email marketing 101

Summary

email and SEO is how I built every online business I’ve been a part of. people get confused by that because they think the only path now is a giant social following. that path works, and it will also make you sick of your phone in two years. email is the durable asset.

1. own the channel. social media is rented. an algorithm change can wipe out 100,000 followers overnight. nobody can take your email list.

2. write as a person, not as a brand. vulnerable, candid, behind the scenes. polished corporate broadcasts get ignored. people open emails from people.

3. cadence is weekly minimum. twice a week if you can sustain it. and have a format, otherwise you’ll stare at a blank page and quit by week four. Wednesday is testimonials. Friday is updates. pick the frame, fill the frame, ship.

4. hard call-to-action emails are once a month, maybe once a quarter. don’t be the mattress company emailing a fake holiday discount every Tuesday.

5. ignore opens and clicks past a certain point. Apple broke open rates. those numbers are vanity once you’re hitting industry average. the only number that matters is the conversion rate on your CTA emails. if 100 people see the offer and one buys, you missed. if 10 buy, you have a real list.

build the list, run the format, measure the conversion. if you don’t want to do that, try harder.

Transcript

why i built on email and not social

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and today we’re talking about email marketing. Recently, I got a few questions about email marketing, what to track, how to do it, all of those kind of things.

And so I figured it’d be good to have a quick episode about email marketing, talk about it a little bit because it really is very important. If you don’t know my backstory, email marketing and SEO is basically how I built business, how I built every business that I’ve been a part of online. And that confuses people sometimes these days because the key to being successful online from the outside perspective, most people think that you just need this massively large social media following.

And that is very effective. You can absolutely go the influencer route, and you have to be tied to your phone a little bit and continually posting contents and paying attention to algorithm and all those kind of things. But I also know that’s not great for mental health. And I think that every influencer out there who is tied to their phone, snapping 47 stories a day and having to post new things, if you were to honestly behind closed doors have a conversation with them, they’re probably a little bit sick and tired of it and they don’t want to do it forever.

They want to be able to not do those things and have their company still grow. And I think that you can do all of these things, but you just need to do them to a manageable level. So when we get into email marketing, I’ve always thought that should be the goal of what you’re doing on social media and your website and everywhere else.

And so I’m talking about this in general terms to start because I want people to understand how I view it. If I’m doing social media stuff, it’s because I eventually want to get an email subscriber so I can start a more meaningful relationship and conversation with someone who’s interested in things that I’m doing.

Same with if they visit my website organically through SEO or maybe even paid ads, I want them to submit their contact information, name and email so I can communicate with them. Email is not dead. It is still very powerful. And while a lot of people were building their brands on social media, I wasn’t doing that.

individual voice beats brand voice

I was building massive email lists of people who want to engage with me and what I’m doing. And so you can grow a massive business, online business or even brick and mortar business through email marketing. So what are some of the things that you should pay attention to and the cadence you want to hold if you’re going to get into email marketing?

The first thing is I do think, there’s two school of thoughts here. I think that these days, going back to kind of social media, I don’t feel like brands on social media do as well as the individual. So the individual, the more like vulnerability, talking about my life, being very candid, letting you behind the scenes, that seems to be the most effective strategy for people on social media.

It seems to be what resonates with audiences these days over this brand post or just telling you, here’s the brand, here’s what we’re doing, here’s the discount, here’s that kind of thing. The individual normally does better. And so think about that in terms of your email marketing, how you want to come across.

You can do either. You can send an email newsletter and be like, hey, this is coming from the company. It’s very polished and here’s what we have going on this week at our company. Here’s how you can get involved. Very one to many, right? It’s just a broadcast and you communicate with people what’s going on.

If at a minimum, you should be doing that. The other option in email marketing is to be a little bit more individual. Be yourself. Write the email as the founder, as the person who is running the company. Have a little bit of that vulnerability. Talk about the behind the scenes. Those kind of things.

It takes a little bit more effort. But really, this is what helps build the relationship with another person online is when they know that you’re a real person too and you share a little bit more about your life. That’s what’s happening on social media and how people are building massive brands. They’re just being a human being, but they’re being a human being publicly.

It’s no different with email marketing. One of two ways, I think the individual route, when you’re communicating, the more candid and not as formal approach is going to be better in your email marketing and have it be from you, not a general just company. You can always make that change, by the way.

frequency and format

If you’re like, I don’t always want to do that, well, you don’t always have to. But you’ll get more engagement with your email subscribers if you’re doing it in the way that is a little bit more off the cuff and that’s going to be your better approach. Now, once you start emailing, what should you do?

Should there be frequency? First off, making sure that you’re always collecting email addresses. Like I said, if I’m doing social media, if I’m doing anything, that’s where I want to be pushing people to is my email list. And then you have to have some sort of cadence. At a minimum, I recommend people send something out on a weekly basis.

So check mark one, frequency, minimum weekly. If not, two times per week. Two times per week is a little bit more advanced. What we normally recommend for people, if you’re going to do two times a week, you just need to stick with a format. So sometimes people get lost in, oh, what am I going to send this week?

One email can be like a testimonial type, a social proof type email. So people getting results in what you offer, such and such said this thing. You can highlight them, their story. That can be once a week. And then the other one can be more like, hey, here’s what’s going on this week, podcast episodes we published, and all those kind of things.

But do follow a format. If you don’t have a format, you will very quickly run out of what this newsletter is going to be. So Wednesdays, if that’s the, Wednesday is when you send social proof, hey, a testimonial, that’s the format. That’s the Wednesday email. And then on Friday, the Friday email has to have a format.

So make sure that you have a frequency and then make sure you have a format. That’s going to keep you in the game for longer because you’re like, okay, we send an email every Friday and this is the format for that email. And this is also something that can be delegated eventually if you have the frequency and the format.

After the frequency and the format, you are going to generally only be sending information that’s extremely helpful, content related. Then eventually, you can have that request for, hey, why don’t you come in and visit and see what we’re doing or why don’t you start a free trial or get on a call. Those things can happen.

stop tracking opens and clicks

But that should be either once a month or once a quarter when you’re doing your hard call to action emails to try and get people in. So once a quarter, maybe you have a big sale twice a year or something like that. You want to limit it. And again, sticking with a format, being like, okay, here’s when we do our call to actions when we’re having like a very specific offering, whether that’s a discount or whatever it is.

You can think of a thousand different things. You don’t want to become the mattress company where every Memorial Day, Teacher Appreciation Day, every single whatever day is an excuse for you to discount your products and services. That’s not what you want to do. Have your format. Have what you want to do throughout the year.

Now what should you track when you’re doing the email marketing because that’s the grand scheme of things. Be conversational. Have a frequency. Have a format. But then, okay, we’re doing it. Now I’m doing those things. That’s the doing. What am I tracking? And I think that people get too into the weeds of this stuff.

There’s been a lot of things that have changed in email marketing over the years like Apple blocking what they report back so you might not have an accurate open rate or click rate or anything like that. And people get too wrapped around these stats. What’s my open rate? What’s my click rate? And those things can be important.

Like if no one’s opening your emails, how do you fix that? You have to try better headlines or better email titles, right? So what’s the subject of the email making that more engaging? Now if people aren’t clicking, how do you sell the click a little bit more? How do you make that more engaging? How do you leave a cliffhanger so where they want to click?

That’s how you can get your opens and your clicks increased. But again, those aren’t the two best metrics to be tracking. Those are things that you can fix if they suck, but once you get the industry average, they’re not going to get much better. And so what I ultimately think is the most important thing is are they doing what you want them to do when you have the call to action email?

That’s the biggest thing that we need to track and it’s so easy to track. So if I send out an email selling $100 program and I send this email to 100 people and I have one person buy, that’s a 1% conversion rate. So that means I missed somewhere. That’s not good. But if I have 10 people buy and that’s 10% of them, 10% of the list, that’s a lot better.

conversion is the only metric

I’m going to be happier with a 10% conversion rate via email and that’s the only thing that really matters. Everything else is getting people who are interested in your services. It’s giving them amazing content. It’s helping them out, letting them know you, getting them to like you, getting them to trust you.

After they know and trust you, you can occasionally sell your services, right? Occasionally sell your services. And then when you make those pitches, what’s the conversion rate? That is the number one thing that you want to track because if your open rates and your click rates are great, you’re like, yeah, I have awesome open rates and I have awesome click rates, but you’re not selling anything when you try to sell.

You’ve missed the entire boat. You suck at something and you need to fix it. And so that’s the only thing that really matters when it comes to tracking these things. You can track everything else. You can get into all this data, but ultimately at the end of the day, if you’re not selling the thing that you want to sell or getting people to make a call or book a call or come in or whatever it is, that’s what you need to track.

And if you need to improve those things, maybe you need to give more valuable content. Maybe you need to move away from that branded newsletter where everything’s super cookie cutter and no one’s really engaged with it because it’s just not a very interesting newsletter, to be honest. Those are the things that you need to fix.

Giving more valuable content, making it more engaging, talking more a little bit like informally, that’s the direction you might want to go. It’s generally never going to be the other direction. So those are some things to think about if you’re getting into email marketing. If you don’t really want to do all that, it sounds like too much work.

Try a little bit more.