How To Make The Most Of The Email List You Have Built

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTIf you tell your list that you’re going to email them at a specific time, it helps give you accountability. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, if people know you’re going to be emailing them you will feel more encouraged to continue.Offering content and value that your email subscribers may not be able to find elsewhere is a great way to get people to stay on your list.Write your emails yourself. You want your content to come from you personally.If you have a product, newsletters may be the better option.Shorter emails are often better, however, there are no rules you should be following when it comes to length.Ultimately, how often you send out your email comes down to how often you want to send it. If you have enough content, weekly is a great starting point.Try the three-month challenge where if you do something for three months and it still doesn’t work, stop. Although it may be tempting to give up sooner, you need to give your email strategy enough time to develop.What you put in your email will depend on whether or not you’re sending out a newsletter or an email. If you’re sending an email, you may find that your content will be more focussed on events and updates that have happened since your last email.Your emails need to add value, meaning you need to spend as little time as you can talking about you and your products.If you’re looking for content to add into your emails, sharing other people’s content is a great place to start.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…A newsletter tends to be a HTML email with images, text and chunks of information. An email, however, is text only and more of a one-on-one conversation. People are more likely to engage with an email than they are a newsletter.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSMy Email Journey – 03:40What is the Difference Between A Newsletter and an Email? - 08:45How Long Should Your Emails Be? – 10:40How Often Should You Send Your Emails? – 12:00What Should You Put In Your Email? - 14:31A Quick Summary – 23:00LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODESign Up for My Email List HereTranscript below Speaker 1: (00:32) Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Marketing That Converts podcast. How are you? So I'm glad to say that after an awful lot of travelling and then coming straight back to do a launch, I am now.. the cart is closed and I am now in a position where I can just chill out in the office, which is really, really cool. You know those times where it's like you've got time in the office or you can focus and tick things off and get things done. So I'm really, really excited about that and really pleased. I'm also super excited about my launch and how that went and all my new members in the academy, which is so cool. So I'm excited to get to know them better and to really start helping them with their business. So this week I wanted to talk about emails. Now I know we've done lots of different, talking about emails and we've talked about building email lists and I go on and on and on all the time about how important it is because basically we don't own our data.Speaker 1: (01:25) So the people who follow us on social media, we don't have their details. And if something, God forbid was to go wrong on social media, we've lost our following. So I've talked all the time about building lists and I've worked hard on building lists. My seem to have done a lot of talks recently about how to do it and step by step and that sort of thing. So we all know it's super important. But the one thing I haven't really gone into a huge amount is what you actually do with them. Once you've built an email list. And I know that this is something that is putting off a lot of people from even starting building that list. Because they're saying "It's all well and good building a list, but what am I going to send to them?" And if they're not producing lots of regular content then maybe they're thinking, "I haven't got anything to send to them." So that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this.(02:12) Also, I was inspired over the weekend. I received a few different emails, one from Ann Handley, which I always enjoy getting. She does one every other Sunday and has it always really well written and I like reading them and the other one from someone I'm not going to mention, but basically I received this email and it just was so focused on the person and on their own business and what they had achieved and what they had done that I just thought, "This is a really bad example of a newsletter or an email that you'd send out to your list" because don't get me wrong, I know there's an element where we're going to talk about things that we've done. I just started this podcast saying, you know, this is what I've done recently, but it's 30 seconds of it. And then hopefully we get straight into the value. So if you're doing an entire newsletter and that's all writing, every time people quite honestly don't care. And I know that sounds really harsh and I'm not saying I don't care, I'm just saying that honestly people don't care about us and our businesses as much as we do, what they care about is stuff that's going to interest them and be of benefit to them and add value to them.(03:18) So like I said, I took inspiration by receiving one really good email and one really not so great email over the weekend and I decided that I was going to record this episode and talk about what you actually do once you've got an email list or how you start sending those emails and what you can send in them. So let me just explain to you what I did, which honestly I laugh at myself all the time. My Email Journey Speaker 1: (03:41) And I think I've talked about this before, but so as you know I was setting up my email list and I was running lead magnets and adverts and people were signing in. In fact this lead magnet I did, which was all about being proactive on social media. And the lead magnet went down so well and I ended up getting loads people on my email list and it was wonderful and I wasn't doing anything with them. Honestly. I like, I didn't take my own advice. I didn't take my own advice that I had to actually email these people cause I think in my head I was half like, well I don't want to bother them and I don't want to irritate them. But the truth is, and if you'll sit there thinking the same, the truth is they've signed up to your email list. So tick, that's number one. Number two, if they don't want to receive your email, they can just unsubscribe. It's not that difficult. They can just delete your emails. It's not that hard. So that's the first thing I think I needed to get over. The fact of people were on my list. And I was doing nothing with them.(04:39) So I had a word with myself, literally a serious word and myself saying, "Teresa, what are you doing? You've got this list and you're not emailing them." So my first decision was I was going to come out to the list and say, "Listen, I'm going to start emailing you more regularly now because I've made a mistake. I should have been doing that from day one and I haven't been."(04:58) The other thing I did, which really helped me and the type of person I am is I told my whole list every Wednesday, I will email you. It really gave me accountability because one thing I don't like doing is letting people down. I'm not very good at it. I really hate that part. If that ever happens, luckily touch word because I'm so, cause I hate it so much. I don't often do it. But if I do, I hate it. So by saying to people, every Wednesday I'm going to email you, I kind of held myself accountable and allowed them to hold me accountable as well. So again, it's a bit like the podcast. I wouldn't miss a Monday because this is what the podcast is about. So obviously I make sure, I mean this has been recorded and while before it's due out, but I make sure that obviously that I have the episodes recorded in time, so I've got something every Monday. So again, how hard could an email be? So that was the first thing that I wanted to really get...