#8 - Email marketing is easier than you think

Hello friends, and welcome to episode eight. You know, I often hear from fellow agency owners how difficult it is to stay connected and front of mind with your clients. Let’s fix that together in today’s episode.

Picture the scene… you finish your project, your client is happy, you’ve been paid, and everything is live. That’s all good, but what happens next? Your client carries on with their business, and you move on to the next project in your schedule. The sound of crickets is heard in the background. And you don’t have follow up processes. So you don’t have anything set up in your business where you’re continuing to reach out and follow up with your clients. And when you do reach out to that client in the future, because you want to talk about more services? That’s going to be really jarring for them, because you’ve not spoken for a long time. Suddenly, they feel like you want to sell them more services, but you haven’t nurtured the relationship. When you don’t stay in contact with your clients, you’re not front of mind. Sure, they’ll come back to you if something breaks and they think you’re responsible for fixing it. We know what that’s like. We get those messages that come through, even when it’s not your fault. But you’re not actually having any meaningful conversations.

What about for new leads who aren’t yet clients? You’ve got a marketing funnel lead generation system set up for your business, right? Let’s talk about that typical funnel. So a new lead comes along to your landing page and they see that you’ve got an offer, where you’re going to send them out some free content, maybe it’s a video or a PDF, lead magnet, whatever it might be. They sign up for that offer. They get a welcome email, and they get a link to download the free item that you’re giving away. And after that, maybe they’ll get some nurture emails from you, and then some sort of offer. But what are you doing after this? If the lead doesn’t become a new client straightaway, how are you following up with them in the future? If you don’t follow up with your leads and nurture a relationship, you’re failing them as a business owner. And for those of you who don’t yet have a marketing funnel? Well, that’s something that we do offer with Funnel Packs, so check that out if you need some help there.

Email Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. When it comes to email marketing, there are usually two mental barriers that you need to overcome. And these are the same two things that we hear from agency owners all the time. The two main problems are not having enough time, and not knowing what to send.

Now not having enough time I get it agency life is busy, client work always takes priority. Completing those client projects gets you money, money obviously pays your bills, keeps a roof over your head, keeps everyone happy, that makes sense. Yet once you know what you’re doing, email really doesn’t take that long at all to look after.

And not knowing what to send this one again is very, very common. But you can overcome it. You just need to understand your audience and their problems. Nurturing and building a relationship is all about delivering value to your audience.

You’re sending emails every single day. You’re sending emails to clients, you’re sending emails to suppliers, emails to friends, emails to family, emails for pretty much every occasion. And this all happens every single day of your life. If you can send a single email to anyone else on this planet, then you can send out an email from your business too. The only reason you’re not doing it right now is because you have the mental barriers that we just spoke about.

Another point where the typical agency owner may stop at is choosing the right email marketing platform. If you’ve already got a marketing funnel set up, then you should already have an email platform. But for those that don’t, this can be another stumbling block. There are a whole range of email providers for you to choose from. Some of them are dedicated platforms and others are plugins that you can hook into a WordPress website, for example. It really doesn’t matter which platform you pick, as long as you pick one and get started. The one thing I will say here is that in my personal opinion, it’s far better to go with a standalone platform that has been around for a long time. These are battle tested platforms. And they’ve worked hard to make sure that your emails get delivered. I’ll always prefer these to a plugin that tries to bring email marketing into a WordPress site, for example.

And I do realise as well that you may be that one person who is asking for a recommendation as you’re listening. So here you go. If you have a limited budget and you want to get started easily go with something like MailerLite, it’s free to get started, and it has all of the features you need. For something a little more advanced, I’d go with Active Campaign, or ConvertKit. We use ConvertKit for all of our email marketing in our businesses. I’ll put links to those in the show notes in case you want to click through and have a look. Pick an email platform and use it. It doesn’t matter what you choose, what matters is that you do something. So, time to repeat after me: “The email platform you pick really doesn’t matter.”

Alright, so you’ve picked a platform, now it’s time to actually do something. When it comes to email marketing, the most important thing to remember is that you need to commit to a regular process. This could be a weekly email, a monthly email, an email, when there’s a full moon, you get the idea. Daily emails can be a fun option to think about, but be realistic when you start out. I don’t believe that anyone who has just started email marketing should be committing to a daily email. There’s no quicker way to feel burnt out than to take on something that you can easily fall behind on. For me, I’m a big fan of sending out a weekly email. We currently do that with Funnel Packs on Fridays, and this podcast also has a weekly email to announce new episodes. Pick a schedule and stick to it while you get started. You can always change it in the future once you’re up and running, and you’re feeling more confident about the whole process.

So what should you be sending in your emails? Well bringing it back to its basic level, the purpose of email marketing is to nurture and grow a relationship with your audience. Delivering value, sharing tips, ideas, and important information are all ways that you can grow a relationship. Story based emails are particularly popular when it comes to email marketing. Stories take your readers on a journey and make them feel like you’re talking directly to them. It’s no secret that stories are something we all love in life. This year alone, has seen a huge jump in book sales because of the events that we’ve had going on around us. So talk directly to your audience. Imagine them on the other side of your desk and write emails that mean something to them. Think about the problems that your audience struggle with. These are the problems that you solve with the products and services that you offer. Writing content around your audience’s problems helps them to see that you understand them. And delivering value positions you as a trusted expert. Email Marketing should never just be about promoting the next offer. While it’s good to point people towards your products and services, don’t do this all the time. Your subscribers want to feel valued, and they signed up to receive value from you. So just space those offers out a bit.

At this point, I can hear you saying you’re not able to sit down regularly and write an email. The first thing I’d say back is to simply ask if you’re sure that you can’t spend 15 to 30 minutes each week or month. You don’t have to sit in front of a blinking cursor every time, it’s possible to write your emails in batches and to schedule them in advance. Much the same as scheduling blog posts or social media posts. So if you wanted to take a few hours or a day to write some emails in advance, then you can absolutely do that. And then you can schedule those in your email platform of choice. And you can give yourself some briefing room or a buffer if you like. That way, if you have some difficult projects coming up where you know you’re not going to have too much time, you still have emails that are gonna go out to your audience and you don’t have to worry about having to get back in front of that blinking cursor. Personally, I like to write on a weekly basis. I like to sit down, I like to write it live, I like to press send and then bask in the glory of people opening and hopefully enjoying and engaging with the email that I’ve sent. With the Funnel Packs newsletter, this is usually a mixture of a roundup of any news that we have inside our business, any observations and tips, tutorials, opinion pieces, essentially sometimes a story email, sometimes news, but hopefully always something that’s engaging and interesting to our audience.

And yes, you may still not know what to write, so that blinking cursor continues on flashing on and off. But not every email needs to be a big long story or message. Some emails could be linking to a new video or a blog post that you’ve shared. Perhaps there’s some industry news reported elsewhere, that’d be really helpful for your audience to read. And as I’ve just mentioned, that about linking to other content, repurposing is really useful. So if you’ve written a blog post in the past or a video, you’ve recorded a podcast, if you’ve got some content in another format somewhere else, you can easily repurpose that into emails. So it was never really a question of not knowing what to write as the average business owner agency owner, you’ve created a bunch of content in the past. It may even be that you sent an email to just one of your clients, where you’ve realised… you know what the email I’ve sent out there could be really useful if I sent it to more people. There are so many opportunities for you to repurpose content that you have, to link to valuable content, and to write your own unique content in your emails that you should, over time, end up with an overflowing list of things that you can write about. I think if I was to take a look at my Google Docs right now, I’ve got at least a year’s worth of content, of just ideas written down, and I can tap into these at any time.

Since we’re talking about email marketing, it would be remiss of me not to mention something that we have coming soon. So Mel and I have been working on a new product, which we first started putting together in the summer of 2019. It’s called Nurture Copy.

Nurture Copy is a product that’s designed to help agency owners, designers and marketers to use email marketing more effectively. Every month, you’ll get access to emails, scripts, sequences, and more that you can use directly with your audience. We’ve just released a landing page introducing the product and you can find that over at nurturecopy.com. I’ll put that link in the show notes as well. The launch will be on Friday, November 27th, and there will be a very special introductory price for a short period of time.

And finally, let’s talk about email marketing as a service. Once you’ve got the hang of email marketing, you may well realise there’s a fantastic opportunity to offer email marketing services to your clients. If like me, you really enjoy writing and crafting emails and engaging your audience, this is something you could do for your clients across many different industries. There are so many clients who set up an email list and then they completely neglect it. Yep, they’re just the same as the agency owners who try and fail at email marketing because they don’t quite understand what they’re doing. And then they wonder why no one engages with them 6 to 12 months later, when they finally decide to put out an email promoting a sale in their business. They get a lot of unsubscribes, a lot of spam reports and very little revenue for the emails they’re sending out. And this happens because they failed to nurture the relationship that they have with their audience. And the reward that they got from their email was people not remembering who they are, or why they’re receiving an email in the first place.

If you offer email marketing as a service, you can help your clients to navigate the landscape a little better, help them to build relationships, help them to stay front of mind, and most importantly, help them to make more money through nurturing their audience.

For anyone interested in helping E-Commerce businesses with their email marketing, I actually wrote a whole business plan for you on the Funnel Packs blog during our birthday giveaway in April. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. As a simple note on that, in my opinion, E-Commerce is one of the biggest areas that you can help when you’re offering email marketing as a service. It’s really easy to set up so many different types of automation to help E-Commerce businesses to generate the next sale. For example, setting up an automation after someone has made their first purchase, encouraging them to make the second purchase soon after. As we know in business it’s much easier to get someone who’s already paid you some money to make another purchase, than it is to go out and attract the attention of a brand new customer and encourage them to make a first purchase. So I highly recommend looking at E-Commerce if you’re ever interested in offering email marketing as a service.

Aside from that, though, do consider setting up email marketing in your agency. It’s such a valuable way of creating connections, building relationships, and helping your clients to understand that you’re there for them. Not just through the project, but on an ongoing basis. You can keep your business front of mind, you can continually deliver value, and as and when you have something to promote, it’s easy for you to send an email and to have that offer in someone’s inbox a few moments later.

Email Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s a lot easier than you think. You just need to take action and break through the mental barriers.

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Have a great day ahead. You’re awesome. Take care 🙂

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Transcription by Otter.ai