(Small Business Superstar) Using email marketing to increase sales

This week’s Small Business Superstars are Laura Moore and Laura Davies, otherwise known as the two Lauras!A little bit about the Two Lauras’ amazing business…Laura and Laura own The Hub for Social Media Managers – providing support for freelance social media managers to grow their business through a membership and online courses.What one marketing thing made a difference to their business? Email marketing! The Two Lauras made a commitment to email their list once a week in January 2020 and have stuck to it ever since. They send an idea, a tip or hack every Monday their list can implement into their business. Then they went a step further and started to email their list every single day (apart from weekends).What difference did it make to them and their business? People love their emails! They have had brilliant responses and people enjoy the valuable content they offer. When they then sell in an email, their list is very open to this. Since emailing every day, they have seen less unsubscribes, consistently higher open rates and more sales!Where you can find the Two LaurasWebsite: https://thetwolauras.com/Facebook Group: @smmhub Transcript below Hello, and a very warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? Oh, it's not this week's episode. I keep saying that all the time. I keep saying this week's episode. It's the second episode of the week. It's the Thursday episode. You're probably thinking, is it a Monday again? No, we're on Thursday. It's nearly the weekend. Okay. So this week's episode, I have the very lovely Laura Moore and Laura Davis, otherwise known as the Lauras. Hello, ladies. And welcome. Lauras: Hello Teresa: Oh, that was very well synchronized. Thank you very much. That was excellent. And we're going to have this the whole way through. Don't ask a question. I want you both answered at the same time. So I'm really excited to have you ladies on stage because I have worked with you and your business is pretty amazing and you are pretty amazing at what you do. And I often talk to you, I've gone on a complete side already, but I often talk to you about the fact of there's two of you. And I always wonder about the two person perspective in terms of, I feel like because there's two of you, you're so much more organized. You're so much more productive. You're more motivated their faces and not saying they agreed. But I honestly genuinely do think that's the case. So what you guys have achieved in the short space you have is immense. So let me zip it up. And one of you, both of you, however you want to do it, tell us how you got to do the thing that you do today. Lauras: Um, so we, um, have a business called the hub social media managers, which we set up as we were both freedoms, social media managers, and ads managers, um, and we know that there was a gap in the market. Really. We wanted somewhere where we could go to get support and, um, just for people to understand what it's like to be a freelance social media manager. So we decided to fill that gap really. So we created the hub. Which, um, we support people essentially to grow their business. So we don't teach people how to become a social media manager, but we all support them once they all want to grow their business through our membership and through our Facebook ads courses, et cetera. Um, yeah. So Teresa: for me, what was interesting? Two things, first off, you doing learning about a job and doing it are two entirely different things. Like I did a marketing degree. I can tell you that first day I walked into my first marketing job and they said, "You want to fax that thing and you want to do some franking." I was like, "Sorry, where's the strategy I'm putting together? Uh, where's this, this, this?" Like, it's so different. So I think to, to realize that even if you've done that learning to become a social media manager or a freelancer. It's going to be very different in practice. And then secondly, the thing I want to pick up on and ask you was when you started the hub, which was a Facebook group initially, wasn't it just the Facebook group. Was it for the intention of we're going to take this business in this direction? Or was it just a support thing in the first instance? And then the business idea came later. Lauras: It was a bit of both wasn't it to start with. We had a business idea, but it wasn't what it is now. Um, it was it, we were just going to have this standalone, our social media managers tool kit, which was going to be a standardized product to help fill the gap. But then we realized that there was a lot more things that we could do to help people. So it kind of grew and snowballed from there really. Yeah. Talk you a good way for us to, I suppose, tech the market really too. We felt that there was a gap. A lot of people were DM us. Just on our own kind of socials thing or where do you do that? Or how can I do this? Or I don't know how to get a client or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we needed to know whether that was a mass need for the, the ideas that we had. So the toolkit was a good way for us to kind of test the water really. Um, but yeah, it's grown very much based on the needs of the audience rather than our original grand plans. They weren't that grand. Teresa: And, and also share with us how you both got to work together because like, when I think of. The, the, the business couples that I know they've grown up together. They've worked in the same industry for long time together. So tell people the story, if you don't mind, like how you got to work as a, as a pair. Lauras: So we talked to me on Instagram. Teresa: It was always a dream to be Laura most best friends. Lauras: We both, um, we just met, we met online. We didn't, we didn't like right. Um, we, um, so was he, we were both doing well and we'd both done similar courses. We both. I didn't actually, Laura Moore followed me on Facebook. I actually didn't follow her. And yeah, we just started having conversations like, you know, in our DMs, you know, that's thinkers. Do you get asked this a lot? I get asked this a lot. We both had similar ideas on how we turnt kind of fill that gap really. So it just was very organic. Um, but yeah, now we've Laura and I've only probably met each other in person like five times. And Teresa: Know what, that blows my flipping mind, like, you know, you know how like some people meet. And the relationships they're so meant to be together. It's like, this is the business version of this because to, to create a business together, having met through the way you met and then not like being in person next to each other, like you don't even live near each other. Do you like what's how many hours drive? Lauras: 24 hours away are we? Yeah. Birmingham. They're not, they're not near. Teresa: So yeah. I love that. I love the fact of. You know, I talked to my husband about it, you know, should I have a partner? Should there be, should there be two of us? And he's like, God, no, not two of you. But like the problem is now I'm so with my business, it's my business. And in reality, now that I can have lots of team members, which is great and people who support me, but it's always just going to be me. Whereas actually what I love about this is, is the fact that, you know, this didn't have to be a. I kind of, we grew up together and therefore, you know, but you'd had similar backgrounds as well. Haven't you? Lauras: Yeah, similar. Yeah. Weird, given that we also have the same name, but we also base, um, before this, when we kind of had a gap in our careers around sort of kids being young, we both had take businesses and we both also used to teach cake decorating classes while at those things. So. Yeah, it's very, very strange. The only differences between Laura and I, Laura like diet routine and I like gin. And apart from that, most of everything. Teresa: You could be the same person, no, that's crazy gets crazier. Okay. So the idea, now you have say, as I've said, I've worked with you guys. I, I know what you do and you do loads of amazing things. So I don't know how hard it was for you to pick one thing to talk about when you come on. Uh, but tell us what that one thing is that you have done in the business that actually has really made a difference to you. Lauras: It probably actually wasn't that difficult to pick this thing. Back in January, we decided that we would make a commitment that we thought we would fail at, um, where we were going to email our list once a week. And we decided we would do that on a Monday morning, we would always email our list and that was like our new year's resolution. And we were pretty convinced that we would fail at that by February. Um, and we didn't...