Just remember that every email in your campaign needs to build up to an endpoint. A sales campaign has a specific structure – we use the acronym SVVC (which stands for Seed, Validate, Verify, and Close) to teach the various jobs that the emails in a sequence have to do. What kinds of emails should you include in your sales campaign?Send emails to sell!Why do you want to follow a specific structure? Because you don't want to show up in someone’s inbox pretending you’re a friend and then suddenly try to sell them something – that’s aggressive. It’s a surprising flip, and people won’t like that. What you want to do from the beginning of your relationship with each subscriber, is to train them to buy. Show them that you're selling to them regularly. Because you can't start doing it all of a sudden. In fact, one of the things we see over and over is email marketers nurturing their subscribers to death and to the point where people no longer read their emails. They get to a point when they’re not even considering buying from you anymore – you’re just a friend who shows up!We don’t believe in the method of giving loads and loads, hoping that people will eventually buy. Most of us don’t have the luxury of financial backing or playing the long game – we don’t have deep enough pockets! What our types of businesses need instead is an ROI – a return on investments. And a quick one at that! Because if we’ve invested money (on ads, for example) to get people on our email list, we need to make that money back.And the only way we can do that is by having sales campaigns early in our subscriber’s journey instead of nurturing people to death. We don’t want people to go and buy the solution from someone else because we haven’t offered them anything, do we? A major part of selling is amplifying and putting a focused spotlight on the pain, and that doesn’t work if we do it to death.Have good reasons for sending emails! You want every email you send to have its own specific reason. In a campaign, you have enough room to go into detail on one specific thing about you, your product, the audience, the beliefs, the social proof, etc.In fact, one of the worst mistakes we see people make is to tell their audience everything they possibly want to say in one email. Doing that is a mistake! Because it means you have no more points to make in your other emails. Also, if you bury all your valuable points (such as overcoming objections or building beliefs) all in one email, people might miss it! You have to address these points in a way that’s noticeable. What should you talk about in the emails inside your sales campaign? Here are things that you can each put in individual emails. And please don't ask the question in the subject line and then answer it in the email. This is important because the underlying hook, strategy, or angle will ultimately make up at least 80% of the success of your email campaign, so you want to get this right.Here are some ideas for topics (each one is one separate email):Explain who your product is for.Explain the specific problem and transformation people are going to get.Go through the success other people have experienced with this product. (You can share more than one case study in different emails).Talk about why your product or solution is unique or better than what people may have already tried.Send an email based on personal urgency – why should someone fix this problem now? Why is this problem personally urgent?Or, instead, give everyone a fixed reason why they need to buy now. For example, that could be because your offer is going away, and after that, the price will be going up.And on that last point, if you have actual urgency because the offer is closing, then send a few emails the day before and on the last day to remind people that they’re going to miss out if they don’t buy right now. Why so many emails? You’re effectively looking for reasons to send more emails. And if you put all the above information in just one email, then you literally have nothing more to say. We even send an email after the cart has closed to let people know that the offer is gone, and they’ve missed out. And we do that because it’s important to prove to people that when you say something, it really does happen. We call it the SIPI method – say it, prove it. You can even ask people to join a waiting list to be notified when that offer may become available again in the future.So why so many emails? Because your sales campaigns help you create the right beliefs. It's not just about selling - it's also about showing people that when you say something, you deliver on that promise. And they’ll know for next time.As long as you have a good reason for sending emails, there’s no such thing as sending too many emails. That only happens when you repeat yourself or send emails for no reason. If you see people unsubscribe because of that, that’s fair enough. But as long as you’re answering questions that people actually have, they’ll be invested. And that means you won’t lose as many subscribers.What if people unsubscribe from your sales emails?  We treat unsubscribes differently depending on what people are unsubscribing from. If you're running a sales email campaign around your core offer (which we call your Rome because all roads lead to Rome), you want everyone to get that product. And if people unsubscribe at the back of the emails that talk about your core product, let them go. If they’re never going to be interested in buying your main product, you probably don’t want them on your list anyway.However, if you’re sending a campaign about something that’s not your Rome offer, you can do something we call granular unsubscribe. For example, we run a campaign a few times a year that only goes out to people who bought from us in the past but aren’t our existing customers. It doesn’t go out to our main list – only to a specific segment. And that’s an invitation to join our Email Engine Accelerator, which isn't our main offer. It’s a phenomenal, limited, small-group programme with a strict ceiling on how many people can get in.So we send out an email campaign to invite people to join this programme and include a manual link at the bottom so people can remove themselves from that segment if they're not interested in that product. We add a specific tag to those people in our system, but we don't remove them from our list entirely. That’s what we call granular unsubscribe, and it allows people to remove themselves from a particular segment that’s not related to our Rome offer.[thrive_leads id='8822']What results should you expect from your sales emails?When you send out sales email campaigns, you can expect two things – sales and unsubscribes. And of course, the sales will help counteract and balance your unsubscribes. This is the reason why you have to make offers in all your emails – because every time you send an email, some people are going to unsubscribe. And to counterbalance that, you need to get sales.This isn’t a game of list building – it’s a game of customer acquisition! How many of the subscribers on your list can you turn into paying customers?How to create an 'email engine' of sales campaignsLet's do a quick overview of how our system works as a whole. First of all, people join our email list, opt in, and get our lead magnet. Then they go through what we call our email engine. That is a sequence of well-thought-through email campaigns.We have:A sales campaign,A content-led sales campaign,An objection-handling sales campaign,And a risk-reversal sales campaign.All our subscribers go through these campaigns after our welcome sequence (the Get To Know You sequence), which is engagement-driven. When people receive these campaigns, the emails look and feel like the daily emails we promised them when they first signed up. They roughly follow a daily cadence, even though sometimes they’re more frequent.About 80% of the people who ever buy from us do so within 60 days of joining our list and while going through the automated campaigns of our email engine. After that, they start receiving our real, live, daily emails, which are being sent to everyone who’s already completed the engine. Those emails are designed to keep people warm, engaged, and clicking and replying to our emails.Running additional sales campaigns Every now and then, we run sporadic sales campaigns. These might be about the same things we offer in our daily emails, but also promote specific bonuses or discounts, for example. Inside our membership The League, we have campaigns specifically designed for this (with a strong risk-reversal element), such as our Bribe campaign or our Golden Cloak campaign.Or, we might pick a big objection as to why people haven’t bought from us yet and run an objection-handling campaign instead. Other times, we might decide to run a campaign because we’ve launched a new product. Or we might offer an affiliate product so we can earn commissions on sales.When those ad-hoc campaigns end, we go back to daily emails for as long as we want to or need to. Of course, for you, if you don’t send daily emails, these are the live, broadcast emails you send regularly to your list at whatever frequency you set.   And then finally, we have silent campaigns that are waiting in the wings to be deployed and specifically target people's levels of engagement. If we see people who are very engaged and looking at a specific product, we send them the Tell Me More campaign to try and sell this thing they’re interested in. On the flip side, if someone’s become super disengaged (i.e. they haven’t clicked on a link in 60 days), we put them through our LOL Revival campaign. We give them a chance to re-engage, and if they don’t, we remove them from our list.Join us for a FREE web class!If you want to understand how this all fits together, we have a brand new free web class where we’re going to show you exactly how we do it, and how it all works together. Simply head over to this link and access our FREE web class.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is just the word “Timewaster.” This is great because, on the surface, this subject line may seem accusatory. You see it in your inbox, and you might think you’ve done something wrong, and you’re going to get in trouble. So you open the email to check, and you find out it’s really nothing, which is a lovely, relaxing feeling of relief. So check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.Template For Email Marketing Campaigns.How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets)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...

Is it a good idea to launch a holiday email campaign to acknowledge Black Friday, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Back to School, and any other holiday or occasion you can think of? It could even be Tacos Tuesday if you want! Yes, indeed it is. So let's talk about holiday email marketing campaigns. Because you want to do these right. Ready to find out how to get your subscribers to buy like crazy when you launch your next holiday offer? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:08) Join our FREE Facebook group.(3:32) Why are holidays a good time for email marketing?(6:40) The psychology behind deals and promotions.(9:20) Why holidays are a tricky time for email marketing?(10:55) Create a dedicated offer for that specific holiday.(14:40) Prep people for the offer in advance.(17:13) Launch your holiday offer and surround the market.(20:24) Running a successful holiday email marketing campaign.(21:00) Get people to click on the links in your emails - check out Click Tricks!(22:24) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Why are holidays a good time for email marketing? Psychologically speaking, when you launch a promotion or a special offer to mark or acknowledge a holiday, you're creating momentum and giving people a reason to buy. A lot of copywriting advice emphasises the importance of using the word “because” in your copy. And we often talk about that too. If you're running a discount or a special offer, give people a reason why you're doing it. It could be anything, but make sure to have a reason. And a holiday is a reason in itself!A great example of this is Prime Day. Amazon went and created their own time of year and reason for having a sale! And it’s no coincidence that they run it in October, which is typically a quieter time for retail. They've effectively manufactured a holiday! Another example is Boxing Day, which is big in the UK but not everywhere in the world. A lot of people will wait until just after Christmas to buy discounted goods in the Boxing Day sale. And why wouldn't they?The psychology behind deals and promotionsSo why are holidays so good? Because people are in proactive, spending mode. It’s the actual opposite of when they’re scrolling on social media, and they suddenly see an ad – this is called interruption marketing. When a holiday is coming up, we're all out there looking for deals. And a holiday promotion (or a sale) is giving your customers an excuse to buy and justify to themselves why they’re buying something.Think about 3 for 2 deals, for example. When we see those types of promotions, we end up buying 3 products instead of the one we originally wanted! So spend more money but still feel like we got a great deal. We got something for free, right? Would we have spent that much money in the first place? Probably not! This shows the promotion worked - we spent more and feel great about it, too. It's because of the self-justification that happens when people grab a deal. And as business owners, we can tap into that. Holidays are the perfect opportunity to get customers to feel good about their purchases. And that’s not in a scammy, unethical, or dodgy way. Because you’re definitely selling them something worthwhile, and they feel happy with that purchase. Why holidays are a tricky time for email marketing? Obviously, holidays are busy times when it comes to people's inboxes. As a consumer, you must have noticed the increase in email volume. Because everyone is doing a promotion! Think of all the emails we get about Black Friday deals in November, for example. There's definitely a lot of noise, and if you're doing your own promotion and sending emails about it, you're competing for people's attention. Your job at this point is to try and stand out. And you want to do that by making sure that in the run-up to your holiday promotion, your deliverability is good.For example, if you only email your list once a year on Black Friday, chances are that a lot of your emails won't be delivered on that day. Email platforms like Gmail, on those days specifically, know that there’s going to be a higher volume of emails. And because of the increased security, a lot of them won't even make it to someone's inbox. So you need to make sure your sender's reputation is great by working on it all year round.Create a dedicated offer for that specific holidaySo how do you stand out with your holiday email marketing campaigns? The first thing you can do is to put together a dedicated offer specifically for that holiday. That means you should avoid rolling the same thing out every year. Don't use every holiday opportunity to sell things from the same angle. If you use the same discount or offer, you're acting like the furniture store where the sale never ends! (You know the one).In this time and age, you definitely want to be more thoughtful about the offers you create. So think about a way to tie your promotion to the specific holiday, rather than offering the same promotion again and again.If you are the type of business that can do that, try and relate your offer to the occasion. A restaurant, for example, could have mums eating for free on Mother’s Day. We understand that’s not always possible or applicable to your business, but definitely keep it different and fresh every time. If you sell courses, for example, you could bundle a couple of them together, and then change that combination up for your next holiday promotion.  Prep people for the offer in advanceAnother tip we can give you is to prime people in advance of your promotion. Don’t just spring the offer on your list at the last minute! Instead, let them know a bit earlier. Tease them and build them up to the offer. You could do that by showcasing what's going on behind the scenes, for example. Build up their excitement so they're queued, primed, and ready for the day.For example, a couple of days before the offer goes live you could run a piece of Facebook ad. Talk about something interesting that has to do with your niche (not your offer, necessarily), and try to build an audience around that. You just want people to get interested in what you do, so you can send them to a waiting list and ask them to opt in to hear more about your sale.When you're ready, you start emailing the people on the waiting list and your usual subscribers, too. You could build excitement by showing the behind-the-scenes of what your offer is. That can be as simple as recording a video showing them what's in the sale but without telling them the price. You share when it’s going live, what they’re going to get, and how much it’s worth. But you don't tell them how much they can get it for.This way, you build up the hype so that people are ready and waiting for you. You effectively give them the heads up. You’re telling them that there is going to be a sale for that particular holiday, and they can soon take advantage of it. [thrive_leads id='8822']Launch your holiday offerThe next step is to launch the offer. To build up the anticipation for it, you send a few emails saying that the sale is coming. You can do a preview or some teasing to add anticipation and curiosity. You could even have people guessing what’s going to be included in your offer and ask them to hit reply to get some engagement out of it.You then send a bunch of emails about it (and probably more than you normally would), and that campaign will culminate with the announcement that the offer is finally here. You might feel uncomfortable with the amount of emails it takes to build anticipation and excitement for this promotion. But we guarantee you won’t be uncomfortable with the amount of sales it generates and how much you put in the bank because of it! That’s a good trade-off, don’t you think?To give you an idea, you might send a couple of emails every day in the lead-up to the launch and then even 3 emails on the day when the promotion closes. The last email on the last day is the final warning to say that the cart is about to close, and you’d hate for people to miss out and have to pay full price. So be comfortable with sending lots of emails to drive people towards your offer!Surround the marketWe use a strategy that we call surrounding the market. All it means is that you want to tell people everywhere about your promotion. So as you’re building your waiting list of people, keep running ads to those who watched your videos and showed interest in your product, for example.You want to create what we call an environment of zero competition through your email list and on your social media. In other words, wherever people look, they'll see your offer because that's all you're talking about at the moment. And the great news is that you don't need a huge budget for that - just a bit of forethought.Running a successful holiday email marketing campaignBy now, we hope we convinced you that you don't want to wake up on the morning of a holiday and decide to run a promotion just because everyone else is. That’s probably not going to be hugely effective for you. You missed the boat! If that's the case, just consider it a lesson learnt and get ready to launch a campaign for the next holiday. Start preparing, planning, and writing the material, and go out all guns blazing on the next campaign.Not sure where to start? Pretty much all of the email marketing campaigns inside our membership The League will work for this. We have a dedicated Black Friday campaign, but this can be applied to any other holiday or period. And once you tie your offer with the work you're doing on other platforms (social media, ads, etc.) you've got the recipe for a successful holiday email campaign. Get people to click on the links in your emails! Obviously, to get people to see your offer, you first need to make sure they open your emails and click on the links inside to go check out the sales page. And in order to do that, you'll want to maximise your chances by training your subscribers to click on the links inside your emails. Because if they don’t, they'll never get to the stage where they can enter their credit card information and buy from you! So don’t let your audience become blind to the links in your emails and scroll past them simply because they always look the same.That’s why we created a FREE resource with 12 different ways of dressing up the links in your emails. It helps you capture people's attention and makes them want to click and go check out your offers. If you want to get your mitts onto this lovely free piece of content, go grab Click Tricks.[thrive_leads id='8854']Subject line of the weekThis week’s subject line is “We’ve kept this secret (from you).” And it’s an interesting idea because it sounds like we’re building up to a surprise. But then because we added the bit “from you” in brackets, it makes the subject line sound almost sinister. It’s like we didn’t tell you, specifically, about this thing. Does it mean everyone else knows? No one wants to be the butt of a joke, right? So people will open the email driven by curiosity to find out what that’s all about. Check it out!Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.How To Get Back On The Email Wagon When You Fall Off (Back To School Edition)The 2 Best Times Of Day To Send Promotional Emails – Making Bank With Paul Counts.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 run a super successful holiday email campaign over and over) 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!