TCC Podcast #258: Making Email Marketing Simple with Liz Wilcox

Liz Wilcox will blow your email marketing mind on the 258th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast. Liz is a blogger turned email marketing expert who helps other bloggers become business owners. If you’ve been letting your list sit in the dust or you haven’t taken the plunge in creating an email list, this might be the episode to give you the push.

Here’s how it all breaks down:

• Have you ever googled: How to make money from home?
• The overwhelm that comes with all the ways you could start a business and make money online.
• Why it’s a good idea to start your email list. (even with no audience)
• What you should do when you begin to grow your email list.
• Writing a book about poop? How it became the beginning of everything for Liz.
• The secrets behind a 100% conversion rate.
• Do you really need to go to the experts?
• Van life. Is it for you and can you start a business while living in the woods?
• How to think outside the box of what you see online.
• Going from idea to done and executed in one hour.
• How to get to a 47% email open rate.
• Steps to take to become a digital course creator. (do you need to give up client work?)
• When is it a good time to start pitching to podcasts?
• Creating an inclusive digital product based model and following through.
• How long email newsletters should really be taking you.
• Is storytelling a thing of the past?
• The difference between stories and updates on your life.
• Is Liz going to take over our newsletter?
• How to keep it fresh and exciting when writing to your list.
• Everything you don’t want to do when it comes to email marketing.
• Making your business your number 1 client and not apologizing for it.
• What every copywriter and business owner needs to be for themselves.
• How Will Smith will help you build your business.

Need Will to help you build your business? Check out the episode below or read the transcript.

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Liz’s website 

 

Full Transcript:

Rob:  You know how when you meet some people, they just seem to be stuck. They’re not able to move forward, they’re just not able to do anything. If they’re in business, maybe they’re stuck following everybody else’s formulas, doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. And then there’s some people that you meet who seem full of energy. They’re free. They’re definitely not stuck. It’s almost like anything is possible for them in business, in life. Well, today’s guest for the Copywriter Club podcast, is the type of copywriter and entrepreneur who broke out of that box a long time ago. She’s the type of creative who sees the worldwide web as the Wild Wild West, and as an opportunity to build and connect with companies, ideas and people. That’s copywriter Liz Wilcox.

Kira:  Before we jump into Liz’s interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank. That’s our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to think outside the box and build new offers and revenue streams in their businesses. Rob, I’m going to interview you. Why do you think the think tank helps copywriters and marketers experience real results? Why does it work?

Rob:  I’ve thought about this a lot recently, and I think one of the things that’s really different about the think tank is that we don’t have a single formula that we’re trying to get everybody to buy into or to follow. Some courses, some masterminds you’re working with, an expert who’s done it their way. And so they teach their way and they expect you to do everything the way that they did it. That’s not our approach. We start out by asking each member about their goals, about what they want to achieve, about the challenges that they’re facing, about the impact they want to have in the world, the authority they want to build. And based on those goals, we tailor the experience for each individual in the think tank. Everybody else in the think tank is doing something similar. They’re working on their goals, but when you have everybody working together to achieve their goals in their business, you start to see what other people are doing.

There’s an effect that just happens where everybody grows together. And so it’s different from a lot of other programs that are a little bit more rigid. I think that’s one of the reasons why the think tank works.

Kira:  Wow. That’s a good answer. I feel like you practiced that. It was very smooth.

Rob:  Not practiced at all. I’m the most unpracticed person ever on the podcast.

Kira:  So smooth. If the Copywriter Think Tank sounds something that could help you in your business, you can visit copywriterthinktank.com to learn more.

Rob:  Okay. Let’s go to our interview with Liz and find out how she got her start as a copywriter. How did you become this expert in email, email strategist, copywriter, all of these things?

Liz:  This is a really fun story. I think it’s a lot different than what you typically hear on the show. Number one, I feel a lot of especially email copywriters, they start off as copywriters for other people who are selling products. I actually started off as a blogger. I was an RV travel blogger. I didn’t even start off traditionally where it was, this is my passion. I just want to share the word, RVing is so awesome. No, I started off as a business. I knew I wanted to travel and I had no means of making money from the road. Of course, I Googled how to make money from home, saw all these people, make a million dollars in six months, just watch my webinar, that type of style. I realized that there were all these people making money from blogs. I saw, especially in the RV space, I saw a lot of bloggers and I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it too.

I signed up for WordPress. I said, okay, here I’m going to go. From the get-go every, every online guru, so to speak was saying, my biggest regret was not taking my email list seriously. Before I had even hit publish on my blog, I made sure I had an email service provider set up. I didn’t even have Facebook at the time, but I got back on Facebook, added all my old friends and I hit publish on my blog and I said, hey, actually now I live in this RV. I want to get it going. I heard you can make money on a blog, please join my email list and I’ll figure it out as I go. I got 100 people on my email list in the first, I don’t know, it was 30, maybe 60 days. I can be persuasive, hence why I’m a copywriter. Right?

From there I just started, asking them, why do you follow me? Why do you follow me? People said, well, you’re really funny and you can tell a good story. So about six months later, I wrote my first book. I published it. It was a book about poop.

Rob:  Nice.

Liz:  It made over $7,000 in the first 90 days, it got picked up by an international sponsor that gives me $7 for every new lead it generated for them. I realized wow, the money really is in the list, because I only had about 300 people on my email list from them. I just kept creating digital products, creating digital products. I ended up launching my very first online course. About three years into business, I had 141 people on the wait list. By the cart close day, I had made 141 sales. Flash forward a couple of months later, I actually went to Tarzan Kay and Sage Polaris, they had some, what was it called? Legendary or something. I started meeting all these copywriters. I had no idea what really a copywriter did. I’d been following some online, but I wasn’t sure what they did or how they made money.

And so, I’m meeting all these copywriters and I’m like, but what do you actually do? They say, sales emails, pages, et cetera, et cetera. I said, well I do all that for myself and here are the results I’ve had. And they were like, whoa, you should do that for a living. And so I knew, number one, I was apparently very good at writing and I was really good at writing emails, because I didn’t run Facebook ads. I didn’t do social media campaigns. All my success just came from email marketing. And so I actually left that conference. I put my RV blog up for sale and I went right into the copywriting business.

Rob:  Nice. Okay. There’s definitely a lot of questions that come out of this. First of all, RVing, tell us a little bit about, what were you driving? Where did you go? How did you make that work? This is a dream of mine. I would love to have the skoolie, the refurb skoolie, maybe a trailer and live the van life. Unfortunately my wife has zero interest in that. So I have to do this all vicariously by asking people about their experience. Tell us a little bit about that before we come back to email and copywriting.

Liz:  Yeah, sure. I was married at the time, and number one, I hate to clean, and number two, I hate to spend money. We were moving, he was in the military at the time. The deal on our house fell through and he made a joke. We were moving to Alabama and he made a joke about, well, everybody in Alabama lives in a trailer, Liz, why don’t we just buy an RV? We’d only been married a year and a half. He didn’t really know me that well. And I said, okay, why not. And so six days later we bought an RV and we were living in it. That’s when I thought, hey, this thing has wheels, kind of like Rob just said, why don’t we move this thing? That sounds really fun. And so that’s when I started my blog. But about a year later into the blog, I actually started traveling. We traveled full-time for about three years.

First, we had a big giant fifth wheel was about 400 square feet. And then when we started traveling, we realized that was way too big. We downsized into a 32 foot Jayco Greyhawk. You can Google it. It’s the picturesque RV. It’s got the cab over it. We have a daughter, she slept up over the cab and she called it her little princess castle. It was really fun. But like you said about your spouse, Rob, my husband who is now my ex-husband, he didn’t really care for it either.

Rob:  I have a feeling if I bought the trailer or whatever, I would probably be in a very damaged relationship if it lasted at all. That’s cool. We both love to travel. But she doesn’t necessarily love the idea of being on the road all the time, as much as being in cool places.

Liz:  It is very hard. Today I actually am in a hotel room right now at the time of this recording. Earlier I was trying to go up to the business center and print something out. I was working on some client work and I thought, if I just had this printed out, I could refer back to it. I’m just working on my small laptop right now. It’s so hard to go back and forth through the windows. And then the printer wouldn’t work and I said to myself, Liz, you used to live in an RV and do this on campground Wi-Fi, just stop, you can click through the tabs. You’re going to be fine. It’s all about perspective. And so something I love to tell people on top of my first digital product was literally a book about poop, is also, I started my business. I started making money online without any internet. If you’ve ever been to the woods, you can imagine what I was working with. If I can do it, I truly believe anybody with a deep desire can do it too.

Rob:  Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot to be said for hard work and just figuring things out, especially as you get started. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, let’s talk about the book, the book about poop. I think this might be the first time I’ve said that word on the podcast in like 216 episodes or whatever.

Liz:  Congratulations Rob. You’ve made it.

Rob:  Growing. The obvious questions is why, why a book about that? How does that topic come to your mind? What were you thinking? Obviously there was a demand for it. Tell us a little bit about writing the book and then how you sold it.

Liz:  Yeah, sure. Like I said, and this is great advice for any copywriters out there who are thinking, well, how the heck do I come up with my first digital product? I’m tired of always just doing services. I just asked my audience, of course I was building my email list. I was all over the place. I was this travel blogger, but I was stationary at the time. I was trying to build up enough revenue so we could hit the road. And so I think I mentioned it earlier. I just asked people in my email, I sent out a newsletter and I said, I’m all over the place. Why the heck do you follow me? And people, you’re funny, you can really tell a good story. Your newsletters are so great. Actually, I was just driving one day and I was thinking about all these answers, all these reply’s I was getting. I thought, funny stories. Yes, I’m a good writer. I know I am. I could create a collection of funny stories about RV life.

Because if you go on Instagram right now, you go to hashtag RV life, you’re going to find all of these beautiful pictures, all these, come join us now. We hit the road and now we live on a hippie commune and see the Grand Canyon. Our kids are just awesome. All these picturesque utopia things. But that was not the reality I was living in. I was living in Alabama, sweating my butt off, had a leaky roof, had no carpet, a toddler, it was a nightmare. I thought, I can’t be the only one, this hashtag RV life cannot be the reality 100% of the time. I just started asking other RV bloggers that I was trying to network with. Hey, do you have any story that, it just sucked that day, but in hindsight, it’s funny? How about you give me that story, I’ll put it in a chapter in my book and I’ll give you 50% commissions of whatever you sell.

That worked. I got 13 different stories. I called it Tales From the Black Tank. If you know anything about RVing, Rob’s nodding his head, the black tank is where the sewage goes.

Rob:  Yup. You’ve got to find a lot of hook up to the black tank.

Liz:  Right. Tales From the Black Tank are a collection of hilariously crappy RV stories. I found that the niche, the pain point that I was solving, it wasn’t how to actually dump the black tank, how to get in the RV. It was entertainment purposes, but also it was filling that loneliness gap. When you get on the road it can be lonely. It can be like, I’m the only one who’s doing that. Maybe my spouse doesn’t want to do this, but I really want to do it. And so it’s just fine when you can connect with people through laughter, you can remove that loneliness. You feel a little different. And so that’s the pain point that I was scratching and people freaking loved it. I sold the blog and that I sold the book with it and that book still sells today. You can Google it. You’ll see a picture of me making a funny face in front of the black tank. It’s outrageous, but it’s funny.

Rob:  Nice. I like it. And then you said that you sold it or used it as a lead magnet for somebody else or was that a different book?

Liz:  Yeah, no, that’s the same one. What’s really great, and another thing, if you’re a copywriter and you’re trying to find more clients or even to sell more digital products, it’s just partner with people. The beautiful thing about my book was, I didn’t even write it. I wrote one chapter. I only had one story. I’d been in the RV six months and I’d never even moved it. Having those partners, having those pieces of the puzzle, being other people, they were promoting it. Somebody promoted it on Instagram, which I didn’t even have an Instagram account at the time. A company just happened to be looking at other RV influencers I guess, saw it, thought it was hilarious and thought, hey, this is how we are going to connect to the market. It was an international company trying to break through to the US. They called me up. And they said, hey, this book is hilarious. We love it. We’ve showed it around the office. Everyone’s laughing, can we use it as a lead magnet?

I was selling it for $10 at the time and they gave me $7 for every lead. I can’t remember how much money I made, but it was quite a bit, especially for someone who hadn’t even been in business for a year.

Rob:  I like this idea. I hadn’t really thought about writing a book that could become a lead magnet for somebody else. Obviously there’s probably a more deliberate way to go into it. Maybe touching base with a company like that, that’s trying to break into a market and then creating it on the front end, as opposed to the way that you did it. I love something like that, that obviously something that was working for your business, could work for somebody else’s business, licensing that property out to them or selling that property to them. It’s just a cool way to make more headway in your own business.

Liz:  Yes. 100%. It is called the worldwide web for a reason. It’s just bountiful, full of companies, ideas, people that want to partner with you. If you’ve got something good, definitely, if that’s a route you want to take. If you think I can’t do client work forever, or I’ve got this really. I know a lot about X. And so I’m going to write a book about X, and you can license it out. That’s actually something I’m trying to do with my business right now, license out my trainings, things like that. I even know of a copywriter who sells her curriculum to universities now. It’s a real thing that you can really make happen for yourself.

Rob:  I heard of somebody doing that just last week. University reached out about licensing a copywriters training, which I love that as well. There’s so many opportunities out there, it’s almost endless, especially when you start talking to niches as opposed to, I’m going to focus on marketing or copywriting or whatever. When you start getting into niches, there’s literally millions, millions of things that we could be doing.

Liz:  Yeah, 100%.

Rob:  Okay. Let’s go back then to, you ditch the blog, you sell that off and you lean all the way into copywriting as a business. What did you do to start connecting with clients, to start creating, well, you’ve got a lot of moving parts in your business, but let’s start with that. How did you start connecting with clients and get started actually writing for other people?

Liz:  Sure. I always knew when I started my RV blog, I knew I wanted it to be a business. I’ve always been really firm on the vision and flexible on my details. And so I knew I wanted to go into email marketing. I knew I had a framework that not a lot of people were talking about because I was a very B2C person. Right? Very business to consumer. I was talking to people that didn’t even want to pay for electricity, that were dying over poop jokes. It was a very specific, interesting framework versus the typical, online digital marketing thing. Anyway, that’s when I said, okay, I’m going to go full on into this copywriting service thing, because I’d just met all these copywriters who live in LA and Toronto and all these fancy places and I’m still stuck in my RV, in this trailer park at the time.

I was like, oh yeah, this is what I’m going to do. I set up the copywriting services in order to pay for me building the email marketing digital product side. And so because everyone had already seen my success, I had built my RV travel blog for three years. I put it on the market, and the second it went on the market, the same day I posted on Facebook, just on Facebook, at this time I probably had one, maybe 2000 Facebook friends that knew me from the RV business, had seen me selling. I said, hey, you know what I really hate, when a friend of mine tries to create an online course and they spend six months to a year agonizing, creating the curriculum, blah, blah, blah, and then they make zero sales. I said, I’ve sold a book about poop. I’ve sold an online course about RV maintenance and I’ve never even changed a tire before.

I know exactly how to do it and I’m going to share everything with you, just join my newsletter. The same as with the RV blog. I got my first 100 subscribers, at that point, it took seven days or something. And then I said, share it, share it. If you’ve been watching me the last three years and you think, how the heck does that blogger makes so much money and she hasn’t posted a blog in two years? Share this, share this, share this. And then I put another post out that said, okay, I did it through email marketing. I’m going to start doing some copywriting services. If you’re interested, like the post, send me a DM, comment, whatever. I had something like 12 or 13 comments, a couple of DMs. I just took my sticky note, wrote down all their names and went in the DMs, hey, can I have your email? I want to send you the details. Can I have your email? Can I have your email?

I didn’t add them to my email list, but I did email them. I said, hey, this is what I’m thinking. I’d heard about day rate. I was like, in a day, I think I can write X amount. If I said I can write eight emails, they said six, that way, I’m giving myself some room. I think I charged a thousand bucks for my first one. I made my first sale in the first couple of days. Because like I said, I did have that experience, people had been watching me online so they knew, oh yeah, I’ve seen her writing. I’ve seen her make sales, she’s legit. I already have the social proof. And so I did my first day rate for a thousand. Then I realized that’s not enough. I did my second rate for 1200, a couple weeks later. Then 1500. And then within I think six months I had raised it to 2000 and that’s the rate now.

Rob:  That’s awesome. You’ve been doing it for how long?

Liz:  It will be two years as of December, in December of 2021, 2 years.

Rob:  Okay. That’s amazing. And then you said that you were doing the writing to basically allow you the ability to create the products. Talk about some of the products you’ve created. It seems like a lot of fun.

Liz:  Sure. I love creating products, with my RV business, I created over a dozen digital products in three years. I think it might’ve been even two and a half years. If you name a digital product, I’ve created it. I’ve done digital summits. I still own an RV business that’s a digital summit. But anyway, so yes, all the copywriting was just to build up cash flow until the products were built up. Actually in that two year mark, December, 2021, I probably won’t need to do any more copywriting unless I want to. Right now, my very first product, actually I had a mastermind call, used to meet with some people at 6:00 AM every Monday morning for three years or something. Get yourself some friends if you don’t have any, you can ask me, I will be a friend, just DM me. I’ve got lots of Facebook friends. I’ll most likely accept your request and read your message.

But anyway, my first product, actually I was part of a summit, the Rebel Boss virtual summit with Eden Fried. I had actually been running her private mastermind for years when I was an RV blogger. I knew that her summit was going to be pretty big. And so I created my presentation. I had dancing banana GIFs on there. I had sound effects, because I really wanted to be noticed. This was my first, quote unquote, real publicity. And so I asked my mastermind, oh my gosh, my presentation, it goes live in five hours. I’ve had it on my to-do list to create a product. I know if I don’t, I’m really missing out, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is my plan. I said, so tell me, what’s your problem with newsletters? I know I can write them quickly, but what’s your problem with email?

And they said, well, newsletters suck and I never know what to say. I said, I can write a newsletter in 20 minutes. It’s nothing. They said, well that’s what your product should be. I said, okay, I’m going to name it 20 minute newsletters. Anything I name is very much what exactly it is. They said, if you can figure out your outline for a 20 minute newsletter, that’s going to sell. And so got off the call, I signed up for SamCart. I had no place to even get people to buy a product. I Googled free trial cart, found SamCart, set up the page. I said, okay, well, I’m not going to create 20 minute newsletters unless somebody buys. The second the page went live, the summit started, within five minutes of my talk. I had made three sales. I was like, oh shit, I better create this. Right? I’m like, okay, what do I act?

I went back through all my newsletters, of course, like I said, I used to own a business. I had three and a half now, four years with my new business of newsletters. I was looking for a pattern of how I was writing. I found out, first, it literally was say, hello. Personal updates, segue into content. You don’t even have to buy it now, that’s the whole thing. I just put it in a Google doc. I sent it to the people who had purchased, sorry for the delay. Here’s the 20 minute newsletters. I made a video that said, here’s an outline, gave some examples of what that actually looks like. I ended up making over $500 in that first, the product was $22. I don’t know the math, but I made over $500 from that one product. That took me from idea to creation, less than an hour. From there I created an outline called just pre-sell it where I pre-sold Tales From the Black Tank. Before I had even created it, I had made a couple hundred bucks and I kept doing that over and over with other products. I created an outline for that.

My open rate is actually crazy. When I sold my RV blog, my open rate was over 47%, it was a three and a half year old email list. I had sent over a half a million emails. I had I think about 6,000 people on the email list. And so people said, how the heck do you do that? And so I made a two hour workshop. I sold that, you can buy that, that’s called Open Sesame. And now back in February, my pride and joy, my favorite product to sell is actually a membership. It’s called email marketing membership, hoping the SEO catches up with me on that one. It’s $9 a month. I write a newsletter every single week that you can use. It comes with a skeleton outline, an email explanation, a detailed template, and two swipes written from two different perspectives, two different businesses. In the first six months I have over 400 members. And as of right now, I’m trying to get a hundred members in the next 17 days.

Rob:  Nice. Okay. Let me ask about the financial side of that then, because obviously you’ve put a lot of time into creating these products. You are still writing for clients, although maybe not so much longer in the future. How does that break down in your business? What are the percentages and how much are you making from digital products?

Liz:  As of today, summer 2021, my digital products are about 40% of my income. I still am making quite a bit from copywriting. Just full disclosure, in July of 2021, I had my best month, I made $15,000. I’m trying to think of, actually, I think I have it here, I’m obsessed with my numbers. Right? And so it was about, I would say about $7,000 of that came from the digital product side. And then the 8,000, that’s where I got about 40%, of what came from the copywriting. Basically how I’ve been able to just build that up is doing podcasts like this. In 2021, by the end of the year, I’m hoping to have over 52 interviews. Right now I have almost 40, summer of 2021. And so just positioning myself. Like I said, I wanted to be the email marketing lady. Right?

And so, positioning myself as such in these interviews has allowed those new leads to come in. Most of them honestly didn’t even know that I was a copywriter. They didn’t know that they could hire me. And so it was actually working pretty, pretty quickly. I will say, also if you go to my site, you can see I now have productized services where you can just buy five days of emails. You can just buy a homepage, a sales page. That was because I was getting all these new leads that were just buying the products. All of my products are less than $50. I want to be very affordable. When I started my business, I was really, really quite poor. I try to price it where it’s really affordable for everyone. But anyway, I realized, wow, okay, there’s not enough leads coming in. I still do need to sell some copywriting services.

I put those up, this was in May or June, and within a few days of putting that up, I had made over $3,000. No contracts, no sales calls. It was just, my friends said, wow, awesome. I’d love to refer you. I’ve never known how, now I have this hire me page. And people were just going up, signing up, filling out the survey, everything that I needed to put their message into copy. And then I guarantee a 14 day turnaround once you purchase and fill out the survey.

Rob:  Do you do all of the work yourself, or there’s so much coming in that you would need to have a junior writer working along with you?

Liz:  As of right now I do all the writing myself. I am in Chicago and I wish that I was working less. I was actually speaking with a friend yesterday and saying, I think I need to hire a junior copywriter or take down some of those services.

Rob:  Right. Because when I saw that, I’m like, it’s so easy to buy from you, whether you want a product or whether you want a service.

Liz:  Thank you.

Rob:  I was definitely curious about that. Okay. A lot of other things that I want to ask about, you talked for a minute about your framework, your framework that’s a little bit different. I think it’s follow a friend customer if I’m not mistaken. Let’s talk about that. How does it work in what you do? How do you talk about it with your clients?

Liz:  Sure. The framework that I follow to build my email list, and then the framework that I followed to write newsletters, I think the newsletter is one is really different and I hinted towards it. What Rob was saying is, and you can get this right on my homepage. I really truly believe that email marketing will work for everyone if you just keep it simple and you really truly know your people. Just the way that I was able to sell a book on poop, how did I do that? Because I knew exactly what my person wanted. Right? And so basically first you have a follower, right? They find you on Instagram, you’re listening to the podcast, whatever. Then you get them on your list. You can turn them into a friend. Now I’m not talking about your best friend who you tell all your juiciest, craziest stories to, you air your dirty laundry out. No, not that type of friend.

This is a friend where let’s say you went to high school together; you haven’t seen them in 10 years. You bumped carts in the grocery store. Oh my gosh, Rob, I haven’t seen you in forever. How are you doing? I’m doing great. I’m a copywriter now. Me too. Awesome. Let me get your email. I’ve got some tips for you. That kind of friend, where you’re talking a lot about that mutual interest. And of course, you can add in personality, as copywriters we know you need to make a personal connection. But basically when you have a group of friends like that, with that mutual interest and you focus on that mutual interest, that’s when they can start opening up to you, you can start really knowing those pain points. And so just I asked my very first email list, why do you follow me? I was able to create a product. Once you know those people really well and they answer those questions, you can say, hey, I’m thinking of creating X. What do you think?

You can just turn them into a customer quickly. There’s no guessing what they want. There’s no, Rob mentioned earlier, it’s so easy to buy from you Liz, that’s because I knew what they want. All those productized services, it was an email. I said, hey, if you could buy one thing from me, that was at an affordable price, what would it be? Then literally the replies started coming in. I started writing them down. They were on the page the very next day. And so of course there are things that people want to buy. They’re in an easy to find place because those are the things people told me. And so when it comes to writing your newsletters, and this is the podcast and the listeners that might burn me at the stake for this. I do not encourage anyone to tell stories in newsletters. I think that is a little bit of outdated advice. I’m sweating.

Rob:  We’re going to come for you. The listeners and the pitchforks, it’s coming.

Liz:  Yeah, I know some people. Like I mentioned, I sold to an audience full of people that didn’t want to buy electricity. People that had never heard of a digital course. When I first created my online course, the very first FAQ in my FAQ email was, what is a digital course? They had no idea what it was. And so I had to find a way aside from the typical tell a story, create a hook, segue into et cetera, et cetera. I had to find a different way to connect with people. These people were traveling, they had terrible internet. They were subscribed to many different RV blogs. These are Pinterest and Google search kings and queens, and they are just signing up for everything. They follow everyone online. It’s how do I make myself stand out? And also these people tend to be in their 60s and 70s. My ideal avatar was a 66 year old guy named Jeff, right? I could not be any further from Jeff. Right?

Chances are the stories I want to tell him, he doesn’t actually care about. I had to come up with a different framework and I mentioned it in my 20 minute newsletters outline. Instead of telling stories, I really encourage people to give personal updates. The thing about stories is chances are most people, most of your audience if you’re a copywriter and you’re talking to your client, chances are they’re not a professional storyteller like you are. Right? They don’t get paid to sit down and write and craft these beautiful stories and create these amazing hooks that get you to click over to a $5,000 program and get you to have that emotional, logical argument with themselves in order to purchase, et cetera, et cetera. Chances are that their client, their ideal person doesn’t have time to read those, especially in a post COVID world, where we just spent the last 18 months on our phone, subscribing on Pinterest, on Google, all the Facebook groups, all the Instagram lives, we are completely burnt out.

And so, because everyone is doing these stories, everyone is following the same type of framework with their newsletters. What I believe, it’s actually teaching subscribers to say, well, I know that’s a story and I don’t have time for that, because actually my brain is pretty fried. I’m going to leave that for later. And so your open rate continues to go down and down and down. And so when you can just make that quick personal connection, like I talked about, bumping carts with Rob in the grocery store. You’re a copywriter too. Awesome. I got to go. Give me your email. I just want to send you a quick tip real quick, but my kids over here are opening the Captain Crunch, that’s relatable. It’s a quick connection. You can make that, again, that human connection without going on and on and putting the hook first, and then it’s just get on with it.

I’ve heard so many people, I hate newsletters, Liz, this is in my personal life. I hate newsletters. How can you market that? How can you teach people to do that? They’re so annoying. I have 10,000 unread emails. I’m like, well, no, that’s not what we’re doing. A personal update, I always recommend just two to three sentences. Like, hey, I just interviewed, this is me writing Rob’s right now. Hey, I just interviewed this girl named Liz Wilcox. I can’t believe it, but we were talking about poop on the podcast. It’s going to premiere in a couple months. Anyway, I’ve got to go with my wife to the store, here’s what I really want you to know. Here’s our maternity leave. The Facebook group just hit X, whatever, peace out, Rob. That took 20 seconds. I always say, if you’re taking more than 20 minutes to write your newsletter, you’re really overthinking it.

Chances are, if you’re taking 20 minutes to write it, it’s going to take way too long to read and that person is going to tune out and they’re going to stop opening your emails.

Rob:  I like that you just wrote our next weekly update. Look for that. By the time this broadcast, we will have mailed it already, but that’s good advice. I’m assuming, because-

Liz:  I will send you the invoice Rob.

Rob:  Yeah, there you go. There you go. Because you’re obviously anti story, your audience is not necessarily copywriters. Who are the people who are buying all of the digital products that you’re selling?

Liz:  I have such a plethora of customers, students, clients, it’s crazy. Just this year alone, I’ve worked with a company that launches your remains into space. How they looked at my website and said, yes, this is the lady, I’ll never know. But also just down to people who are just starting their blog and they have no idea except they heard email marketing was it. And so I tend to work with a lot of, like I said, B2C, business to consumer. And so bloggers, Etsy makers, Shopify owners, tech startups, apparently people who launch your remains into space. Who else is a big one? I do have some service providers, some copywriters that just like my approach, they saw my website and they’re like, oh yeah, this girl can write. They like to do that. But mainly a lot of B2C companies, whether they are digital or actually in-person.

Rob:  You talk about how stories aren’t necessarily working right now, maybe ever, because of what’s happened over the last couple of years. What else is not working in emails? Or what else are we getting wrong as we’re mailing to our list or trying to attract people to the things we want to share?

Liz:  Well, I think, especially in this audience of listeners, they’re probably doing it right. But a lot of people with the stories, they’re just along with that, they don’t bury their emails, right? They’re either always pretty long or always really short. I think you can really vary your emails, that way your customer, like I said, they’re not trained to not, that’s another really long one, I can’t read that. Or they’re just sending me this, right? If you’re just always sending out the same thing, then that’s going to train someone to save it for later. That’s just going to go to the abyss of on the open. Right? We never want them to save it for later. We want them to open it right then and there.

Kira:  I really enjoyed hearing about Liz’s start to her career in business. I also liked hearing about your RV travel dreams, Rob, but it sounds like that’s not going to happen anytime soon for you.

Rob:  Sadly. I think I’m going to be an airplane and hotel traveler for the short-term here until I can convince my wife that kitting out a van and traveling around the world is the way to go. We’ll see. There’s some more convincing that needs to happen, but we’ll see. We’ll get there.

Kira:  You created the course on persuasion, Rob, so you can do this. You can persuade your way to make this happen.

Rob:  Working on it.

Kira:  You’ve got everything you need.

Rob:  Yeah. Working on it. See, the problem here is that the number one best way to persuade somebody is to step into their worldview. My wife does not share the worldview that driving around in a sprinter van or a skoolie is the right way to travel. Like I said, a little bit more work to do, but we’ll get there. I know for a fact here that you’ve got some travel dreams too. A couple of weeks ago we talked about, with John Murray about some of the traveling stuff that he did, the crazy stories that he had. I think you and I both are missing traveling right now, not being able to go out of the country or in some cases out of the state. But what are your biggest travel dreams?

Kira:  Well, I actually was trying to travel to France to hop around a bit on a little adventure with my husband and to take our baby, but just because things have been so crazy with travel, we’re not going to be able to do that with the baby anytime soon, but I still am dreaming about it and dreaming even about living abroad and spending some time in Europe over the summer. Maybe even a couple of months with the family and just really taking advantage of the virtual lifestyle that we’ve created for ourselves and actually going somewhere and spending some time there. I’m figuring out logistics, of course logistics they are so much more intense right now, but it could still be possible for summertime in 2022. I’m working on that. What about you, Rob?

Rob:  Yeah, I’m going to be going to Orlando a little bit later this fall for a mastermind retreat, but other than that, I don’t have a lot of travel plans, we’ll see how it goes. But enough about you and me and what we’re doing. We need to talk about this interview that we just did with Liz and all the awesome things she just said.

Kira:  Yeah. There was so much in this interview, it was packed. Liz just gave us, I see why she is pitching podcast and that’s part of her strategy, because she gives so much and just shows up fully as herself and just delivers so much great advice in the podcast. It was really fun to listen to it. What was something really big that stood out to you as you were talking to her through this interview?

Rob:  This is less about what she shared and more about what you were just saying, is Liz comes across as so friendly, so genuine and so warm, that you just want to hang out with her. I have all kinds of respect for that, and it’s no wonder that she’s been as successful as she has been. Talking about some of the specifics, I love the way that she put together her book, it wasn’t even really a book around copywriting, but basically she created this product that because she almost, crowdsourcing is maybe not the right word here, but because she crowdsourced it, she knew that she had a ready audience, she put it together, she was able to sell it. It was an easy thing to promote because of what it was and who was on her list and the kinds of communities that she was around. That’s a bit of a model for us to follow too.

If you want to create a product in your business, and when I say product, I also mean service. You need to think about, okay, who is in the community that I’m serving? What is the thing that they need, or that they’ll be attracted to? When you promote it, how are you going to talk about it in a way that makes that attraction really obvious? All the things that Liz did when she promoted her RV book, are things that we can do when we promote not just books, but products, services, all the things that we do to our niche audience.

Kira:  I love that Liz talked a lot about partnerships. You and I have a business partnership. We have talked to a couple other people about business partnerships, but she’s really approaching her business totally open to multiple partners and opportunities. I think that’s an area that scares a lot of people, because it f