Improve Engagement and Build Authority
In today's episode, John offers his opinions on email marketing. And he describes a particular email strategy he has been using. He explains why email is a great marketing tool, and why starting early in your business is important.
Email marketing should be a fundamental part of most small business marketing programs from the beginning.
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What is Email Marketing?
Sending a commercial message via email, often to a group of people, is known as email marketing. Every email that is sent to a current or prospective customer is part of your overall email marketing strategy. Using email appropriately enables the small business owner to build authority and trust that generates sales at a very low cost compared to other marketing methods
However, it significantly differs from social media marketing since it focuses on bringing in fresh prospects and defining a business brand. And email marketing emphasizes and develops ties with devoted clients
The Advantages of Email Marketing
- You own your list. It is not subject to manipulation or being “de-platformed” the way social media is.
- It can be automated to a great extent, with the ability to create sequences of emails in advance and target specific segments of an email list with different customized messages.
[See Below for a Special Offer for Podcast Listeners]
Unique Email Strategy
John describes a unique email strategy that he has been using. After implementing it, his open and click rates improved dramatically. These parameters generally reflect the degree of engagement, trust, and likelihood to buy.
This strategy incorporates the following features:
- higher frequency, up to 5 to 7 days each week,
- shorter, taking less than 1 or 2 minutes to read,
- includes an amusing or thought-provoking personal story,
- ties the story to your product or service, and
- eliminate “dead weight” from the list (those that never open or click your emails).
Summary
Using this approach leads to much higher engagement, as demonstrated by higher open and click rates. This enables those online marketers with even small lists to build an engaged audience that buys more products and services.
You can learn more about this approach to email by purchasing access to this course from the League of Email Marketing Heroes.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
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Stop Making These Business Email Mistakes
EMAIL MARKETING HEROES’ Bottomless Email Strategy Course (I am an affiliate partner for this course)
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 284
Why Adopt This Email Strategy in Your New Business?
John: I just want to tell you a short story today before we get into the main content, but it's apropo. About a year or so ago, I started looking at a new way to work with my emails. And I was doing what we normally do. I was doing weekly or biweekly newsletters, mentioning what's going on in my business, or things I've talked about on the podcast. I usually send out an email every week to announce my latest podcast episode and that kind of thing.
But I came across a couple of partners that were teaching a different email strategy, and I started to use that strategy. Now, my email list, it got up to about 1,400 - 1,500 just to put everything on the table. I don't have a big massive list of 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people. But the engagement seemed to be quite small. It seemed like the open rate was low. The click rate was low. And I could tell that there were probably hundreds of those listeners, or followers rather subscribers who really never even opened an email.
I looked at their approach and I adopted that, and I started doing emails much more frequently. And as a result, my open rate increased. Well, actually more than doubled. My click rate improved quite a bit, and it seemed like there was a lot more engagement. People were responding to my email.
I want to share with you what I know about using email as a marketing method and what I've been doing for the last year or so, how it's different from what I did before, and why you might consider using this very same technique.
For those that are watching on YouTube, you'll notice I'm using slides today. It doesn't really matter to the podcast listeners here. You're not missing anything because I don't really have any content on my slides that I'm not talking about. But for the YouTubers, it provides some variation. You get to see the slides and breaks things up a little bit when you're watching a video instead of just watching a talking head. The objectives I'm following today are the following. What is email marketing? Why is it important? When should you start? How do you set it up? And what are the metrics to follow? Those are kind of the general areas that I want to cover today.
So, what is email marketing? Well, I'm not going to go through a long history of where email came from, but as you know, email when it first came out, we probably didn't think about it as a marketing tool. I'm sure there were businesses that did, but we saw it as a way where we could communicate with people in an asynchronous fashion electronically. We could send notes out at will. They arrived instantaneously, and it enabled us to connect with friends and family on a regular basis. It was essentially free of cost after we got through the first year or so. AOL and others have very low costs. Some are free. Yahoo I think is free because they sell other things on the service. But it was just an interesting and brand-new technology. And now we take it for granted.
Well, early in the process of adopting email across the world, people saw, "Wow, we can use this as a marketing tool. We can send notes to clients, to customers, to followers, to readers, and we connect with them. We can actually sell things through our email." And so, a marketing approach started to develop. You'll remember in the past when we first had Google and the internet and emails, everything had a lot of flashing brightly colored symbols and giant letters, and it was pretty gross. It's become more and more sophisticated over time and we came to find out that we shouldn't be crazy with our email. Let's just connect and communicate with people.
What happened as email is being used more and more is there were more and more features that were added to email providers. Most basic email providers like AOL, which still exists actually, I still have my AOL account. It's probably an antique now. I have a Gmail account too. And then there's Yahoo, and then there's a bunch of other email marketing. You'll see them after the ads. There's iCloud and even if you have a website today, you'll have probably an email type of program associated with it. It's usually at even a more basic level than just your AOLs and your Gmails.
But anyway, it's a way to communicate with customers, readers, listeners, followers and develop some rapport with them. The thing is, it's become much more easy to use because the tools we're using now where they're emails, unlike what you can do with Gmail and AOL and so forth, is you can start to automate some of the functions and streamline some of the functions. Now, you can also keep track of multiple audiences and you can do other things that I think I'll be talking about in a minute here. I just wanted to give an overall description of what email is and what email marketing is.
Email marketing is using your emails to sell ultimately, to market and sell. But it's not that simple and there's lots of ways to optimize it. Why is it important? There are several reasons here. I think it's super important. When you use email, it has advantages over other types of marketing approaches. It's often compared, for example, to social media. Can you do similar things on social media? Yes. Can you do things on Facebook where you post things like sending an email? Yes. Can you sell on social media? Yes. Can you do advertisements on social media? Yes.
But let's look at some of the advantages of email. In fact, I think these advantages make it like the foundation of your marketing. Probably email should be the basic first thing you try for marketing before you try paid ads or other ways to promote your services. There's nothing wrong with let's say promoting yourself on LinkedIn for free but there are limitations, and that is the following two that are the bigger ones.
First, social media can be manipulated in the sense that they can be changed over time. They can change the rules, they can make it difficult for you to succeed. You adopt one set of rules, they change the rules. People that have monetized social media have been demonetized. People that have depended on social media for major amounts of income have been taken off that social media site. Unlike that, because you own your email program, you own your email list, it can't be taken away from you and it can't be manipulated in that way, and it can't be shut down. Those are two big reasons. The rules don't change really over time, except some of the different government entities put some regulations on it. But other than that, the rules stay the same. It becomes easier to use over time as the technology improves and it's not subject to being shut down or taken away.
Can you imagine if you had 100,000 followers in a Facebook group and Facebook just canceled the idea of a Facebook group? Pages used to be very popular in the past, then the pages went away. Now the groups are better. But every day you're getting more and more features on, for example, Facebook that make it more and more difficult to use. And in fact, while someone's in your Facebook group, they're looking at competing ads constantly, which are thrown up on the site by Facebook. And the same is true of other social media sites. That's the first thing. It's part of your basic marketing strategy, and it's a foundational part in part because you can't be stripped away from you.
Now, what does email do for you? Well, with the emails you're sending to your list on a consistent basis, whether it's your entire list or subsets of your list that we can call segments. It gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your authority in whatever it is you're teaching. You can do it on social media. I can do posts. I used to do posts all the time on Facebook or on LinkedIn talking about I'm starting a small business, nonclinical careers, how to become a CMO, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you can do exactly the same thing in your emails and over time, that helps you build your authority in whatever business you are trying to promote.
Now remember too, this applies even to a brick-and-mortar business. I went to a bakery the other day to buy a cake for my wife's birthday. They were beautiful. And after eating it, the one that we had was delicious. And I thought, this place has got to have an email strategy because people are coming and going every day, and they may not think to come back next week or next month, or six months or a year from now.
And I'm going to talk to you about a process where the way you use your email would have those customers coming back on a regular basis, probably double, triple, quadruple their sales in a very short period of time. Anyway, that's because it enables us to demonstrate our authority, whether a coach, a consultant, whether we're selling some service, or even online products or brick-and-mortar types of products, because you can communicate on a regular basis. You have to do it the right way though.
And so, then what that does is it creates a warm audience or a warm customer. When you go out and do ads, let's say on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, whatever it might be, Pinterest, you pretty much have a cold audience there. You're just picking an audience, you're defining it, you're paying a bunch of money and you're sending ads out, and a tiny percent will respond to those ads.
And usually, and when you're doing those ads, you're actually not selling the product directly. You're bringing them into a so-called funnel. And it's to get them to sign up for your website, for your podcast, for your email list. Then you can start teaching them, supporting them, encouraging them and inspiring them. And that's where you are nurturing this warm audience. It's an audience that knows you, loves you, and is already primed to buy, which you can actually enhance by using your email in certain ways. And the cost is almost free.
Obviously, you're paying for a service to enable you to manipulate, monitor and write these emails, but it's a lot lower than paying for advertising on social media like LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, any of those things. It has a lot of obvious advantages over the social media and other forms of marketing. That's why it should be sort of the first thing that you really start doing other than maybe word of mouth.
All right. When should I start my email list? I'm thinking about a business, maybe I've just started a business, or I've got a business. Where in that path, where in that transition, should I start using email? Well, from the very beginning. It's like when should you plant a tree? Well, 10 years ago, because you want the tree to be mature. It doesn't start giving you shade until it's grown for 10 or 15 years. The same thing with email. You're not going to get a result with it quickly. You have to build something first.
And part of the whole thing about starting your email is not only what you should use as an email service provider or a CRM or how it should look and all that. It's when should I start and do I plan at the beginning and what do I do with it? There are some things you have to think about, but the thing is, it should be integrated into your marketing plan from day one.
And if you're selling online services or if that's where most of your activity is, let's say you have online courses or you're doing coaching, which can be done remotely or something like that, then you should start from the very beginning. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about how to build an email list, but let's just suffice it to say that you need to use some kind of reward for people jumping on your list. That usually means you're giving away some kind of what we call a lead magnet or an opt-in bonus or something.
Let's say you're trying to build your business. You find that it aligns with somebody's podcast. You go on the podcast as a guest, and at the end they allow you to promote your business. And you say, look, if you go to my website and click on this button, I'll send you a free list of something they're interested in. And in exchange, they give you their email list. And by doing that in different venues, you can do it on social media, you can do it on these podcasts, you can do it on blogs, you can do it on your website. You get people to sign up for your email list, but they're going to drop off quickly unless they get something worth reading. And we'll talk about that in a minute. That's why you have to start early because it's probably going to take you six months to a year to recruit, to develop a decent size email list that you can then begin to nurture, and then later we'll get to actually selling through email. When to start? As soon as possible.
All right. Well, how do you set it up? I'm not going to go through a long litany of how to set up an email program, email marketing plan. The basic thing to tell you is there are tools for creating your email market and marketing program. How do you set it up? What I mentioned earlier was a CRM, which is a customer relationship management system. Now there's really sophisticated CRMs which are integrated across all kinds of things from selling and billing and just keeping vast records. But the basic ones are designed to help a small business owner stay in communication with their customers and potential customers. And it automates a lot of things in a way that you can't really do on your usual email platform.
If I go into Gmail, I guess I can create different groups and I can send mass mailings out, but it's not really designed to manage that and to track all kinds of metrics on who's opening, who's clicking, who's responding, our sales attached to that email. That's why these other systems were created. One of the early ones, and I've still used it to this day, is Mailchimp. It was fairly rudimentary when I signed up with it five or six years ago. But it really has all the features you need, pretty much ConvertKit and Keap, which I think used to be Infusionsoft. A little more sophisticated. ConvertKit is actually newer, but it was designed specifically to work for those people that use online businesses and has a lot of automation.
Keap Infusionsoft is really a much more expensive program. It's been around a lot longer, but it is very sophisticated and you can create all kinds of protocols for sequences and if then statements in your marketing. If the customer does this, you go this way. If it does this other thing, you send this email and so forth.
But I've been happy with Mailchimp. You can just go to Mailchimp.com to check it out. Also convertkit.com to check it out. It's one that's been supported and I think is on the board is Pat Flynn, some online expert you might know. And Keap who used to be Infusionsoft is more expensive. Actually, Mailchip and Convert Kit both come in a free version until 300 to 500 members or subscribers. And then you have to start paying a fee. Also, it only has certain features. Keap is a two-week trial that's free, but after that you do have to pay significant dollars. It's kind of hard to justify when you only have a few email subscribers. So, you want to build it up very quickly to justify the cost.
So, that's how you set it up. You just find one of these CRMs. There are others, but if you find one of those, I will recommend Mailchimp.com. I don't get any payment or I'm not an affiliate for Mailchimp, but it seems to be working for me. So, that's why I mentioned it.
Now, once you have that system, it allows you to track metrics, which I'll mention in more detail in a second. It also allows you to add tags, create segments so you can segment your list. It allows you to keep all kinds of metrics and follow. Most of them will allow you to do A/B testing where you create one email, change it in some way, and you've got A, you've got B, some have more. You can then send both of those out simultaneously and compare which one has a higher click rate, for example. And then that'll tell you, "Oh, this factor should be used in future emails."
A good example would be, let's say you have two emails, exactly the same, 10 paragraphs, a hundred words, and one has subject line A and the other has subject line B and that's it. They go out and you find subject line A works a lot better than subject line B. Well, then next time you can go ahead and use that one if you're going to use it again or some version of it.
The other thing that these do, they also automate the process where you can take let's say a third of your audience send out A and B. And then after three, four hours, whatever length of time you want to use, the system automatically tracks the open rate or the click rate and whichever one's higher, the rest of your list, the other two thirds are sent to that one. So, it actually optimizes the process of sending an email out while it's being sent out.
The only problem I didn't like with that was that the timing would change. Maybe you think the optimum time is to send at 08:00 in the morning. Well, into this scenario, then you would send it at 08:00 but the next batch wouldn't go out till let's say noon. If the day of the week or the timing doesn't make a difference, it can work fine. You can send the test email out in the morning today and then 24 hours send the next batch to the winner.
But the metrics you should follow. I've kind of alluded to the open rate, the click rate, the sales that come from it, which you cannot usually run measure directly, although in ConvertKit you can do that and probably in Keap as well. And then the AB metrics where you can compare so you can measure that. That's kind of four basic things. I usually look at open rates and click rates. However, I will say this. Open rates are notoriously inaccurate. Some email providers like the AOLs and the Gmails and others of the world, Yahoo and so forth, if the email that you send goes into their inbox, it's counted as being read even though it's not been opened.
In other cases, they may count everything that's in your email box as unread for some reason. So, they're very unreliable. The only thing they're good for is looking over time or comparing as long as within your system, two different emails, then if one had an open rate of 30% and the other 40%, you could say, okay, the second one definitely did better. But whether that was really 30% and 40% or 20% and 25% you really don't know because there's other reasons why those things are not consistently applied to every email that you send out. That part is inaccurate.
Click rate on the other hand is fairly accurate, close to 100% accurate. Let's say in the past I've had open rates of 20% and I had a click rate of 1%, and then I make some changes. My open rate goes up to 30%, but my click rate goes up to 2% or 3%. That's a big difference. And I'd be more interested in that change in the click rate than in the open rate because again, the click rate is much more accurate. So, when I get up to let's say a 2% or above click rate, that's extremely high for me. It's one thing for someone to open an email, but to actually go in and click on something, they've got to take action. That's a good thing. That's what you want. And so, those are the metrics that you should measure.
Then you can do the A/B testing later when you get much more sophisticated. And it probably doesn't even make sense to do that unless you're up over 2,000 email subscribers. Because again, you're comparing, let's see what did I say, it was one third and split those in half. So, you're taking 500 compared to another 500 or even less in my case when I've only got a thousand email subscribers. So, there's no sense getting into that.
And then as far as sales, right now, the only way I can tell is I can just look and see how the timing is. Most things are going to be sold out an email within a day or two after it's sent, obviously, because after that it just kind of disappears into the ether as new emails come in. All right, those are the metrics I recommend you follow.
Now, email marketing philosophy. This is the crux of what I want to talk to you about today. I was talking about why adopt this strategy in your new business. Like I said, people send out newsletters. It's not uncommon for people to only send out emails when they have something to announce. It's not uncommon for people to build and build and build their email list and only use it when they have a product to sell or some kind of course to promote. And that could be very infrequently to the point where it's not uncommon for people to be on your list, my list, who haven't opened one of our emails in over a year or two. That's completely dysfunctional. It's completely a waste of time and you're missing a huge opportunity.
So, what is the alternative? Well, let's look at it in a new way. What we want to do now these days, and it's been shown to be very successful, and I'll give you some more examples in a minute, is that we want to have regular frequent connections with our audience. In other words, we don't want to be a stranger to them. We want them to know us, feel comfortable with us, and look forward to reading our emails. Oh, is that possible?
And at the same time, as we're doing that, as part of that, and maybe before starting that process with intensity, we should get rid of those that are already unengaged, although we need to do something to maybe allow them a chance to become reengaged. I'm not going to go into detail on this, but basically what we need to do is get rid of the flack, the dead weight, but we have to give them a chance to show that they really aren't dead weight, that they're out there waiting to hear something.
So, here's what you do. This is an abbreviated version of how to do this without going into every step. Most email providers or I'll say CRMs like Mailchimp can tell you how engaged your readers are, and they will look at open rates and click rates and they'll look at how many, what percentage they've responded to and when was the last time they actually opened one, when was the last time they actually clicked on one. Was it a month ago? Was it within the last two days? Was it six months ago? Has it been over a year since they've opened one or clicked one? Again, given the constraints of open rates, and they will tell you ranking.
In Mailchimp you get a five star, four, three, two, one. One is like get rid of them. A two is pretty, pretty unengaged. And they'll define what that means. They call each email a campaign in Mailchimp, but how many campaigns have they opened?
So, what I did before I started this new way of doing a more frequent email approach was, I didn't just use the system that Mailchimp has, but I defined what it was. It was three to six months. They hadn't clicked on a single email, but I didn't just get rid of them or put them aside in sort of suspension. I sent them a series of emails that said, "Hey, I see you have not clicked on any of my emails in six months. It doesn't appear that you are interested in what's going on here. I'm getting ready to kick you off my list. Before I do that though, I have a link here to a free download that has 70 nonclinical jobs on it." It's the same download I use for my lead magnet to build the email list. And I give them an opportunity to click. If they click, they automatically are off that list. There's a group that doesn't click any of those. So, let's say it's 20% of my list. Actually, for me it was almost 35% of my list that hadn't done anything in like a year.
So, I sent them that first email. The next email I sent was kind of a different approach or different comments. I said "You know what? I see you haven't been opening my emails in a long time, you haven't been clicking on them, but I have this free course in my academy. And if you do this course, it could have been anything, but I would say I would teach you about how to become a medical writer." And then I would send it out. If they click and open that again, it's free. They don't have to give me their email address because I already have it. So, it's a pretty low barrier. Then they get off the list.
Maybe the last one was, "I've got a webinar that I recorded for you, and it'll tell you the five myths of nonclinical careers and why you should not believe those myths or those myths are being dispelled. It's a 25-minute video, click here, you'll get the free video, you can watch it whenever you like." I go through that. Of those 35% that had not responded in a year, maybe half of them will click on one of those, then they're off. The remaining 17.5% or whatever that is I just eliminated them. Boom, cleaned them up.
Now that by the way is automatically going to increase your open rate and your click rate because you basically have removed many other people that never opened and never click. But it also focuses down on a group of people that are interested. And again, on my podcast, I usually say what I want to do, I want to inspire you, I want to encourage you and I want to teach you. So, these are people that want to be encouraged, inspired, and taught by what I talk about, which is nonclinical careers.
When I did that, I pretty much brought my list down to a thousand ultimately, after I went through that process a couple of times. But the open rate is currently run above 50%. Now, they were running about 20% back then. And my click rates are consistently somewhere between 0.6-0.7 all the way up to 1.9-2.0. Sometimes depending if some special things will get as high as 2% or 3%.
When I send my Tuesday emails out there mostly about my podcast, sometimes 3.5% of people will click those either because they want to click to go to the podcast or they're clicking on something I'm talking about or promoting, or a freebie or one of the links. There are so many links in my emails for my podcast to other episodes that the click rate is much higher. Now that's an engaged audience, but that's only part of it.
Once you find the audience that does want to hear from you, now remember, if you're only sending an email out once a month or so, the fact that they even click on that once a month is pretty amazing because you're so much out of their mind. The big part of this strategy is sending more frequent, shorter, funny or interesting or inspiring emails. You want to do all those things at the same time. All right, I'm going to give you a resource in a minute on that.
Here's how I do it. I try to send an email almost every day. Actually, my goal is to send five emails a week. Now, one of those is automatically a Tuesday email about my podcast. Now I only have to prepare four emails. But the emails are much shorter, they're funny, they're to the point I sent and they come from my life. There's always a story in there pretty much every time about something in my life. Something happened when I was a kid. Someplace I've visited, I've traveled a lot, so I have a lot of stories about travel.
I did a lot of things in my 40s and 50s. For whatever reason I went on kind of a binge of trying new things from golf to scuba diving, to rock climbing, to traveling, to you name it. International travel. I went to Jerusalem twice. I went to Nepal and track in the Himalayas. Anyway, a lot of stories that we can use and everybody has those stories. It's not unique to me. But I tried to do an email every single day during the week. Five a week. One was for my podcast, the other four were new. And I would do them on weekends. Sometimes I'd skip a day and then I'd do one on a weekend instead.
Emails like these can be prepared all at once, batched five in a row or five at a time, 10 at a time if you want. Because they're not really related to timing unless you're talking about something in the news. But I would do that. They would be shorter and I would try not to spend too much time developing them. And I would jot down ideas for emails as they came to me. I might be brainstorming sometime or doing something and all of a sudden, I've had a good cup of coffee or two and I came up with ideas for three or four or five different emails. Things that happened before I went to med school, things when I had roommates. Just all kinds of ideas. And I would always tie them back in some way with something that was informative or inspirational or encouraging. Things I have experienced like they have.
At the top right of the email, I put in that it's going to take less than one to two minutes to read. And the other thing is, it usually has some clickable links in it because you can't really measure the success unless you have something to click. Now those clicks might really not go anywhere except like I said to a podcast episode, a blog post, me being interviewed by somebody else's podcast host. It's all kinds of things you can do, but it's more frequent and it's shorter. It's to the point.
The other part of this philosophy is not a lot of pictures or a lot of colors. It's basically like a short note you're writing to somebody that can be read quickly, digested quickly, and usually get a little chuckle, a little insight, something like that.
Like I said, my metrics just doubled in terms of the open rates and the click rates. I really started seeing more engagement. I recommend you do that. And the idea here is they're getting to know you. Now as a podcaster, it's funny because people listen to my podcast consistently. They know me because my voice is in their head just like it is right now if you're listening to this, which you obviously are or watching it on YouTube.
But you may not have a podcast. Maybe all your engagement is on a website or maybe you do some videos, YouTube videos, another way to do it. But if you're doing this email thing, you are going to really start to connect with those people and you will see that those rates will be quite high. And if you're a really good writer, and again, don't use that as an excuse, but I do say when I do write the emails that I go back a couple, two or three times, sometimes I sent them aside for an hour or two or even the next morning if I'm writing them the day before and I go through them and I really try and get rid of all the unnecessary language, all the extra words.
Get it down to the core message, the story, and then whatever call to action you want them to take, if any. Ask them just to reply to the email with comments or suggestions or requests. And that's it. You'll find over time that that is about as warm an audience as you'll ever get when it's time to start selling. Basically, that's what I want to talk about today as far as a new approach to email marketing strategy.
I usually like to put resources in. I would say Mailchimp is the one I would just recommend you check out because you can try it for free for months at a time until you reach a certain level. And even after that, it remains very reasonably priced.
The only other resource I would give you is the nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy. That's a link. And if you go there, you can buy the course that I learned this approach to with the League of Email Marketing Heroes. If you go there to my link, nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy, it'll take you there. And for $39 you can buy their course on how to implement this. And it goes in a lot of detail about everything I've talked about and then a whole lot more. That's the one resource I would mention today.
Thanks for joining me today. You can find links for today's episode at nonclinicalphysicians.com/adopt-this-email-strategy. And there you'll find the link that I just mentioned as a resource. And again, that link is nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy where for only $39 you'll learn exactly how to implement the bottomless email strategy is what that's called. It's the approach I use in the product that teaches a tried-and-true email framework that helps business owners create psychological connections. That's what it does. It helps create that psychological connection that their lists are looking for. That's basically it today.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 284
Why Adopt This Email Strategy in Your New Business?
John: I just want to tell you a short story today before we get into the main content, but it's apropo. About a year or so ago, I started looking at a new way to work with my emails. And I was doing what we normally do. I was doing weekly or biweekly newsletters, mentioning what's going on in my business, or things I've talked about on the podcast. I usually send out an email every week to announce my latest podcast episode and that kind of thing.
But I came across a couple of partners that were teaching a different email strategy, and I started to use that strategy. Now, my email list, it got up to about 1,400 - 1,500 just to put everything on the table. I don't have a big massive list of 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people. But the engagement seemed to be quite small. It seemed like the open rate was low. The click rate was low. And I could tell that there were probably hundreds of those listeners, or followers rather subscribers who really never even opened an email.
I looked at their approach and I adopted that, and I started doing emails much more frequently. And as a result, my open rate increased. Well, actually more than doubled. My click rate improved quite a bit, and it seemed like there was a lot more engagement. People were responding to my email.
I want to share with you what I know about using email as a marketing method and what I've been doing for the last year or so, how it's different from what I did before, and why you might consider using this very same technique.
For those that are watching on YouTube, you'll notice I'm using slides today. It doesn't really matter to the podcast listeners here. You're not missing anything because I don't really have any content on my slides that I'm not talking about. But for the YouTubers, it provides some variation. You get to see the slides and breaks things up a little bit when you're watching a video instead of just watching a talking head. The objectives I'm following today are the following. What is email marketing? Why is it important? When should you start? How do you set it up? And what are the metrics to follow? Those are kind of the general areas that I want to cover today.
So, what is email marketing? Well, I'm not going to go through a long history of where email came from, but as you know, email when it first came out, we probably didn't think about it as a marketing tool. I'm sure there were businesses that did, but we saw it as a way where we could communicate with people in an asynchronous fashion electronically. We could send notes out at will. They arrived instantaneously, and it enabled us to connect with friends and family on a regular basis. It was essentially free of cost after we got through the first year or so. AOL and others have very low costs. Some are free. Yahoo I think is free because they sell other things on the service. But it was just an interesting and brand-new technology. And now we take it for granted.
Well, early in the process of adopting email across the world, people saw, "Wow, we can use this as a marketing tool. We can send notes to clients, to customers, to followers, to readers, and we connect with them. We can actually sell things through our email." And so, a marketing approach started to develop. You'll remember in the past when we first had Google and the internet and emails, everything had a lot of flashing brightly colored symbols and giant letters, and it was pretty gross. It's become more and more sophisticated over time and we came to find out that we shouldn't be crazy with our email. Let's just connect and communicate with people.
What happened as email is being used more and more is there were more and more features that were added to email providers. Most basic email providers like AOL, which still exists actually, I still have my AOL account. It's probably an antique now. I have a Gmail account too. And then there's Yahoo, and then there's a bunch of other email marketing. You'll see them after the ads. There's iCloud and even if you have a website today, you'll have probably an email type of program associated with it. It's usually at even a more basic level than just your AOLs and your Gmails.
But anyway, it's a way to communicate with customers, readers, listeners, followers and develop some rapport with them. The thing is, it's become much more easy to use because the tools we're using now where they're emails, unlike what you can do with Gmail and AOL and so forth, is you can start to automate some of the functions and streamline some of the functions. Now, you can also keep track of multiple audiences and you can do other things that I think I'll be talking about in a minute here. I just wanted to give an overall description of what email is and what email marketing is.
Email marketing is using your emails to sell ultimately, to market and sell. But it's not that simple and there's lots of ways to optimize it. Why is it important? There are several reasons here. I think it's super important. When you use email, it has advantages over other types of marketing approaches. It's often compared, for example, to social media. Can you do similar things on social media? Yes. Can you do things on Facebook where you post things like sending an email? Yes. Can you sell on social media? Yes. Can you do advertisements on social media? Yes.
But let's look at some of the advantages of email. In fact, I think these advantages make it like the foundation of your marketing. Probably email should be the basic first thing you try for marketing before you try paid ads or other ways to promote your services. There's nothing wrong with let's say promoting yourself on LinkedIn for free but there are limitations, and that is the following two that are the bigger ones.
First, social media can be manipulated in the sense that they can be changed over time. They can change the rules, they can make it difficult for you to succeed. You adopt one set of rules, they change the rules. People that have monetized social media have been demonetized. People that have depended on social media for major amounts of income have been taken off that social media site. Unlike that, because you own your email program, you own your email list, it can't be taken away from you and it can't be manipulated in that way, and it can't be shut down. Those are two big reasons. The rules don't change really over time, except some of the different government entities put some regulations on it. But other than that, the rules stay the same. It becomes easier to use over time as the technology improves and it's not subject to being shut down or taken away.
Can you imagine if you had 100,000 followers in a Facebook group and Facebook just canceled the idea of a Facebook group? Pages used to be very popular in the past, then the pages went away. Now the groups are better. But every day you're getting more and more features on, for example, Facebook that make it more and more difficult to use. And in fact, while someone's in your Facebook group, they're looking at competing ads constantly, which are thrown up on the site by Facebook. And the same is true of other social media sites. That's the first thing. It's part of your basic marketing strategy, and it's a foundational part in part because you can't be stripped away from you.
Now, what does email do for you? Well, with the emails you're sending to your list on a consistent basis, whether it's your entire list or subsets of your list that we can call segments. It gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your authority in whatever it is you're teaching. You can do it on social media. I can do posts. I used to do posts all the time on Facebook or on LinkedIn talking about I'm starting a small business, nonclinical careers, how to become a CMO, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you can do exactly the same thing in your emails and over time, that helps you build your authority in whatever business you are trying to promote.
Now remember too, this applies even to a brick-and-mortar business. I went to a bakery the other day to buy a cake for my wife's birthday. They were beautiful. And after eating it, the one that we had was delicious. And I thought, this place has got to have an email strategy because people are coming and going every day, and they may not think to come back next week or next month, or six months or a year from now.
And I'm going to talk to you about a process where the way you use your email would have those customers coming back on a regular basis, probably double, triple, quadruple their sales in a very short period of time. Anyway, that's because it enables us to demonstrate our authority, whether a coach, a consultant, whether we're selling some service, or even online products or brick-and-mortar types of products, because you can communicate on a regular basis. You have to do it the right way though.
And so, then what that does is it creates a warm audience or a warm customer. When you go out and do ads, let's say on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, whatever it might be, Pinterest, you pretty much have a cold audience there. You're just picking an audience, you're defining it, you're paying a bunch of money and you're sending ads out, and a tiny percent will respond to those ads.
And usually, and when you're doing those ads, you're actually not selling the product directly. You're bringing them into a so-called funnel. And it's to get them to sign up for your website, for your podcast, for your email list. Then you can start teaching them, supporting them, encouraging them and inspiring them. And that's where you are nurturing this warm audience. It's an audience that knows you, loves you, and is already primed to buy, which you can actually enhance by using your email in certain ways. And the cost is almost free.
Obviously, you're paying for a service to enable you to manipulate, monitor and write these emails, but it's a lot lower than paying for advertising on social media like LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, any of those things. It has a lot of obvious advantages over the social media and other forms of marketing. That's why it should be sort of the first thing that you really start doing other than maybe word of mouth.
All right. When should I start my email list? I'm thinking about a business, maybe I've just started a business, or I've got a business. Where in that path, where in that transition, should I start using email? Well, from the very beginning. It's like when should you plant a tree? Well, 10 years ago, because you want the tree to be mature. It doesn't start giving you shade until it's grown for 10 or 15 years. The same thing with email. You're not going to get a result with it quickly. You have to build something first.
And part of the whole thing about starting your email is not only what you should use as an email service provider or a CRM or how it should look and all that. It's when should I start and do I plan at the beginning and what do I do with it? There are some things you have to think about, but the thing is, it should be integrated into your marketing plan from day one.
And if you're selling online services or if that's where most of your activity is, let's say you have online courses or you're doing coaching, which can be done remotely or something like that, then you should start from the very beginning. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about how to build an email list, but let's just suffice it to say that you need to use some kind of reward for people jumping on your list. That usually means you're giving away some kind of what we call a lead magnet or an opt-in bonus or something.
Let's say you're trying to build your business. You find that it aligns with somebody's podcast. You go on the podcast as a guest, and at the end they allow you to promote your business. And you say, look, if you go to my website and click on this button, I'll send you a free list of something they're interested in. And in exchange, they give you their email list. And by doing that in different venues, you can do it on social media, you can do it on these podcasts, you can do it on blogs, you can do it on your website. You get people to sign up for your email list, but they're going to drop off quickly unless they get something worth reading. And we'll talk about that in a minute. That's why you have to start early because it's probably going to take you six months to a year to recruit, to develop a decent size email list that you can then begin to nurture, and then later we'll get to actually selling through email. When to start? As soon as possible.
All right. Well, how do you set it up? I'm not going to go through a long litany of how to set up an email program, email marketing plan. The basic thing to tell you is there are tools for creating your email market and marketing program. How do you set it up? What I mentioned earlier was a CRM, which is a customer relationship management system. Now there's really sophisticated CRMs which are integrated across all kinds of things from selling and billing and just keeping vast records. But the basic ones are designed to help a small business owner stay in communication with their customers and potential customers. And it automates a lot of things in a way that you can't really do on your usual email platform.
If I go into Gmail, I guess I can create different groups and I can send mass mailings out, but it's not really designed to manage that and to track all kinds of metrics on who's opening, who's clicking, who's responding, our sales attached to that email. That's why these other systems were created. One of the early ones, and I've still used it to this day, is Mailchimp. It was fairly rudimentary when I signed up with it five or six years ago. But it really has all the features you need, pretty much ConvertKit and Keap, which I think used to be Infusionsoft. A little more sophisticated. ConvertKit is actually newer, but it was designed specifically to work for those people that use online businesses and has a lot of automation.
Keap Infusionsoft is really a much more expensive program. It's been around a lot longer, but it is very sophisticated and you can create all kinds of protocols for sequences and if then statements in your marketing. If the customer does this, you go this way. If it does this other thing, you send this email and so forth.
But I've been happy with Mailchimp. You can just go to Mailchimp.com to check it out. Also convertkit.com to check it out. It's one that's been supported and I think is on the board is Pat Flynn, some online expert you might know. And Keap who used to be Infusionsoft is more expensive. Actually, Mailchip and Convert Kit both come in a free version until 300 to 500 members or subscribers. And then you have to start paying a fee. Also, it only has certain features. Keap is a two-week trial that's free, but after that you do have to pay significant dollars. It's kind of hard to justify when you only have a few email subscribers. So, you want to build it up very quickly to justify the cost.
So, that's how you set it up. You just find one of these CRMs. There are others, but if you find one of those, I will recommend Mailchimp.com. I don't get any payment or I'm not an affiliate for Mailchimp, but it seems to be working for me. So, that's why I mentioned it.
Now, once you have that system, it allows you to track metrics, which I'll mention in more detail in a second. It also allows you to add tags, create segments so you can segment your list. It allows you to keep all kinds of metrics and follow. Most of them will allow you to do A/B testing where you create one email, change it in some way, and you've got A, you've got B, some have more. You can then send both of those out simultaneously and compare which one has a higher click rate, for example. And then that'll tell you, "Oh, this factor should be used in future emails."
A good example would be, let's say you have two emails, exactly the same, 10 paragraphs, a hundred words, and one has subject line A and the other has subject line B and that's it. They go out and you find subject line A works a lot better than subject line B. Well, then next time you can go ahead and use that one if you're going to use it again or some version of it.
The other thing that these do, they also automate the process where you can take let's say a third of your audience send out A and B. And then after three, four hours, whatever length of time you want to use, the system automatically tracks the open rate or the click rate and whichever one's higher, the rest of your list, the other two thirds are sent to that one. So, it actually optimizes the process of sending an email out while it's being sent out.
The only problem I didn't like with that was that the timing would change. Maybe you think the optimum time is to send at 08:00 in the morning. Well, into this scenario, then you would send it at 08:00 but the next batch wouldn't go out till let's say noon. If the day of the week or the timing doesn't make a difference, it can work fine. You can send the test email out in the morning today and then 24 hours send the next batch to the winner.
But the metrics you should follow. I've kind of alluded to the open rate, the click rate, the sales that come from it, which you cannot usually run measure directly, although in ConvertKit you can do that and probably in Keap as well. And then the AB metrics where you can compare so you can measure that. That's kind of four basic things. I usually look at open rates and click rates. However, I will say this. Open rates are notoriously inaccurate. Some email providers like the AOLs and the Gmails and others of the world, Yahoo and so forth, if the email that you send goes into their inbox, it's counted as being read even though it's not been opened.
In other cases, they may count everything that's in your email box as unread for some reason. So, they're very unreliable. The only thing they're good for is looking over time or comparing as long as within your system, two different emails, then if one had an open rate of 30% and the other 40%, you could say, okay, the second one definitely did better. But whether that was really 30% and 40% or 20% and 25% you really don't know because there's other reasons why those things are not consistently applied to every email that you send out. That part is inaccurate.
Click rate on the other hand is fairly accurate, close to 100% accurate. Let's say in the past I've had open rates of 20% and I had a click rate of 1%, and then I make some changes. My open rate goes up to 30%, but my click rate goes up to 2% or 3%. That's a big difference. And I'd be more interested in that change in the click rate than in the open rate because again, the click rate is much more accurate. So, when I get up to let's say a 2% or above click rate, that's extremely high for me. It's one thing for someone to open an email, but to actually go in and click on something, they've got to take action. That's a good thing. That's what you want. And so, those are the metrics that you should measure.
Then you can do the A/B testing later when you get much more sophisticated. And it probably doesn't even make sense to do that unless you're up over 2,000 email subscribers. Because again, you're comparing, let's see what did I say, it was one third and split those in half. So, you're taking 500 compared to another 500 or even less in my case when I've only got a thousand email subscribers. So, there's no sense getting into that.
And then as far as sales, right now, the only way I can tell is I can just look and see how the timing is. Most things are going to be sold out an email within a day or two after it's sent, obviously, because after that it just kind of disappears into the ether as new emails come in. All right, those are the metrics I recommend you follow.
Now, email marketing philosophy. This is the crux of what I want to talk to you about today. I was talking about why adopt this strategy in your new business. Like I said, people send out newsletters. It's not uncommon for people to only send out emails when they have something to announce. It's not uncommon for people to build and build and build their email list and only use it when they have a product to sell or some kind of course to promote. And that could be very infrequently to the point where it's not uncommon for people to be on your list, my list, who haven't opened one of our emails in over a year or two. That's completely dysfunctional. It's completely a waste of time and you're missing a huge opportunity.
So, what is the alternative? Well, let's look at it in a new way. What we want to do now these days, and it's been shown to be very successful, and I'll give you some more examples in a minute, is that we want to have regular frequent connections with our audience. In other words, we don't want to be a stranger to them. We want them to know us, feel comfortable with us, and look forward to reading our emails. Oh, is that possible?
And at the same time, as we're doing that, as part of that, and maybe before starting that process with intensity, we should get rid of those that are already unengaged, although we need to do something to maybe allow them a chance to become reengaged. I'm not going to go into detail on this, but basically what we need to do is get rid of the flack, the dead weight, but we have to give them a chance to show that they really aren't dead weight, that they're out there waiting to hear something.
So, here's what you do. This is an abbreviated version of how to do this without going into every step. Most email providers or I'll say CRMs like Mailchimp can tell you how engaged your readers are, and they will look at open rates and click rates and they'll look at how many, what percentage they've responded to and when was the last time they actually opened one, when was the last time they actually clicked on one. Was it a month ago? Was it within the last two days? Was it six months ago? Has it been over a year since they've opened one or clicked one? Again, given the constraints of open rates, and they will tell you ranking.
In Mailchimp you get a five star, four, three, two, one. One is like get rid of them. A two is pretty, pretty unengaged. And they'll define what that means. They call each email a campaign in Mailchimp, but how many campaigns have they opened?
So, what I did before I started this new way of doing a more frequent email approach was, I didn't just use the system that Mailchimp has, but I defined what it was. It was three to six months. They hadn't clicked on a single email, but I didn't just get rid of them or put them aside in sort of suspension. I sent them a series of emails that said, "Hey, I see you have not clicked on any of my emails in six months. It doesn't appear that you are interested in what's going on here. I'm getting ready to kick you off my list. Before I do that though, I have a link here to a free download that has 70 nonclinical jobs on it." It's the same download I use for my lead magnet to build the email list. And I give them an opportunity to click. If they click, they automatically are off that list. There's a group that doesn't click any of those. So, let's say it's 20% of my list. Actually, for me it was almost 35% of my list that hadn't done anything in like a year.
So, I sent them that first email. The next email I sent was kind of a different approach or different comments. I said "You know what? I see you haven't been opening my emails in a long time, you haven't been clicking on them, but I have this free course in my academy. And if you do this course, it could have been anything, but I would say I would teach you about how to become a medical writer." And then I would send it out. If they click and open that again, it's free. They don't have to give me their email address because I already have it. So, it's a pretty low barrier. Then they get off the list.
Maybe the last one was, "I've got a webinar that I recorded for you, and it'll tell you the five myths of nonclinical careers and why you should not believe those myths or those myths are being dispelled. It's a 25-minute video, click here, you'll get the free video, you can watch it whenever you like." I go through that. Of those 35% that had not responded in a year, maybe half of them will click on one of those, then they're off. The remaining 17.5% or whatever that is I just eliminated them. Boom, cleaned them up.
Now that by the way is automatically going to increase your open rate and your click rate because you basically have removed many other people that never opened and never click. But it also focuses down on a group of people that are interested. And again, on my podcast, I usually say what I want to do, I want to inspire you, I want to encourage you and I want to teach you. So, these are people that want to be encouraged, inspired, and taught by what I talk about, which is nonclinical careers.
When I did that, I pretty much brought my list down to a thousand ultimately, after I went through that process a couple of times. But the open rate is currently run above 50%. Now, they were running about 20% back then. And my click rates are consistently somewhere between 0.6-0.7 all the way up to 1.9-2.0. Sometimes depending if some special things will get as high as 2% or 3%.
When I send my Tuesday emails out there mostly about my podcast, sometimes 3.5% of people will click those either because they want to click to go to the podcast or they're clicking on something I'm talking about or promoting, or a freebie or one of the links. There are so many links in my emails for my podcast to other episodes that the click rate is much higher. Now that's an engaged audience, but that's only part of it.
Once you find the audience that does want to hear from you, now remember, if you're only sending an email out once a month or so, the fact that they even click on that once a month is pretty amazing because you're so much out of their mind. The big part of this strategy is sending more frequent, shorter, funny or interesting or inspiring emails. You want to do all those things at the same time. All right, I'm going to give you a resource in a minute on that.
Here's how I do it. I try to send an email almost every day. Actually, my goal is to send five emails a week. Now, one of those is automatically a Tuesday email about my podcast. Now I only have to prepare four emails. But the emails are much shorter, they're funny, they're to the point I sent and they come from my life. There's always a story in there pretty much every time about something in my life. Something happened when I was a kid. Someplace I've visited, I've traveled a lot, so I have a lot of stories about travel.
I did a lot of things in my 40s and 50s. For whatever reason I went on kind of a binge of trying new things from golf to scuba diving, to rock climbing, to traveling, to you name it. International travel. I went to Jerusalem twice. I went to Nepal and track in the Himalayas. Anyway, a lot of stories that we can use and everybody has those stories. It's not unique to me. But I tried to do an email every single day during the week. Five a week. One was for my podcast, the other four were new. And I would do them on weekends. Sometimes I'd skip a day and then I'd do one on a weekend instead.
Emails like these can be prepared all at once, batched five in a row or five at a time, 10 at a time if you want. Because they're not really related to timing unless you're talking about something in the news. But I would do that. They would be shorter and I would try not to spend too much time developing them. And I would jot down ideas for emails as they came to me. I might be brainstorming sometime or doing something and all of a sudden, I've had a good cup of coffee or two and I came up with ideas for three or four or five different emails. Things that happened before I went to med school, things when I had roommates. Just all kinds of ideas. And I would always tie them back in some way with something that was informative or inspirational or encouraging. Things I have experienced like they have.
At the top right of the email, I put in that it's going to take less than one to two minutes to read. And the other thing is, it usually has some clickable links in it because you can't really measure the success unless you have something to click. Now those clicks might really not go anywhere except like I said to a podcast episode, a blog post, me being interviewed by somebody else's podcast host. It's all kinds of things you can do, but it's more frequent and it's shorter. It's to the point.
The other part of this philosophy is not a lot of pictures or a lot of colors. It's basically like a short note you're writing to somebody that can be read quickly, digested quickly, and usually get a little chuckle, a little insight, something like that.
Like I said, my metrics just doubled in terms of the open rates and the click rates. I really started seeing more engagement. I recommend you do that. And the idea here is they're getting to know you. Now as a podcaster, it's funny because people listen to my podcast consistently. They know me because my voice is in their head just like it is right now if you're listening to this, which you obviously are or watching it on YouTube.
But you may not have a podcast. Maybe all your engagement is on a website or maybe you do some videos, YouTube videos, another way to do it. But if you're doing this email thing, you are going to really start to connect with those people and you will see that those rates will be quite high. And if you're a really good writer, and again, don't use that as an excuse, but I do say when I do write the emails that I go back a couple, two or three times, sometimes I sent them aside for an hour or two or even the next morning if I'm writing them the day before and I go through them and I really try and get rid of all the unnecessary language, all the extra words.
Get it down to the core message, the story, and then whatever call to action you want them to take, if any. Ask them just to reply to the email with comments or suggestions or requests. And that's it. You'll find over time that that is about as warm an audience as you'll ever get when it's time to start selling. Basically, that's what I want to talk about today as far as a new approach to email marketing strategy.
I usually like to put resources in. I would say Mailchimp is the one I would just recommend you check out because you can try it for free for months at a time until you reach a certain level. And even after that, it remains very reasonably priced.
The only other resource I would give you is the nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy. That's a link. And if you go there, you can buy the course that I learned this approach to with the League of Email Marketing Heroes. If you go there to my link, nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy, it'll take you there. And for $39 you can buy their course on how to implement this. And it goes in a lot of detail about everything I've talked about and then a whole lot more. That's the one resource I would mention today.
Thanks for joining me today. You can find links for today's episode at nonclinicalphysicians.com/adopt-this-email-strategy. And there you'll find the link that I just mentioned as a resource. And again, that link is nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy where for only $39 you'll learn exactly how to implement the bottomless email strategy is what that's called. It's the approach I use in the product that teaches a tried-and-true email framework that helps business owners create psychological connections. That's what it does. It helps create that psychological connection that their lists are looking for. That's basically it today.
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