The Email Marketing Show

What are the BEST email marketing strategies out there? Well, we have 7 strategies for you that shouldn't work, but they absolutely do!We're Kennedy and Carrie, and the things we're going to share might surprise you. But trust us, they work!Ready to get all the good stuff?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:33) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:42) 1. Send more emails. (5:09) 2. Include one clear call to action in all your emails. (8:06) 3. Talk about yourself. (16:23) 4. Stop using benefit-driven subject lines. (17:53) 5. Send emails that 'divide' your audience. (26:20) 6. Share complaints or negative reviews. (30:00) 7. Send 'ugly' emails. (31:49) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. (32:17) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesTurn Problems into Opportunities – Convert Haters into Sales with Laura Belgray from The Talking Shrimp.The Truth About All The Surprising Things That REALLY Impact Your Email Deliverability.Perfect Timing? What’s The BEST Time To Send An Email For Maximum Impact?FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website!Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 7 BEST email marketing strategies that shouldn't work but absolutely do) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Falling off the email marketing wagon happens to the best of us. Whether life got busy, a launch took up your focus, or you just fell out of the habit - it happens. And if your list hasn’t heard from you in a while, it’s tempting to wait for the “perfect” moment to restart (eg. Monday, the start of the month, or some other arbitrary milestone) But the truth is, the best time to reconnect with your audience is today.In this episode, we’re diving into how to restart your email marketing without overthinking or worrying about upsetting your subscribers. (Plus, we’re giving you the exact framework for the perfect reintroduction email - we call it the ‘Terrible Friend’ Campaign)Let’s do this!Useful Episode ResourcesFREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero BlueprintWant more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

What do stage entertainment and email marketing have in common? As you may know, we are both from an entertainment background. Rob is a comedy hypnotist and Kennedy is a psychological mind reader (or mentalist). That means we spend a big chunk of our lives on stages using psychology to make people do certain things, to perform and entertain an audience, and make it funny, interesting, and engaging in the process. So today we're sharing 12 email marketing strategy examples from our on-stage careers that we use in our psychology-driven email marketing. Ready to find out how you can apply these 'tricks' to your email marketing? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (00:09) Want to make your sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:28) Train your audience and create authority.(9:54) Grab and keep people's attention.(12:27) Be yourself and surprise your audience.(16:49) Tell stories and create a setup & payoff situation.(21:03) Build beliefs.(21:38) Adjust and adapt the way you address people.(24:51) Find the most efficient way to do things.(27:08) Pay attention to language patterns.(28:58) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. 1. Train your audienceThe first strategy we'd like to share is training your audience. What do we mean by this? Well, this may sound strange, but when people go to an event for the first time, they don’t know how to behave. Can they interact with the host? Should they stand up or sit down? People have questions. So the first thing we do when we get on stage is to explain the culture and the rules of engagement. In other words, we train our audience.We do this right at the start of our opening bid, which is highly interactive and more akin to stand-up comedy. It’s where we let people know how the show is going to go. We communicate our style and form of entertainment, which is individual to each performer. And we do the same in our email marketing, which is why we talk about how important it is to tell your audience how often you're going to email them and what they can expect from you, for example. Tell them if they can reply - and of course, we encourage that.In our Getting to Know You sequence (i.e. our welcome sequence) we ask a question that gets people to reply. And we also include a link (or several) in every email we send. Because this teaches our audience that every time they click on a link in one of our emails, they get rewarded with something valuable.  Whatever you do (or don’t do) in your email trains your audience into specific behaviours - whether you're doing this consciously or not. Are these behaviours serving you (and your audience) in a positive way? Because if they're not, you may be stopping people from getting value from what you do. So become aware of what you’re training your audience to do.2. Create authorityAnother important email marketing strategy example we want to share is creating authority. As entertainers, sometimes we go on stage to perform in front of a group of people who don’t know who we are or whether we’re any good. People have to believe that we can deliver the show that’s been promised - that we can do what we said and that it's going to work. And in order to achieve that, we need to create authority. Of course, there's some natural authority that comes with the framing of the show. People spent money to buy a ticket and come to the show so they already assume (to a degree) that it’s going to work.Now if you translate that into the email marketing world, the fact that someone set up a business with a website where you can subscribe to their email list already creates some sense of authority. But above and beyond that, you want to show people what you’ve done before and what you could do for them. On stage, we do this with footage and clips from previous shows that prove that we can do what we say we do. But remember it’s important to create authority by giving proof or evidence that working with you is going to be worth their time.3. Grab people's attention The next thing you want to do is ensure you have the attention of your audience. This is true on stage but also in your email marketing. If you don't have people's attention at the beginning of the show or at the start of your relationship with your subscribers, they’re going to talk all the way through (at a show) or not pay attention. And you don't want that - you want their attention.So how do you do it? First of all, you show up with something that’s attention-grabbing. In th

How do you make sure you get better results, more engagement, and more sales using email marketing campaigns? You need to understand the psychology of marketing.We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and today we're going to share the 9 psychological strategies that we successfully use in all our email marketing campaigns.Ready to discover all our best secrets?Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Use Summits To Get Visible (Even If You’re An Introvert) And Build Your Email List, With Fifi Mason.Useful Strategies To Stop Procrastinating RIGHT NOW To Get Your Email Marketing Done!How To Build The Most Impactful Email Marketing Strategy Plan To Make More Sales In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Fifi?Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people - those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the biggest mistakes you're making with your email automation strategy) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Do you have a flagship product - a core product or service that you focus on with your marketing and your messaging? Today we're sharing how you decide in what order to promote your products so you can simplify your business and your marketing and maximise your sales per subscriber. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's a really simple trick, and you're just about to learn all there is about it! Ready? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:43) All roads lead to Rome!(7:21) Choosing your Rome.(9:34) Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audience.(10:40) Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can help.(11:46) Bring more eyeballs to your core product.(13:09) Simplify your business and maximise your profits.(14:56) How to structure your email marketing.(16:29) Talk about your offers in different ways.(18:04) How to pick your flagship product.(21:20) Subject line of the week.All roads lead to Rome! In a casual, throwaway comment we shared during our Level Up mastermind in London, we said that all businesses need to have a core product and all roads must lead to it. It's like the old well-known expression that all roads lead to Rome! This was hands down the biggest takeaway from our participants, and it's an idea that we often take for granted but want to shed some light on because it might help you solve some of the problems you're currently experiencing in your business. When using our email campaigns, a lot of people ask us in what order they should sell their products and to whom. If you sell a couple of different products in your business and have a few lead magnets as well, you have to juggle different offers. So how do you know how they all fit together?The great news is that there's an easy answer to this. You need to pick the one thing that you ultimately want everybody in your world to end up in. For us, it’s our membership, The League. Interestingly, what you choose as 'your Rome' doesn’t have to be your highest-priced product. For example, our email writing agency or our mastermind Level Up cost more than The League. But those are what we call our profit maximisers or upsell offers. They are products we make available for the people who want further help from us (more about that later). So to help you figure out what your Rome is, finish the sentence, “If I could wave a magic wand and get everyone single one of my perfect customers to buy one thing from me, it would be ............”.Choosing your RomeOur Rome is our membership because with our more expensive products we have a capacity issue. In our mastermind, we only have two groups of 15 people, for example. So we don’t want every single one of our ideal customers to end up there – that’s just not possible! But with our membership, we can have as many members as we want because it’s a scalable offer. In other words, having more people inside The League won’t diminish our ability to deliver. That's why our membership is our Rome, and everything leads to that. Bringing people closer to our Rome (our flagship product) is our ultimate goal.So that's what you want to do too – figure out what your Rome is and then lead people to it. Because if your marketing isn’t doing that, it’s probably confusing people and pushing them away. Once you have one focal point in your business, your customers will see that too. But if you have loads of different offers, it’s hard for people to figure out what’s right for them. They can get confused.It's okay to have different products that will bring in people at different points and help them with various parts of their journey. But ultimately you want one core offer - something you’re driving everyone to. That will be your focal point - your North Star. So every time you’re creating a new piece of content, a new offer, or setting up an email campaign, you want to first figure out how that activity helps you to get more of your ideal clients closer to buying your core offer.Create offers that appeal to different segments of your audienceOnce you've picked your Rome, look at everything else you're doing to see if your other activities or offers act as a ramp towards your Rome. Do they move people towards your core offer? Everything you do in your business and your marketing needs to act as a precursor or prequel to the one thing you want to sell. In order to achieve that, you want to create things that appeal to different segments of your audience. For example, in our business, we might create a piece of content that only appeals to course creators. And then we'll have something separate for membership site owners or coaches. These are all micro products, and they can be free or paid for, but the key is that they lead into the core product. So create on-ramp products or offers that appeal to different segments and lead to your Rome.Reduce the risk and deliver results to prove you can helpOn-ramp offers can also be useful to help you reduce the risk for potential new customer

Are you thinking of running your own online summit? Are you wondering about how to promote a virtual event with email marketing?Today we're sharing the lessons we've learned from running our own two-day online event - Inbox. This is the third year we hosted our signature email marketing conference, which is a totally free online event with multiple speakers and a ton of value. Want to know all about it so you can find out exactly what email campaigns you can run to make your next online event a super profitable one? Then let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:03) Why the online online virtual summit business model works.(6:49) Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom.(8:00) Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event.(9:53) Find sponsors for your event. (10:56) Promote your event with email marketing. (12:39) The registration sequence and the engagement sequence. (16:06) The sequence you run during the event and the post-event sequence.(20:07) How to handle the price hikes.(25:51) Check out our Virtual Summit email campaign workshop.(29:06) Subject line of the week.Why the online virtual summit business model worksOur Inbox email marketing conference is now online, which means people can attend from all over the world. But when we first ran the event in 2020 it wasn't meant to be free or online. We'd planned an in-person conference in Newcastle for $500 per ticket. But then the pandemic hit, and we had to move the event online. We've basically changed the business model so that instead of having people pay for a ticket, they pay for the recordings of all the sessions (we call this All Access Pass). Plus, because all the speakers also promote the event to their audiences (and earn a percentage of the sales), an online event like this is a great list-building exercise. We absolutely fell in love with this business model, and to this date, our conference Inbox creates the biggest influx of brand new subscribers to our list each year. Why we choose to run Inbox on Zoom One of the things we learned is that although there are different platforms designed to host virtual events (and those are absolutely brilliant) sometimes tech barriers stop people from attending. So we decided to host our event on Zoom, and we have no intention of ever changing that. Because running a virtual summit is a list-building exercise, you want lots of attendees! So it's probably not the right time to try out fancy platforms that people aren't familiar with because there can be a lot of resistance to those. Whereas with Zoom, pretty much everyone knows how to use it, so if you remove the tech resistance you'll have more people registering and attending the event. Agree with the speakers when they're going to promote the event Another thing we learned is that not all businesses treat email marketing as a priority in their business. So while we know in advance what we're going to promote and when, a lot of businesses might not. During the first year of running Inbox, we asked all speakers to promote the event to their list, but we didn't specify any timelines for them. And that meant that we got very little (if any) promotion at all from some of the speakers. So what we do now is to ask the speakers to specify in advance what dates they're going to promote the event. We ask them to create a schedule, put it in their calendars, and commit to it. So if you're organising an online event, don’t be afraid of letting your speakers know that it works as a collective. If all the speakers promote the conference to their list, then you’re getting in front of all of their audiences. But if they don't, then you don't get as much exposure - you all have to do the promotion. Find sponsors for your eventAnother tip we can give you is to try and find companies that are happy to pay to get in front of your audience (because they're their ideal clients too) and offer them a sponsorship package. This means you'll have other businesses advertise at your event and pay a fee to be able to do so.The sponsorship fee could be any amount and might depend on the scale of your event, but it gives those sponsors a good potential for return. And for you, having sponsors means additional revenue. We suggest you put different sponsorship packages together and let your sponsors know what they get for paying different amounts. That way, you allow businesses at different levels to put their message in front of your audience. Promote your event with email marketing Another tip we have for you if you're running your own virtual summit is to use a few short email campaigns to promote it. Inside our membership The League we have different campaigns that are perfect if you're hosting a big, expensive, in-person event. But for a free online event, we use and recommend four email sequences.A summit is a list-building event, but it's also a money-making opportunity. So you're leaving money on the table if you don'

How do you know if you're unique enough? What makes you stand out? How do you market yourself so that your ideal customers choose you and not your competitors? These are some of the questions we answer today with the help of our awesome guest Belinda Weaver. Belinda is a copywriter who helps people who are learning to be copywriters to up their game. And today she talks to us about how to make yourself choosable. Yep - that's a word. And you sure want to find out all about it! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:50) Did Belinda really have a pet peacock called Cocker?(5:10) Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd?(7:20) No USP? No problem!(8:45) How do you make yourself more choosable?(10:00) Lean into the combination of ingredients that makes you unique.(13:06) Tell people what it's like to work with you.(16:44) Share your passion and why you got started. (18:52) Be yourself and don't be afraid of feedback.(23:02) Subject line of the week with Belinda Weaver.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Do you really need a USP to stand out from the crowd? As business owners, we all worry about the idea of standing out. Why should people choose you? Do we worry too much about this? Is this a valid concern? Our friend and awesome copywriter Belinda Weaver shared with us that having a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is indeed Marketing 101. We're told to come up with our USP and our differentiator and to have a great elevator pitch that explains what we do, who we do it for, and what makes us different. These kinds of things are drummed into us. And Belinda calls this the unicorn fallacy. It's this idea that in order to be successful, you have to be unique and different. But when she first started out as a copywriter, Belinda didn’t know what made her unique yet. So instead of trying to focus too much on that, she decided to become as good as she could be and then figure out what made her unique. And she thinks a lot of business owners should do the same. As a copywriter, Belinda always asks her clients what makes them unique. And funnily enough, she never expects a great answer because she doesn’t have a great one herself! In fact, at first, she thought there was nothing in particular that made her unique. But she kept showing up, earning an income, and making progress. And at some point, she realised that maybe she didn’t have to be different in order to be successful.No USP? No problem!Is anything ever unique anyway? Even if you invented something brand new, is it going to be unique for long? According to Belinda, having a USP isn’t completely irrelevant. We probably all have something that’s uniquely and brilliantly us, but if the USP becomes a gimmick that holds us back from what's important, then it’s not useful.If we get paralysed in trying to find our USP and don’t do the things we could be doing to get more business, then there's no point in finding a USP in the first place! We sometimes get so worried about what makes us different, unique, special, or rockstar-worthy that we do nothing. And that's not cool.  How do you make yourself more choosable? Making yourself choosable isn't just about standing out from your competitors. Yes, there are people who do the same thing as you, but there are often different solutions to similar problems - alternative routes we could take and different types of businesses we could use. So what can we actually do to make ourselves more choosable?Belinda tells us it all starts with the idea that you don’t have to be unique. The best in the market isn’t always the favourite. So instead, try and get in front of people and become their favourite. Because what we do as buyers is make decisions on who we choose. We don’t want to look at the whole Internet. We want a short list, which is often made of the people we know. Consumers are always trying to cut their choices down, so send out signals in your marketing to help you become people’s favourite.Why you need to share reviews and testimonialsAs buyers, we want to know that you, as a business, are capable of solving the problem we have – that you've done it before and can do what you say you do. So how do we know? We know because you’ve done it for other people and you did it well enough to get reviews and testimonials.And also that you’re not a complete twat to work with! That can be the difference, and it's how you become someone's favourite. However, according to

What do you do if you have a high unsubscribe rate? What is a high unsubscribe rate, and does it even matter? Or should we simply focus on addressing any spikes in unsubscribers instead? We hear so many people telling us they put in a lot of work to build their list just to see their subscribers leave pretty quickly. And we know it's easy to feel bad about it, but if you find yourself in this situation, fear not! There's quite a bit you can do about it.Ready to find out? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:48) Unsubscribers aren't a bad thing!(6:55) Why you can't just rely on your lead magnet.(8:41) How to make sure people want to hear from you.(12:48) Why use a Welcome sequence.(14:39) Why monitor your unsubscribe rate.(18:31) What to check when you have a high unsubscribe rate.(21:41) Have you made any changes to your email marketing?(22:51) Why always include offers in your emails. (25:15) Build a list of subscribers, not hostages!(26:53) Subject line of the week.Unsubscribers aren't a bad thing!Here are a few things to think about when it comes to unsubscribe rates - the impact they have on your technical email deliverability, your relationship with your list, and your business. Because broadly speaking, unsubscribers aren't a bad thing, especially when it comes to your emails getting delivered. Just for a second, imagine you have a massive mansion. You decide to have a housewarming party, and instead of just inviting your friends, you tell everyone who lives within 100 miles of your new place. So they all come, but the thing is – you don’t want most of these people there. In fact, you probably want them to leave! Because ultimately, you only want to hang around the people you actually like. And the same goes for your business. You want to build a list of people you like and who like you.Why you can't just rely on your lead magnetHigh unsubscribe rates are typical of the way we build our lists. And they're definitely part of the course when we use lead magnets. If you’re running ads or employing any other quick-win list-building strategies, you need to come to terms with the fact that a lot of people don’t want to be on your list - they just want your lead magnet.So they’ll opt in for the thing, get it, and then quickly unsubscribe because they don't care much about hearing from you. But one way of fixing this is to make sure you have a long-term nurture sequence.For example, if you join our list because you’ve listened to a few podcast episodes or have been in our Facebook group for a while, you’ve been nurtured into our world. That means you are subconsciously and psychologically committed to remaining on our list because we've built a relationship with you over time. It’s a totally different experience from someone you've never heard of before who signs up to a lead magnet. How to make sure people want to hear from youA good solution to help with this is asking people to join your email list because they want to hear from you however many times you email them every week. That way, your emails become the thing people are signing up for. And that should reduce your unsubscribe rate. Plus, it means that people are expecting emails from you. It's not just you suddenly sending them sales emails after they downloaded your lead magnet. You see, we also lose a good number of subscribers quite early on in our email journey. But this isn’t something unique to email marketing - it happens everywhere. Think about networking events or work meetings, for example. There aren’t that many people that you meet that you find interesting enough to keep in touch with or want to see again. And even out of those people, only a smaller percentage become meaningful to you.What this means is that you want to build a list of people who are good, responsive, and ideal subscribers. As we always say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs! You need to accept you'll have a lot of people come into your business who won't hang around for very long. And that's okay because the goal isn’t to build the biggest list that you can. Your subscribers aren’t Pokémon - you don't have to catch them all.What you need is something in place that makes people hang around long enough to turn into raving fans. And if you can't do that, then it's okay if they leave. Hopefully, the percentage of people who leave immediately is small, and more people will instantly become fans and feel they want to stay on your list because it's the right place to be for them. Why use a Welcome sequenceThis is why we created out Getting To Know You sequence. It’s our version of a welcome campaign or indoctrination sequence (which is a phrase we don’t like). The way we look at it is that people come into your business, and you’re getting to know them as much as they’re getting to know you. The idea is that you gather data on your subscribers to find out how you can serve them better. And at the same time, they get to find out why you’re unique a

Why did we wait three years to create a brand? Shouldn't that be the first thing you do when you start a business? Probably not! It's not what we did, and there are valid reasons for that. Because for years, we proved again and again that we could sell our product - even if it was ugly. Want to know what this is all about? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:33) Why we finally decided to create a brand.(9:29) Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your business. (11:10) How we started Email Marketing Heroes.(14:58) Focus on your offer first.(19:57) Fix what doesn't work before making it pretty.(21:26) The four things you need to focus on to make your business work.(23:40) Launching 'ugly' businesses.(27:47) Creating our brand - why now?(29:39) Why create a brand for our products and audience. (33:25) Subject line of the week.Why we finally decided to create a brandYou may have noticed that a couple of months ago we finally decided to create a brand - we overhauled our entire branding. Our colours and fonts look different, and we've even had our first professional photo shoot together. Why? Because our previous branding looked significantly uglier than it does now. Over the years of being in business, we've definitely seen people around us producing graphics that looked way better than ours did. But the problem is that neither of us has an eye for things like that. We’re good at communication, but we’re not designers. When we first launched our business, branding wasn't our priority. We just wanted to get off the starting blocks - not to create a brand that looked nice. So when we launched Email Marketing Heroes all we had was a logo. We ran a contest, and the person who submitted the best logo also came on board to work with us. She's an amazing designer, but she's not a branding expert. And as a result, over the last few years, we’ve been producing graphics that looked inconsistent. They were nice in isolation but didn’t fit with anything else. All the different elements of our business had a different vibe, and we felt our branding was disjointed and was getting worse with time. Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your businessUnfortunately, over the years we've also seen businesses with amazing branding go out of business. Why? Because they focused on the things that looked good or what they found naturally interesting, enjoyable, and easy for them - rather than what needed to be done to run a business and to keep it going. Because we all have to make sales. We have to show up and give value to people. And we need to put out offers that are so interesting and valuable that people are willing to invest in them, so we can stay in business and help more people.And there’s one really uncomfortable piece of advice we find ourselves dishing out a lot to our clients, which is to stop doing the thing you’re doing because it’s the wrong activity for you to be doing in your business right now. Your problem above and beyond anything else is to figure out how to make money. Once you have that nailed, then you can build around it.How we started Email Marketing HeroesWhen we started our business, we wanted to find out whether people would pay us to teach them email marketing and buy our campaigns. When we launched our membership The League, we didn’t know if people wanted a new email campaign every month - and that's one of our core propositions.But figuring all of this out was our first aim - our aim then was not to create a brand. Could we build a thriving business based on something people want? Are our offers good enough? It’s not just what we sell and how. If Rob and Kennedy (the hypnotist and mind reader who teach a psychological approach to email marketing) sell email campaigns that you can swipe and use in your business along with coaching, will you buy it (regardless of how we package it)? That's what we tried to figure out. And doing this was completely independent of any sales pages or any branding. Because it’s about the concept. Is it interesting? Does it get your attention? Is it valuable enough for you to pay a reasonable amount that’s a good economic fit for how we need to grow our business?So that's what we did back in 2019 when we first launched. We focused on making $20-30k in sales with nothing more than a logo. And truthfully, could we have done it without even having that logo? Because if we could, then we could prove that the fundamentals were all there. If you can sell it when it’s ugly, you can sell it when it’s pretty. And in the end, we didn’t create a brand until we’d made $600k in the last couple of years. And this year alone (2022) we'll be making over $1m in sales. We waited so long to create a brand because we first focused on how to understand our customers better to make more sales and become more valuable. Focus on your offer first  If you can take the right offer, prove it, and sell it when it’s ugly, then you can s

Can giveaways help you grow your list? What prize should you choose for your contest and how do you make it go viral? Who do giveaways work best for, and how do you even run them? Ready to find out why giveaways are important for your email list growth and your business? Then let's hear it from the awesome Derek Videll! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:24) Does Derek really have uncontrollable sneezing fits when he chews mint gum? (5:19) Why are giveaways a good strategy to use for new businesses?(6:40) Should new businesses run paid ads to their offers?(8:44) Why picking the right prize will help you find the right audience.(13:00) Testing your audience and finding your target market.(14:14) Do giveaways work for B2B?(16:22) What are the key ingredients to running a viral giveaway?(21:07) How do you make the giveaway go viral?(23:40) Subject line of the week with Derek Videll.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Why are giveaways a good strategy to use for new businesses? Our awesome guest Derek told us that giveaways work better for beginners and new businesses. Why? Because while viral contests can also work for intermediate and advanced businesses, they are a much simpler and more effective way of building your list when you're starting out than other strategies are, such as organic social media posting. For example, if you're a business owner who's been trying to grow organically on Instagram by posting reels, you might have experienced limited success. Reels can be difficult to do, and not everyone likes to create them. Plus, even if your reels go viral and you gain some followers from them, this strategy still doesn't give you much control over your business. Sure, you may end up with a few thousand followers, but you'll have no consistent sales revenue.Should new businesses run paid ads for their offers? Paid social media ads are a more ambitious route than organic content sharing, but a lot of new businesses aren't yet experienced at selling their offer. They might have not narrowed down their target market or fully established their branding and website. Or their email marketing might not be fully set up yet. But all these components are necessary if you want your paid ads to bring in sales. The truth is that running paid social media ads directly to your offers rarely works. You might make a few sales, gain some followers, or even collect some email addresses, but the cost per acquisition tends to be very high, and in that case, your rates are probably very unprofitable. And that's fully understandable because a lot of new business owners who have started a passion project don't necessarily have the marketing background or copywriting skills they need to make the sales they want to make. So they end up burning money on paid ads, which isn't ideal. But there's a better way to do things! And (you guessed it) - it's giveaways!What prize should you give away in your viral contest? When you run viral contests, your marketing or copywriting skills don't have to be excellent. You just need to pick a prize that people want to win. So the first thing to consider is what you'll be giving away. It can't be something untargeted or generic like an Amazon gift card or a MacBook. Because that will only give you random followers who then unfollow you once they've realised they haven't won. If you pick a prize that has nothing to do with your business, people will only enter your contest to win the prize - they won't stay afterwards because they won't want to have anything to do with your content. And even if you do end up gaining some followers from the process, they'll probably never reply to you, and that ruins your engagement. So the prize you choose needs to pre-qualify your audience's interest in what it is you do. If you’re a course creator or membership site owner pick a prize or perhaps even create a product that's relevant to what you do so you can attract the right audience for your business. Running paid ads to a contest rather than to an offer means you get to attract your ideal clients while deterring those who aren't the right fit. Why picking the right prize will help you find the right audienceThe reason why giveaways work really well for small businesses is that if you don't have many followers on social media, it’s hard to attract an audience through organic content. But if you share a giveaway instead, people follow yo

Are you going on holiday or taking some time off from your business? What will you do with your email marketing? Will you stop your emails? Or will you keep them going? What are your options? This is what we're sharing today - how to do your email marketing while you're on holiday, whether you’re physically leaving and going somewhere or simply switching off from your business for some well-deserved time off.  Ready to find out what your options are to keep your email marketing going during the holidays? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:51) Option 1 - Stop sending emails (don't do this!)(10:08) Option 2 - Schedule your emails in advance.(12:59) Option 3 - Run a campaign.(15:02) The importance of having customer support while you're away.(17:27) Option 4 - Send your emails while you're on holiday.(20:56) The importance of having an Email Engine.(22:44) Let your holiday inspire your emails.(24:51) Always capture new ideas for your email marketing.(30:54) Take advantage of these helpful resources inside The League.(32:04) Subject line of the week.Option 1 – Stop sending emails (don’t do this!)The first option you have (and - spoiler alert - this is something we don't advise you to do) is to stop sending emails. You simply disappear for however long you're away or taking time off. This is definitely an option you have, but just because you're taking some well-deserved time off, it doesn't mean you don't have to continue showing up. In fact, you don't want to stop sending emails. Because that means losing momentum and traction.Why you need to keep showing up for your subscribersRemember that one of the things you’re doing by sending regular emails to your subscribers is to build and reinforce a habit. If you know that someone sends you an email every day of the week, you expect that. Or if you publish a podcast episode every week and suddenly stop, chances are people will stop listening. The same goes with your emails – you stop sending them, and your subscribers will stop reading them. When you drop your frequency, from a technical point of you, you mess with the algorithm. But people also stop paying attention to you.And from a psychological perspective, the minute you stop doing something, you find it harder to get back to it. So stopping your emails is bad for everything! It's bad from a tech point of view in terms of your deliverability, it’s bad for engagement, and it's bad for your audience because it gives them a chance to disconnect and forget who you are. And last but not least it's bad for you! Because once you've stopped, it's harder to get back into it.So, yes - you absolutely deserve time off. But you also have a responsibility towards your subscribers and customers to show up and deliver value. It’s part of the promise you made to your subscribers. So what other options you have to ensure you can keep showing up even when you're on holiday? Option 2 – Schedule your emails in advanceAnother option you have is to prepare in advance and write and schedule your emails. So let's say you're going to be away for 16 days - you'll want to have all your emails written and scheduled in advance a couple of days before that. And potentially, you'll also want emails scheduled for a few days after you return to give yourself a chance to get back into the swing of things.This means you batch-create the emails in advance for the duration of your trip (plus a few days before and after). And this is great because it means that as long as you spend some time preparing and planning in advance, you can take as much time away from your business as you want. The only thing to bear in mind if you're going to batch-write your emails is that you don't want them to all sound the same. We have a resource called Batch It Crazy inside our membership The League that helps you do exactly that. You want your emails to have different flavours and vibes to them. But most importantly, you want to be talking about your products from different angles. And using our resources will help you do that (and also ensure you won't run out of ideas). Option 3 - Run a campaign Another option you have is to run a campaign. What’s the difference between batching your emails and scheduling a campaign? If you decide to send X amount of days' worth of emails while you're away, you'll simply write and schedule those emails separately as you would when you're not on holiday.Running a campaign, on the other hand, takes your subscriber on a journey. You're telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The emails in the campaign work together to serve a common purpose. We have about 30 campaigns inside our membership The League that you can take, fill in, and apply to your business. The shortest one we have is about 6 days, but most of them are longer. So there’s a good chance you can cover the duration of your holiday with just one campaign. And you may think this is counterintuitive. A lot of people

Have you ever raised your prices and found that no one was rushing to buy? We've been there and done that. And that's why this week we're sharing how to increase your prices the right way by telling your audience in advance and creating urgency that will boost your sales. No matter what you sell (a membership, a course, a coaching programme, or any other product) we also have something special for you - our price increase email campaign. Ready to find out how to increase your prices, build trust with your audience and customers, and make loads of sales in the process? Let's go!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (6:11) How NOT TO increase your prices.(8:23) Why give your audience notice of your price increase.(10:10) Never give people too much notice about your price increase.(11:53) Why send price increase emails to your audience.(14:50) Keep track of all the places where you mention your prices.(17:44) Why tell your existing customers about a price increase. (18:55) Why increasing your prices acts as a retention mechanism. (20:06) Why you should never extend your price increase offer.(21:43) Grab our price increase email campaign for FREE - live workshop.(22:44) Subject line of the week.How NOT TO increase your pricesIf you've ever put your prices up, you probably did what we used to do in the past (and what we see lots of people still do). You posted on social media and found there was absolutely no rush in sales. Sounds familiar? The problem with that strategy is that the reason people aren't buying isn't the price itself, so putting it up or down isn't going to make a difference. But you can use the price (and a price increase at that) as a way to compel people to jump off the fence and go ahead and buy. The way not to raise your prices is by doing it quietly and in the background. Because that's a wasted opportunity! Instead, you could use a price increase as a promotional opportunity to get people to buy. How? You tell them you’re going to put the price up in a few days and give them an opportunity to buy now.Of course, you want people to buy at the new price, right? Sure. But remember that you’re constantly bringing in new people onto your email list - every single week. And the new people will buy at the new price. But don't miss the opportunity to expose your existing subscribers to the old price and create a sense of urgency that pushes people to make a decision and buy now. Why give your audience notice of your price increaseWhy are you telling your audience and existing subscribers about the price increase in advance? Because it helps create a sense of loyalty and happiness - you're giving them notice so they don't miss out on grabbing your product at the current price. And that's a good thing because we all want customers to be with us for the long haul. You have the rest of time to make sales at the new price. So why not give your loyal subscribers who’ve been around for a while the chance to grab the existing price first?This is how we handle each price increase for our membership, The League, and any other product we've ever launched. We start with a lower price, get ourselves a good base of members first (who become our solid audience and give us base income), and then gradually increase the price over time. A benefit of doing things this way is that it gives you the time to refine your offer. When we first launched our membership, the content wasn't finished. It still isn't because it's constantly changing – we’re adding new, amazing features all the time. But we’ve also taken things out that didn’t need to be there. So by increasing your price gradually you get to create the right offer for your audience over a period of time.Never give people too much notice of your price increaseHow you put your prices up is important. But what’s also critical is not giving people too much notice. If you tell your audience about a price increase coming up next year, that's just information. There’s no urgency. And you want urgency – not information.That's why we tell our audience about any price increase 5 days in advance - no longer than that. And that creates real urgency - almost like an impending sense of doom. Because if we say there's going to be a price increase in 5 days, there's going to be a price increase in 5 days. That's urgency. And urgency only works if it’s actually urgent. That’s why we never use countdown timers of 30 days, for example - because there's no urgency in that. It's just information. Why send price increase emails to your audience Using a window of 5 days before your price increase also gives you enough to say in your emails over that period of time. The idea is to send 5 days' worth of emails to your subscribers to talk to them about the price increase from different angles. That doesn't mean 5 emails - you can and absolutely should email them more than once a day, especially on the last day before the offer closes. But make sure you always have a reason to

This week we're sharing 9 amazing lessons we've learnt from two years of running Inbox - our awesome online email marketing conference. It's a phenomenal event, and we promise this year it's going to be absolutely next level! To prove that it's true, we've pulled out 9 tips we learnt from some of our amazing speakers at past events of this FREE online email marketing conference. They're so good you're going to want to take notes! Ready to have your mind blown? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 (for FREE!)(5:40) Lesson 1: Use emails to 're-sell' your membership.(8:31) Lesson 2: Turn your free content into your core product.(12:51) Lesson 3: Tweak and test your lead magnet landing pages.(16:35) Lesson 4: Use your emails to educate, entertain, and encourage.(18:48) Lesson 5: Talk about your lead magnet from different angles.(23:38) Lesson 6: Test the deliverability of your emails with all the major email platforms.(26:21) Lesson 7: Identify the people who want your highest offer first.(28:02) Lesson 8: Grow your list by getting in front of other people's audiences.(29:23) Lesson 9: Sell the product. Don't explain the product.(31:22) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Our Inbox email marketing conference is on the 28th and 29th of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously, tickets for registration were up to $500, but this year we’re going to grow this conference massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing conference you can imagine. It's packed with 12 amazing speakers and presentations and is fully online and fully live. We'd love for you to come and join us! If you want to learn what's going to impact your ability to make more sales with email, this is the place to be. Because it's not just about the words you write, who you send them to, or when you send your emails. It's about a lot more than that! And these two days are going to have a solid impact on your ability to make sales with email marketing. If you're already salivating and want to find out all the details, see the full line-up, and register at zero cost, here's the link.1. Use emails to 'resell' your membership – Neil StaffordNeil Stafford is a genius when it comes to memberships, and in his presentation at one of our previous online email marketing conferences, he talked about how to use emails to keep selling your membership and make sure you build belief so your members become lifetime members. Because your membership is something you need to 'resell' to people. You don’t just sell it once and then sit back and receive recurring revenue forever. Instead, you have to constantly and perpetually 'resell' it. And emails are a solid way to do that.Of course, you need to get that balance right. You don't want to overwhelm people with all the emails you're already sending them to let them know where all the content is. For example, we have a number of emails that tell our members inside The League how they should go on the Success Track. But people still tell us they don’t know where to go because nobody gets 100% readership of their emails, even when people are paying to be a member. Because everyone’s busy!But on top of the emails where you explain where everything is, you also need to send emails that build the beliefs that your members need, in order to stay with you in the long run. Arguably, these types of emails are more important than any instructions or directions you could ever give. Because the beliefs are what will help people stick around. If they don’t believe what you do is something they should be studying for a number of months or even years of their life, people are going to jump in, grab what they need, and go. And that’s not what you want. So email is the most direct thing you can do to make sales and to positively impact the retention of your membership.2. Turn your free content into your core product – Matt and JoeOur friends Matt and Joe exposed their entire business model to us, which was incredible and unique. Their core content (their podcast - The Hustle and Flowchart) isn’t just their free content - it's their entire business. It's also their product and membership.So they shared the idea that you don't have to produce free content and then have additional products on top. Your products don't need to be separate from your content. So you could monetise your podcast by having a sponsor, for example. Or what Matt and Joe do, is create full, in-depth notes of their podcast episodes. And that’s their monthly recurring revenue model - people can subscribe and get their notes as well as additional training.The benefit of doing this is that it frees you up to create amazing content because that is also the product you sell. So you make it the best content it can be. Whatever your content is, make it phenomenal and give it the best chance to work and rise to the surface. In other words, make your content

Why should you attend Inbox? Because it's the email marketing conference of 2022 (even if we say so ourselves). Inbox is the online conference that helps you sell more of everything you're doing by using email marketing. It's on the 28th and 29th of June 2022, and we're going to show you how to get totally FREE tickets and attend this fantastic event from the comfort of your very own pajamas. Ready to get all the juicy stuff? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:27) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 (for FREE!)(4:52) What is Inbox 2022?(6:39) Email is the most direct way you can make sales.(7:44) Learn from different approaches (from our amazing speakers).(8:38) The 5 areas covered in Inbox 2022.(10:00) Inbox 2022 is FREE and the reviews are incredible!(11:58) Inbox 2022 is online and live - on Zoom!(14:16) Who attends our event, Inbox?(16:18) Here's the link to register for Inbox 2022!(17:19) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Our Inbox email marketing conference is on the 28th and 29th of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously tickets for registration were up to $500, but this year we’re going to grow this event massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing party you can imagine. It's packed with amazing speakers, fully online, and fully live.If you want to learn what's going to impact your ability to make more sales with email, this is the place to be. Because it's not just about the words you write, who you send them to, or when you send your emails. It's more than that! So if you're already salivating and want to find out all the details, see the full line-up, and register, here's the link.What is Inbox 2022?Inbox 2022 is our completely FREE online email marketing conference. This is the third year we're running it, and we're inviting you to attend. Why? Because email is the most direct way that any of us can make sales - whether your emails are in real-time or automated. So it’s definitely worth taking two days out of your schedule to study everything there is to know about email marketing. And that's exactly what Inbox 2022 allows you to do - to immerse yourself into this topic and up your email marketing game. You can dive deep into what you can do, find out what everyone else is doing, and why they always talk about how amazing email is.Because it’s easy to think that the way you’re doing email marketing is the way it’s done, right? But we learn new things all the time - from every guest that we interview for this show and from all the speakers we’ve met in the last two years of running this event. We learn new things and we implement them. And that's what makes us better at what we do.Email is the most direct way you can make salesThere’s nothing else you can do that directly impacts the top and bottom line of your business as swiftly as email marketing. And that's a fact. If you have a little cash flow blip in your business, the best thing you can possibly do is to find something to sell and send a few emails about it over the course of a few days. That will fix your cash flow problem - it's as simple as that!Literally, nothing else will work as well. You can't just host a webinar, for example. Because how will you get people to sign up for it in the first place? With email, of course. You could try social media, but the reach isn’t very high, so you wouldn't get the same results.Learn from different approaches (from our amazing speakers)The great thing about conferences is that you get to learn new things. And at Inbox, you don't just get our ideas. Sure, we'll be giving a presentation or two. But over the two days, you’re going to learn from all kinds of different approaches – both from us and from our amazing speakers.A lot of the time, the reason people get stuck with their email marketing (or anything) is that they don’t know what they should be doing. They don’t know what questions to ask or what they should be studying. If you buy a course, for example, you’ll learn whatever that teaches you and nothing else.But at this event, we have a whole bunch of speakers talking about different topics, so you can learn way more than just one approach or one specific thing. We're confident that you'll leave this conference with whatever you were hoping to learn, but also with a lot more – with new ideas you didn't even know you wanted or approaches you wouldn't have thought about. We know for a fact that you’ll leave feeling more inspired than when we walked in.The 5 areas covered in Inbox 2022We split our email marketing event into 5 areas and asked our speakers to fit their talks into one of these categories:List building. How do you get more people onto your email list?Specific email campaigns. We’ll talk about specific email campaigns, including one that allows you to leverage the objections your audience has and turn them into reasons to buy and sales. Conversion. There are different types of convers

How do you encourage your audience to consume your content? Whether it's a free download or a paid course or a membership, how do you use your emails to inspire your subscribers or customers to use the amazing content they now have access to? Today we're covering content consumption by sharing an exclusive panel discussion with our friend Monica Snyder taken from our 2021 Inbox conference. Monica is the CEO and Founder of Birdsong.co, and she's a true marketing genius! She’s great at funnels and ads, and she’s super analytical. In our conversation, we talk about consumption emails - the emails you send when someone opts in for your free lead magnet or buys something from you. Should you send these emails at all? Do they help? Or do they just get in the way?Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:21) Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!(5:50) Should you send consumption emails?(9:15) YES to sending consumption emails AND to offering upsells.(10:40) Consuming your content encourages people to buy more from you.(13:04) Do consumption emails work for both free and paid-for products?(19:21) Are consumption emails nagging? (22:32) How to upsell in your consumption emails.(23:56) Make use of custom fields!(27:45) Do free trials work?(33:35) Subject line of the week.Come and join us at Inbox 2022 - for FREE!Before we get into this conversation with Monica Snyder, we want to let you know that our Inbox conference is happening at the end of June 2022. And we’d like to invite you to join us for FREE! Previously, tickets to this conference were $500, but this year we’re going to grow the event massively and make it into the biggest online email marketing party you can imagine. It's packed with amazing speakers, and it's fully online, and fully live. So check out the line-up and register here for FREE!Should you send consumption emails?There’s definitely a view that if someone takes the time to consume our content, uses it, and gets results, they’re more likely to buy something else in the future. However, in our business, when someone opts in or buys something, we put them into a campaign to sell them on the next thing as soon as the next day. For Rob, for example, when people download a free lead magnet from you, follow-up emails are more about trying to get them to click a link, rather than looking at the free content. Why? Because we think it's important to get them to subconsciously engage with us as a brand, rather than blindly consuming the content. It's probably a controversial viewpoint, but Rob thinks we cannot always trust our subscribers or customers to implement our solutions. The onus to consume the content and get results is on them, and it's a fact that most people never consume the content they download or pay for. So if you’re waiting for the point where the person has consumed your content, you may be waiting forever! YES to sending consumption emails AND to offering upsellsMonica, however, thinks we should definitely encourage people to consume our products. Part of our job as course creators, teachers, and information givers is to make sure we’re providing the information to ensure people do what they need to do with what we’ve given them. So for Monica, consumption emails are a big YES! But she also believes we should let people know about the next thing to buy. This is why Monica’s consumption emails lead straight into a sale.For us, part of the problem is that in the past we found ourselves bashing our heads against a brick wall trying to get people to consume our content. That's how we reached the cynical viewpoint that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. We're the kind of people who will unsubscribe from someone’s list after buying something if we feel we're being heavily forced to consume it. And that's because we don't like to consume content on someone else's timeframe.Consuming your content encourages people to buy more from youHaving said that, there are definitely places where consumption is important. First of all, sending consumption emails is less aggressive than the older way of pushing people to buy something else straight away. Also, if you help people consume your content (which they were excited enough about to opt-in for free or buy) they will get to experience how good your stuff is. They’ll be more like to buy more in the future.So the way we teach our clients to encourage content consumption is by sending emails that remind people of how good the content is - regardless of whether they'll go and look at it or not. Because the number of people who opt-in for free content and never access it is astronomically high! So what we'll do in our emails is point out there's value inside whatever our subscribers or customers have downloaded or bought. And we tell them exactly where they can find it. So when they get an offer from us, they're also aware that they're already sitting on some good value.Do consumption emails work for both

Do people have reasons for not buying from you? Yes, they do.We're Kennedy and Carrie, and today we're sharing the three subconscious questions people have that stop them from buying from you. It's super important you answer these exact questions in your marketing and sales copy because people can't and won't buy unless you do!Ready to find out what these questions are and make more sales in your business?Let's go.SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:30) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:44) Check out our sponsor - Zerobounce! (3:34) Question one - will it work for me? (7:47) Question two - how long until I see results? (11:17) Question three - how much work will I need to do (and how much will it cost?) (18:18) Find ways to give people immediate gratification. (22:15) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. (23:34) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesHow To Sell More By Tapping Into The Power Of Buyer Psychology In Your Email Marketing.What To Send In Your New Year’s Emails To Get Your Clients Excited About Your Business (And Buy From You).How To Prevent Buyer Remorse And Turn Customers Into Raving Fans!FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website or at Fully Leveraged Business. Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the 3 reasons for not buying that people have and that you need to address in your marketing) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

So you want to use deadlines in your marketing. You want to close your offers on a particular date and time and, more than anything, make sure they work. In other words, you want to use deadlines effectively. But you also want to do it genuinely and honestly. This is no doubt one of those marketing ethical dilemmas we've all had at some point - and it's a valid one! So how can you do deadlines well but also ethically in your business? Let's find out, shall we?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:09) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(5:02) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(6:48) How do deadlines even work?(9:46) The power of urgency and scarcity.(11:37) Why you should never extend an offer.(14:32) Why you should be able to have a logical reason for your deadlines.(16:22) Make sure the technology is watertight.(18:26) Can you use deadlines ethically for evergreen products?(21:22) How to implement ethical deadlines for your evergreen products (video link included!)(22:47) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. How do deadlines even work? First of all, let's take a look at why deadlines work in the broader sense. We find people often miss the point when it comes to running any kind of countdown special offer with a deadline at the end of it. And as a result, they don't get the results and sales they were expecting before their launch. Why?Because the psychological, fundamental reason why deadlines work is that they appeal to the fact that we give people a reason to act right now – to bring forward this decision they might have made in the future and make it now. This decision becomes the top of their list of priorities. Because if they don't act now, they risk missing out. And people hate that. Let's think about the buying process for a second. Buying something (anything at all) requires you to decide that you want to buy it and then convince yourself that you want to buy it. Only then you go through the process of buying it. But unless you have a reason to buy right now, you might not grab that offer immediately.The power of urgency and scarcityThere are only two reasons why you might grab it right now - urgency and scarcity. If you want to go to a concert and know it’s going to sell out, you’ll act straight away because you'll want to grab tickets before you miss out, right? But in order to sell a product based on urgency or scarcity, people have to believe you. Because if they don’t, the whole thing isn't going to work. If you have a marketer who keeps telling you every day they're extending their offer for another 24 hours, you're not going to buy. You have no reason. Because you know they'll keep extending that offer. And so the deadline has the opposite effect of what it's there to do - it's causing you to put that decision further away!Why you should never extend an offerLet's not forget we're talking about ethical marketing here. If you keep saying that the offer is closing but you constantly extend it, it’s unfair to the people who may have spent money to prioritise this purchase right now. In their head, maybe they’d assigned this money to something else, but they bought your offer now in order to get the deal that was on the table. And this is important. Because people have an emotional attachment to cash and how they spend it. If you check out the episode How to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer, we talked about why you should never extend an offer. Even if someone gets in touch to ask you to extend the deadline or honour the offer once it's expired, you should politely but firmly say no. Why?First of all, because if you keep extending the deadline, people won’t believe you. And that defeats the purpose of it, which is to help you make sales. So if you're using a deadline, don't move it.And the second reason why you shouldn't extend an offer is that you always need to be crystal clear on when the deadline is. Your audience needs to be aware at all times when the offer expires. If they’re not, then you haven’t created the deadline at all! Because you haven’t engaged that rush and urgency for people to go and grab it before it goes away. So make sure you have a deadline on your sales page and maybe even use a countdown timer. Plus, send emails that lead up to that deadline – tell your audience that the offer is closing today, then again that it's closing this afternoon, and then again in an hour. Always be super

Are you someone who can't stop procrastinating when it comes to doing your email marketing? Well, you're not alone.We're Kennedy and Carrie, and today we're sharing some useful strategies to help you stop putting your email marketing off so you can get it done. Right now!Ready?Let's go.SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:34) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:01) Check out our sponsor - Zerobounce! (3:06) Just get started (or jump back in). (5:15) Stack habits together or schedule appointments in your diary. (8:50) Make things easier for yourself and remove any friction. (15:45) Alternate between longer and shorter emails. (17:53) Follow the 'Rule of One'. (21:14) Create campaigns one email at the time.(25:20) Don't let the fear of 'being bad' hold you back. (29:29) Create a system, process, or formula that works for you. (32:19) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesTime-saving tips for email marketing – how to eliminate distraction with Nir Eyal.Supercharge Your Email Marketing Copywriting By Mastering The Rule Of One For Maximum Impact.Lies You’ve Been Told That Are Stopping You From Making Money In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website or at Fully Leveraged Business. Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about useful strategies to get your email marketing done if you're someone who can't stop procrastinating) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Do you ever find yourself making important business decisions based on a hunch? Would you like to know how you can improve the success rate of email marketing (and your marketing in general) by looking at data and not relying on a gut feeling? Are you curious to finally get a clear idea of what marketing works in your business so you can do more of it?This week we're sharing a technique we created so you can 'read the minds' of your subscribers. You'll be able to work out how they found you, where they came from, and what made them buy from you. This method is quick and effective. And it only requires you to track two simple things about your subscribers. Ready to learn more about this and transform your business for the better? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:16) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:33) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(5:40) Marketing is a numbers business.(7:52) The importance of understanding what works.(10:26) Why do you need to understand your conversion mechanisms?(12:35) The problem with tracking solutions.(15:32) The two things you need to collect in your email marketing system.(20:30) How do you capture the original source and conversion mechanism?(22:48) Learn how to use this method to track the success of your marketing. (25:26) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Marketing is a numbers businessWe come across a lot of business owners who think that marketing is a creative practice. And of course, there's creativity in marketing. But we think that creativity is around the way you decide to solve the numerical and data-driven problems you discover in your business. Because at its core, marketing is a numbers business.It's about looking at what you spend in terms of time, effort, money, and resources and what the return on your investments is. This is called direct response marketing. And for us small business owners it's fundamental that the return on investments is (as much as possible) directly attributable to your spending.The importance of understanding what worksLast month we saw a sudden surge of people joining our membership The League. We have new members every week, but we had more than usual. And we knew that was something worth investigating. Because one of the things we talk about a lot is to raise your peaks and do more of what’s working. And if you see some changes in your business but don't have the data to understand why you're seeing these changes, then you can't course correct. You can't amplify what's working and you can't stop what's not working.So we decided to start looking at what we might have done a few weeks or months prior that could have created this influx of people joining our membership. And we looked at activities we did in the past (not only last month) because it's rare that someone buys your product immediately, even if you're running ads directly to that product. A lot of the time people will look at your offer and leave. And it might be a retargeting ad that encourages them to buy in the end. Or they may look at it a few times before they eventually purchase it. There's always a gap between somebody coming into your world and buying something.And this is even more obvious with email marketing. Because somebody may join your list today but become a customer for the first time at some point in the future. There’s often a gap between when they join your list and when they buy. And if you're doing a lot of different things to build your list (say having a podcast or a YouTube channel, doing webinars, guest training, SEO, Facebook ads, etc.) you also have several conversion mechanisms. Why do you need to understand your conversion mechanisms? So you'll need to know which traffic methods bring in the most people but also which ones help you turn them into customers. Because not all subscribers are created equal! You'll find that you have some conversion mechanisms that work better with some traffic methods than others. You need to know which traffic method and which conversion mechanism in conjunction, get you the most sales. And you also need to know which ones are costing you money. Because you might be getting conversions from a particular source but not a price you can afford to be paying.With both conversion mechanisms and traffic sources at play, sometimes it's hard to understand what works. For example, you might have a lead magnet that converts well but on

Want to find out what we get asked inside our exclusive, members-only group coaching calls? This week we're taking behind the scenes of the coaching calls we do inside our membership, The League. We're going to not only share the questions about email marketing that our members ask us, but also the exact answers we give them! Aaaaaand, we have an amazing opportunity for you. For one day only, you can join one of these exclusive calls too! Want to find out more? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (00:17) The League Open Day.(6:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(7:16) How many campaigns do I need to get started with email marketing?(10:50) What's the best frequency for email marketing?(11:15) Planning your email content. (12:52) How many emails should I send during a launch?(16:53) How do I move to a higher email frequency?(19:50) What about email marketing for the B2B industry?(22:01 ) Join us for our first Open Day!(24:58) Subject line of the week.Join us for the first Open Day inside our membership The LeagueWe’re doing an Open Day for our membership The League where you can come and hang out on one of the hotline coaching calls as our guest. It’s happening on the 11th of May 2022 at 8 pm UK time (3 pm EST).You’ll get to ask questions just like our members do and get answers from us. And if you can't think of a question, just sit there and watch - like a fly on the wall. We guarantee you’ll learn from the questions that other people ask.So if you want to get on this call, register here. We’ve never done this before, and we’re excited to see many of you joining us for this experience. So let’s pack out the room for some great learning! 1. How many campaigns do I need to implement to get started with email marketing?The first question we pulled from one of our coaching calls is from Paul, and he asked, “As long as I have the Getting to Know You sequence and your Overture sales sequence set up, am I good to begin sending traffic through my funnels?”The short answer is yes!But let's break this down. For context, we should say that we give our members inside The League new email marketing campaigns every single month. But obviously, people can’t implement them all at once! Also, for clarity, the Getting to Know You sequence is our welcome sequence. It’s a 4-day sequence for every new person who comes onto your email list. This is where you introduce them to your core product or service.  After setting up our welcome sequence Paul implemented our Overture campaign, which is a sales automation.Of course, if after setting up these two campaigns you want to stop putting people through more sequences, you can. But you can also set up as many email campaigns as you want. You don't have to wait until you have all our email marketing campaigns set up - we don't do that either! We add a new campaign every 8 weeks or so. And taking this approach is perfectly fine. Firstly because it takes some time to set the sequences up. But also because they'll serve you on an ongoing basis. You can view these two campaigns as your minimum viable engine. Just put people through them, and you'll immediately benefit from the work you've done setting them up. Think of it as a train with different carriages - more campaigns will make your email marketing train longer. But simply add a new carriage whenever you’re ready, at your own pace.2. What's the best email frequency for email marketing? Here's another question we get asked by email marketers all the time. “How do I figure out what email frequency I want to do with my email newsletters?”There’s no right or wrong answer here. We talk a lot about the fact that we send an email every single day, and we think you should too. Because we think you’ll get better results if you email at least a few times a week.Planning your email content In terms of planning your content and the frequency of your email newsletters, we do our planning quarterly. So in the middle month of any given quarter (February for Q1, April for Q2, etc.), we plan the content we’re going to share in our email newsletters. We look at what we’re going to sell, what our goals are, and what emails we’re going to send in order to take our subscribers on a journey. And then we figure out what content we need in order to make that happen. Let's say we decide to do a webinar campaign. We go into The League and grab our own template for that, just like any of our members would. And then we put it all together and run it.In short, here's what we do. Once a quarter, we plan a rough big helicopter view of everything we’re going to do and map it all out. We break it down month by month, week by week, and day by day. We create the plan once and then fulfill it, and this means we don't have to spend time every day wondering what we’re going to send out next. 3. How many emails should I send during a launch?“If I'm launching my new course, coaching progra

Does Artificial Intelligence have a place in email marketing? Can you use AI tools to outsource your email writing? These are some of the questions we're answering for you today after testing a few AI tools. Curious to learn what we found? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:12) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:49) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(4:58) Should you use AI to write your emails? (6:50) Where can AI be useful?(7:47) AI tools can write about features and benefits.(9:04) AI tools can't help you with ideas and stories.(11:55) AI tools can't differentiate between products. (14:32) AI can't target people with different levels of experience. (17:42 ) AI tools can't create successful email campaigns. (24:19) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free - we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Should you use AI to write your emails?We’ve been playing with a few AI platforms for a while now, and we have opinions about them. This isn’t about us bashing AI tools though. We believe they definitely have a place, but we’re going to get into some of the issues we found when using them. So let's start by setting the tone with a quick example. This is what we typed into one of these AI tools to see what kind of marketing email they'd write for us:“Welcome to the Email Marketing Show podcast for online course creators and membership site owners.”Simple, right? Want to see what we got? “So this is the first episode of the Z Z podcast. I am super excited about the new venture and hope you all enjoy it too.”Not quite the introduction to our podcast we had in mind. In fact, this makes no sense whatsoever! Where does the "Z Z podcast" even come from??So let's look at some of the issues we've found with these tools. And it's important to say that these findings apply to all the tools across the board. It doesn't matter how good the platform is. You might have the best one out there (and it's up to you to do your research and work out which one is the best for you), but they all have the same issues. Where can AI be useful? AI tools can be useful in what we consider to be simple copywriting - and that's where the stakes aren't massively high. So for example, if you have a membership site or a course and want to send an email to promote a new video, you might want to write a little paragraph that describes what that video is for. You'd pop the information into one of these tools, press a button, and get a few options back.Bear in mind though that once you’ve put this amount of copy into the tool, you’ve almost done the job yourself! With a bit of tweaking, you could use the best out of the options the tool gives you, and it'd probably be good enough. But this is only for a piece of copy where the stakes aren't that high. AI tools can write about features and benefits For us, it boils down to this - AI tools can only write about features and benefits. You're feeding information into these platforms, and the outcome is linear - it's features- and benefit-driven.The problem is that people don't buy just on features and benefits - they also buy on emotion. And these tools are completely devoid of personality – of your nuances and your isms (as we like to call them). They don't have any authenticity because a robot wrote them! There are no pieces of you showing in the turns of phrase and the way the emails are being worded. They're sterile - perfectly written, with no 'knack' about them. So if you want to write about basic features and benefits, by all means, you can try and use AI tools, see what they give you, and then manicure the content afterwards.AI tools can't help you with ideas and storiesThe issue with writing about features and benefits is that it's all about why you should buy a certain thing. And surely you don’t want to show up on the Internet every single day with another email that asks people to buy your product. Right? That's what so much email marketing out there already is – just bashing people over the head with offers!The problem is that's all these AI tools can do. You can't use them to craft good, compelling, interesting stories about something that happened to you. Or pull something out of the news that might be relevant to your email list. And one of the biggest struggles people have when it comes to email marketing is finding the things to write their emails about. Well, guess what? If you use AI tools as part of your email marketing strategy to write your ema

This week we're talking about the therapeutic benefits of writing your own emails. Is writing therapeutic? Absolutely! And writing emails can be just as much a therapy for you as it is a sales-making activity. So let's break down all these cool therapeutic benefits of writing your own emails. Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:16) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:38) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(5:52) Write the emails you enjoy writing.(8:53) Allow yourself to savour the moment.(11:33) Train your brain to become more mindful.(13:28) Create the habit of writing every day.(15:46) Stop worrying about the technology - focus on the psychology!(17:24) The commercial benefits of writing your emails.(18:25 ) Be you!(21:05) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free - we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Writing emails can be fun! Let’s talk about why email writing (and generally the act of writing) can be therapeutic for you. Because writing emails is not just a sales mechanism! The reason why loads of people put off doing email marketing is that it sounds hard. It comes across as difficult, complicated, laborious, and maybe even boring. The key word here is that it sounds like it might be all these things. And we all want to do things that are easy, don’t we?But here's what we're saying. You can turn something you’re currently putting off and think you might not like into something you enjoy!That'd be cool, right? So how do we do that? Write the emails you enjoy writingThe first thing you need to do is to write emails you enjoy writing – emails you would actually want to read. And that sounds a bit crazy because a lot of the emails in your inbox might look boring, formulaic, or braggy. But you don't want to write emails like that. And the great news is that you don't have to!You can write better emails that will also help you stand out. You do that by writing the emails you'd like to read - the ones you enjoy. Because that means you'll enjoy the process and the therapy of writing.  Kennedy, for example, started writing daily emails because he’s dyslexic. He looked at the process as a way of working a muscle. If you exercise that muscle every day, over time you’re going to get better at using it. So he told everyone on his website that he’s dyslexic, and if you join his daily emails, there will be typos. It might be all over the place when it comes to spelling, but he promised the emails would be good and valuable.So if you feel you're not great right now, the expectation of turning up 3-7 times a week with an email to your list will give you the motivation to show up and improve that skill. It’s a bit like having a personal trainer – it’s what will make you show up at the gym and do the work so you can improve your skills.  Allow yourself to savour the momentAnother benefit of writing emails is that it allows you to be present. The idea of mindfulness has become increasingly popular over the last few years. It's about being more mindful of what's going on in the present - living in the present moment. And one of the activities you can do to become more mindful is writing, which is why journaling is so popular. It's all about sitting down and writing privately to yourself about how you feel, what you're grateful for, what you've achieved or want to achieve, your goals, etc.Granted, you might not want to share your private thoughts in the emails to your list - although we’re all about being open, honest, and real with your subscribers. We always encourage you to show them what’s going on in your life and start your emails with a story. And one of the things that this enables you to do is to become more mindful of what's going on in the world around you – to savour the moment and enjoy each thing that happens to you.  Going for a walk in the woods and allowing yourself to become more aware of what’s going on around you is a satisfying thing to do. When you focus on what's going on around you (the sound and sensation of your feet on the ground or the feeling of the breeze through the trees, for example), your brain can't worry about the big stuff that’s going on in your life. Train your brain to become more mindfulRob, for example, likes to either write his emails using Google Drive or use the full-screen, distraction-free mode on his Mac, so he can write without seeing anything else - there are no other tabs open, and all he has in front of him is a screen. So he'll sit dow

Today on the podcast we chat with Cody Burch. Cody is a member of The League and helps course creators and membership site owners launch their programs with funnels and Facebook ads through agency done-for-you work, a membership, live events, and courses. He's here to tell us how he increased sales with email marketing by a whopping 1,000% just by implementing two of our campaigns. Ready to have your mind absolutely blown? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our FREE download, Click Tricks.(3:34) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)(4:42) Cody's email marketing before he joined The League.(11:44) Implementing our campaigns (and increasing sales by 1,000%!)(17:57) Cody's success with the Time Lord campaign.(20:22) How does Cody feel about his email marketing now?(22:45) The one action that had the most impact on Cody's email marketing. (24:28) What's next for Cody's email marketing? (25:52) Has email marketing taken over Cody's life?(28:03) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Cody's email marketing before joining The League When Cody started his business over 5 years ago, he didn’t have a funnel, an email list, or any presence on the Internet. It was only about a year later, when he wrote the book The One Hour Funnel to help people create their online lead capture system quickly, that he started collecting email addresses. His book has been one of the biggest list builders for Cody - one he's been using for years. But while Cody was growing his list, he wasn't nurturing it. He wanted his emails to be perfect and was putting himself under so much pressure that he'd only send emails to his list sporadically and when he had something to promote. Even though the front end was working (and Cody was collecting leads through funnels and ads) his approach wasn’t structured - with no system or strategy behind it. He might promote something similar to what people had downloaded from him, but when that worked, it was random and lucky. Nothing horrible was happening - he wasn't getting haters or huge amounts of unsubscribed. But soon enough, Cody realised there was a gap in his marketing. His front end was working, but he had no real plan on how to nurture his list. And that was until about a year ago when Cody downloaded our Daily Email Strategy (now the Bottomless Email Strategy) and from there he eventually joined our membership, The League. What did Cody's emails to his list look like?Cody's emails weren't story-based or personal – they were completely promotional. Whether it was Cody selling his own products or sharing affiliate links, there was no backstory or consistency with his emails. He would go so long without emailing that his subscribers probably forgot who he was, what he did, or what they'd downloaded from him. And that's why people weren't opening Cody's emails or clicking his links with consistency. When somebody downloaded a lead magnet, Cody would send them three days' worth of emails trying to sell them the next relevant low-ticket offer, but other than that, he had no automation set up. His promotions were sporadic, and this meant he was making money in his business asymmetrically – people would opt-in and may or may not buy something from him over the next 6-12 months. But when he was asked what a new lead was worth to him in the first 30 days, Cody had no idea how to even track that. It wasn't until October 2021 that Cody committed to one email a day. And when he started doing that, everything Cody thought might happen didn’t happen, while everything we said would happen did happen! Amazing, right? Open rates, click-through rates, and replies went up, and he started receiving more and more replies from people saying that his emails spoke to them.Implementing our campaigns So we now know that Cody had a sporadic email strategy for about 3 years before joining our membership. After that, he started sending out 3 or 4 emails a day and getting more comfortable with the practice. But he still hadn't fully committed. As Cody described it, it was like a new baby giraffe learning how to walk. Then finally in February 2022, Cody implemented the Getting to Know sequence (our welcome sequence) and deleted his original three-email sequence. Following that, in just one night he wrote the Overture sequence (which is one of our direct sales campaigns). Since then, people who join C

Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks about the emails you send once people have joined your membership. Mike and Callie know everything about memberships, and they're sharing their best practice around email marketing for paying members. This conversation is all about the importance of communicating with the people who are already inside your membership. And you definitely don't want to miss it! Ready to discover the secret to serving your members through emails? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:46) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (4:45) Did Mike really once perform magic in Vegas?(6:54) Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members. (9:15) Introducing the Weekly Digest email. (10:42) Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea. (13:46) Building relationships with your members. (15:26) The benefits of segmenting your members. (17:42) The key ingredients to the Weekly Digest. (24:13) Subject line of the week with Mike and Callie.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Why email marketing is crucial for your paying membersContrary to what a lot of people think, selling your membership isn't the finish line – it’s the starting pistol! That's right - it's not enough to get people inside your membership. Once they're there, you need to keep them subscribed - month after month and year after year. You need to market beyond the sale and give your members a reason to stay and use what they’re paying for. And the emails you send are critical in doing that.The challenge here is that typically you have a lot to tell them about. You have logistical emails (like reminders for live calls), payment receipt emails, emails to let people know about new content, etc. As the membership site owner, you're going to take up a lot of your members’ inboxes. And all the prompts and reminders to come and get engaged with your membership can get drowned out. So the simplest solution is to send what Mike and Callie call a Weekly Members Digest email.The Weekly Digest emailThis email is in addition to your welcome or onboarding sequence – it’s all about marketing after the sale. It’s what’s going to remind your members that you exist. Because often, when people first join a membership, they're excited and have a good look around. But then life gets in the way, weeks go by, and they haven't had a chance to log in again. So the Weekly Digest helps you remind members that you exist. It brings them back to the site and gets them to log in and feel excited again. It also enables you, as the membership owner, to keep members up to date with any content you’ve just added and signpost future value by letting them know what’s going to happen in the following week, for example.Plus, it's a chance to highlight your community and share your members' wins and progress, which in turn allows you to inspire and motivate more members. It's just one email, but it allows you to do a range of really cool things!Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome ideaIt's important you send this email every week on the same day and at the same time – for Mike and Callie, it’s on a Saturday. That creates a routine for your members – a ritual and a habit. They go into their day expecting it, and if they spend no other time on your membership over the week, this is the trigger for them to go and log in. In essence, the Weekly Digest allows your members to realise the value of your membership, even if they don’t access it too often. It enables them to keep up to date even if they’re not currently in a position to consume your content.With most memberships, there’s a lot of content being shared. So the Weekly Digest allows you to curate what you think they need to see in any given week. It also allows you to hand-pick the conversations that are happening in the community because otherwise, they might get lost. And if you’re segmenting your members based on their interests, you can also use conditional content to direct them to certain conversations based on what you know they're interested in and what their needs are.The Weekly Digest helps your members get to the most important content for them as quickly as possible. It's a service you're providing them - you're offering the convenience of a shortcut in their inbox with the key information they need.Building relationships with your membersMike and Callie shared that there have been times when they were travelling and the

This week we're giving you something a little different - something that has less to do with email marketing and a lot more to do with how to run a business strategy session for your business. And to help you do just that, we're taking you behind the scenes of our own business strategy weekend in Manchester. Ready to be inspired? Because this will no doubt help you come up with some great ideas for your own business.  SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:24) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(4:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (5:04) Booking our business strategy session 'weekend'.(9:59) Creating the agenda for our business strategy session.(11:36) Are you the bottleneck in your business? (14:55) Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff.(18:19) The Love - Happy - Hate exercise.(20:59) Create the business YOU want.(29:27) Working less IN the business and more ON it. (36:09) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free - we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Our business strategy session 'weekend'A few months ago, we booked an Airbnb in Manchester to run our very first business strategy session. We went for two days during the week, but we like to call it a 'weekend'. Because, why not? This trip obviously came to a cost, but we wanted to give ourselves a bit of a treat and also get value from the experience. So we booked first-class train tickets and picked an apartment over a budget hotel. Why? Because we wanted somewhere comfortable and not cut any corners. We invested in this, and that put us in the mindset of working hard for it.We chose a place where we could get our heads down and do a lot of work - rather than sitting with bits of paper on a bed. Our apartment had three different areas we could work in. And that meant we could keep ourselves refreshed and our brains active instead of being trapped in a tiny room. Why Manchester? Because we purposely chose to be away from home. We wanted to get into a different mindset - think about the business in a different way. And why not make this a bit of a holiday, too? We made some time for fun, always went out to eat (rather than cooking in the apartment), and had a nice meal and some cocktails too.Another thing we did was to ask our team not to contact us unless something was on fire. Our CTO could contact us in case of an emergency, of course. But otherwise, we signed off from Slack for two days. And this gave our team some independence but also ensured we weren’t going to deal with day-to-day business questions and issues. Creating the agenda for our business strategy sessionOn the lead-up to our business strategy session, we both kept a Google Document where we listed things to discuss in Manchester. What did we put on there? We added anything that we felt was problematic in the business, like things that we were doing that we thought perhaps we shouldn't do. But we were also on the lookout for opportunities for growth - ways to maximise the profitability of the business.So we started with a very disorganised agenda for this meeting. And on the way to Manchester, we condensed it down and categorised all the items into sections. Are you the bottleneck in your business? The main thing we wanted to discuss was the fact we both felt we'd been the bottleneck in our business. We wanted to understand whether that was true and then figure out how to change this. For example, we were approving every graphic for the podcast or social media, every sales page, every lead magnet, etc. There were lots of areas in our business where our staff always seemed to be waiting for us because of how we'd set things up. Everything felt slower than it needed to be, and we felt bad for it. Plus, we worried that this could end up affecting our members and customers. It never did (because we’re both acutely aware of customer experience), but as we continue to grow our business and serve more customers, we knew these problems would only be amplified. So we started looking at the systems and people to ensure these issues wouldn’t escalate. And this is something worth remembering for anyone running a business – any issues you have now are only going to be amplified as your business grows.Ultimately the whole responsibility for our business lies with us. But during our time away we started looking at ways to delegate some of the day-to-day responsibilities so that all the decisions and checking of various areas of our business wouldn’t be with us anymore. In other words, we started thinking about how we could

Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital who told us all about using your blog and leveraging Google to build a whopper of an email list. So if you think blogging is dead, have tried and failed to start and maintain a blog (much like us), but want to understand how to use blogging for email list building, you just HAVE TO check this interview out. Ready to learn some tricks that will completely change the way you look at blogging? Let's do this!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (:) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(:) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (:) Did Martin and Lyndsay really meet at the Peter Pan ride queue at Disneyland Paris?(:) The benefits of turning podcast show notes into blog posts.(:) How to make your business blog more effective.(:) How to come up with effective blog post ideas.(:) What if you don't like writing?(:) How can your blog posts be found on Google?(:) How often should you blog in order for your efforts to be effective?(:) Subject line of the week with Martin and Lyndsday from Jammy Digital.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. The benefits of turning podcast show notes into blog postsAs you probably know, we’ve been podcasting for a while. In the past, we tried different types of show notes to see what would work well, but over the last year we've been providing a blog post for each podcast episode (yep - that's the one you're reading right now) that people can skim-read. This is perfect for anyone who doesn't like listening to podcasts or can't at a particular point in time. This in-depth article allows anyone to still access the information, even if they don't listen to the podcast. Pretty cool, right? So this is great in terms of user experience, but also, from our point of view, we've definitely noticed a rise in traffic from the search engines. And as a result, we're getting more people opting into our email list (because we give our readers plenty of opportunities to do this while they read our content). And that's because when it comes to search engines, podcasts aren't massively discoverable when it comes to individual episodes. Google likes written content a lot more, so it's about leveraging what the search engines favour in order to make your content more accessible. Repurpose your content to achieve your business goalsSo it's not just a matter of content repurposing. It's about tapping into what's going to make the biggest difference in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. And that's different for every business. But for Martin and Lyndsay, as well as for us, it’s about getting more email subscribers and building an audience of people that you can pre-qualify. How? They’re consuming your content. So they know you’re right for them. And that's why they’re comfortable handing over their email address to get more content from you. And creating written content (over podcast or video) is the best way to do this.So let's say you do create other types of content - a podcast, a YouTube channel, or do a lot of Facebook lives. Should you drop everything to start a blog? Absolutely not! You can do what we did - we didn't add blogging as an extra piece of work we do. Instead, we continued to produce our podcast and a member of our team takes that episode and turns it into a blog from the same piece of content. And then you can easily embed these different pieces of content into your blog, which is a piece of web real estate that you own.How to make your business blog more effectiveIf you have a blog, there are ways to make it more effective and attract more visitors. And the main tip Martin and Lyndsay have to help you be found on Google is to answer the questions your customers and audience are asking you. Sometimes these questions can make us uncomfortable, especially when they're around price. But being upfront and answering them means you’re going to get found on Google.  And that's because you know people are searching for this information, and your competitors might not be answering them and choose to shy away from those topics. So you're more likely to get rankings and traffic that way.You can address the questions people have in the decision-making stage, for example. They're trying to decide which option to go with, and a lot of businesses don't focus on this. Instead, they create content that tends to fit into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. So answering these types of questions can help you s

Welcome to another episode of The Email Marketing Show! We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and this week, we’re exposing six lies your email marketing platform might be feeding you – and what to pay attention to instead.Useful Episode ResourcesRecent episodesHow to Come Up With Your Next Email Campaign (Without Overthinking It)The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.Why You Need to Avoid These Email Marketing Mistakes. FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero BlueprintWant more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Fifi?Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people – those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

We're joined today by one of our members, Dan Greef. Dan runs a gluten-free, keto, low carb, low sugar (or rather, no sugar) bakery. They make cakes and sweet treats that won’t spike your blood sugar levels. Today, Dan shares his experience with email marketing and tells the story of how he made a whopping £9k in just ONE day, sending simple emails and using the strategies we teach inside our membership, The League. We had a few mic-drop moments in this interview. Are you ready to find out how Dan made awesomeness happen from his email list? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:09) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.(3:26) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (4:37) How Dan got started with email marketing. (7:18) What did Dan's email marketing look like before he joined The League?(11:20) What happened when Dan joined The League?(15:36) What impact did email marketing have on Dan's business?(19:40) How does Dan feel about his email marketing now?(24:04) Dan's future plans for his email marketing. (26:14) Does Dan's email marketing take up too much of his time? (31:33) Subject line of the week.How Dan got started with email marketingWhile Dan started his business from his kitchen table a few years ago, things drastically changed for him during the lockdown, when orders started coming in thick and fast. Dan now has dedicated premises and staff. Like Kennedy, Dan is dyslexic and finds public writing terrifying. So email marketing was the last thing Dan ever wanted to do! Before he got started with email marketing, Dan used to do frequent Facebook lives and in January 2021 he'd started running paid ads. But with a fairly low-priced product (the average spending per order being around £27), Dan realised this model wasn't sustainable for him. With regards to his email marketing, Dan would do what most people do - send out broadcasting emails. They'd be full of pictures and offers and not have much in there other than a big flashy BUY button. But when he found our podcast and then started learning our techniques, everything changed. That's when Dan realised he loves email marketing! What did Dan’s email marketing look like before he joined The League?Every Friday Dan does a special restock sale, so he sends out an email to tell his list what’s in the restock. Like many others, Dan wasn't keen on emailing more than once a week - he was worried people might unsubscribe. He had a fairly big list, and he didn’t want to lose what he calls his 'email collection'.And Dan admits that back then, he would have lost a lot of people if he'd started emailing more. Because all he was sending out were sales emails, where he'd say what new flavours were coming out. Dan had nothing else to say. But now he does - and not because his life has changed, but because he realised he can say things. Email marketing has given him a voice. Before he joined The League, Dan had a few automations set up, but (to his admission), they were salesy. Now his emails allow him to build rapport with subscribers and have conversations. And people are more likely to buy from him because they’re no longer just buying a product – they’re buying from a person.Marketing, Dan tells us, shouldn't be about asking people to buy things. That's what Dan was doing, and that's why his email marketing wasn't working. But Dan later realised that in order to be successful, he needed to change his mindset. Because email isn’t a marketing technique – it’s a communication technique and a community builder.Pretty awesome stuff, right?What happened when Dan joined The League?Dan joined The League in the summer of 2021 and spent the first few months watching our videos and learning. Soon enough, he started to experiment with sending out emails twice a week and adding some personality into them. His early emails didn’t do much, he says, but they helped him learn the way.When Dan decided to put his prices up, he was terrified. He thought his list wouldn't react well. But after getting some advice in one of our coaching calls, he decided to use one of our campaigns to approach the price increase. Instead of apologising and being on the defensive, the campaign allowed Dan to bring his customers with him. Dan explained why the prices were going up (to pay for the ingredients), and customers loved his honesty and the respect he showed them. That's why they went with him. Dan's sales increased because the campaigns allowed him to build trust, rapport, and honesty. And these are the basis of any relationship, which is why his campaigns were so successful. We have to remember that email marketing is not us vs them - it's about taking the subscribers on a journey with you. We don't need to convince people to buy what we sell. It’s not some sort of arm wrestle where the business needs to convince the customer to give them money. As business owners, we're on a journey. And we need to take our customers with us, j

In today's special episode, we want to share some strategic-thinking processes to help you decide whether your messaging should change in a crisis. When something big happens in the world, and it affects everyone on a large scale, it can seem like everyone has a strong opinion on it. So how can we make the decision about what to change? And should we, at all? There's no right or wrong here. This isn't about us telling you what you should or shouldn't do. It's not even about us telling you what we think you should do. It's simply to help you decide what's right for you, your personality, your business, and your customers. It’s about helping you have more information to make the decision. Because the choice is yours, and so it should be!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (x:xx) The two types of content you can share in a crisis. (x:xx) Does what's going on affect you?(x:xx) Does the crisis affect what you teach and what you sell? (x:xx) Does it affect your audience?(x:xx) Do you have anything to say?The two types of content you can share in a crisisWe think there are two different types of content you can choose from when it comes to your email list or your social content. These are:Supportive content. This could be something as small or simple as putting up the flag of the country, an image or a video, or sharing information. It’s content in support of the cause.Escape content. In a time of trauma, or when things can be difficult for people, we all need some sort of escapism to support our mental health or our family's health to allow us to carry on. That escape is something your brain needs, in order to have some recovery time. So escape content is any type of content that allows people to think about something different - to give their minds a rest.And the great news is that you can change which type of content you share as time goes on or as things unfold, your learning progresses, and you gain more knowledge. You can switch things around or mix your content up based on what feels right at any given moment. So if you're wondering whether your messaging should change in a crisis, this is something to bear in mind.Kennedy, for example, has a strong background in entertainment, so he’s much more inclined to provide content that helps people escape. When people go and see him live, he makes them laugh – he helps them relax and recharge so they’re more equipped to make the hard decisions that need making in their own life or business. Providing escape content taps into his natural ability. But this particular piece of content you're reading, for example, is one that allows us to support our audience.So to help you decide what to do, how your messaging should change in a crisis (if at all), and what type of content to share, we put together some questions for you to consider.Questions to help you decide whether your messaging should change in a crisis1. Does what’s going on affect you?Of course, any type of crisis will affect us all - mentally and emotionally, if not physically. Are you and your audience lucky enough to be somewhere out of conflict? Or is this having a direct impact on your life?This is where you have the opportunity to choose whether you want to shine a light onto the people who are being affected or whether you want to continue to provide that escape. Because as this situation unfolds, there are still people who will be going to the theatre to watch a comedian who'll make them belly laugh. There are still people who are going to the cinema and watching films. That's all still happening – the world doesn't pause.Decide how to use your platformIt's easy for us to think that because we have an audience online and a platform (whether that’s your social media audience or your email list, for example) we have a moral right to use that platform in some way when something like this occurs. But it's important to be careful. The fact you’ve built a platform only means you’re good at harvesting an audience – at running ads and getting people to opt-in for something of value, or posting content that encourages people to follow you on social media, for example. It doesn’t mean you suddenly have to turn into a politician!We've all built an audience (large or small) around the thing we’re passionate about and are experts in. That doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in politics if that’s not what you do. We certainly aren’t, and no one should expect you to be one either. People aren’t coming to your Instagram to get the latest breaking news about a crisis. So remember that the pressure is off – you don’t have to have the answers.  You don't have to be the leader of the voice. You can decide to show support if you want to, or you can continue to be the escape.Do you want to bring this crisis into your content? Once you’ve worked out if the crisis affects you, you need to decide whether you want to bring it into your content or not. This will help you decide if and how your messaging should change in a

How many email marketing sequences do we need for our business? What are the critical email campaign examples you should have in place?We're Kennedy and Carrie, and here are the 7 email campaigns we think every business should have.Ready to take notes? (And, most importantly, take action?)SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:38) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (3:04) Take action - build one campaign at a time. (5:07) Why are campaigns with multiple emails more effective? (12:40) 1. A delivery sequence. (15:40) 2. A welcome sequence. (19:23) 3. A direct sales sequence. (22:37) 4. A content-led sequence. (27:57) 5. An objection handling sequence. (33:19) 6. A risk reversal sequence. (34:20) 7. A subscriber engagement sequence. (39:01) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Take action - build one campaign at a timeThe email campaign examples we're giving you here are the ones we think you must have in your business, but don’t get overwhelmed by this advice. Build one campaign at a time and then improve them later because you cannot optimise what doesn’t exist!We cannot predict perfection, so we should stop waiting for it - we can only polish our progress. So don't wait to start your email marketing until you have all the sequences fully written, optimised, and reviewed. You'd be delaying action and creating a noble obstacle. Just get something out there because, with email marketing, you’re building relationships with people. We need to stop acting like every email is a performance!Why are campaigns with multiple emails more effective? Some campaigns could have as few as one email, but you can add as many emails as you want to a sequence. Some of our campaigns are made up of up to 30 emails - it depends on what they are and what they do. A sequence of multiple emails will always outperform one single email. That's because none of us is getting a 100% open rate on our emails (not even Google!) Even if you’re getting a healthy 40% open rate, 60% of your subscribers are still not seeing those emails.Also, we are all inspired by and connect with different things. If you tell someone that a particular offer is expiring soon, they might buy because they're motivated by loss. But the same email might not work for someone who's motivated by different things. Instead, you might be able to get their attention by offering a bonus, for example. Having a sequence of emails in a chain with time delays between them always outperforms a singular email.Why you should pre-write and automate your email campaignsWe recommend you pre-write and automate your email sequences because, that way, they’ll perform for you no matter what's happening in your life or business. Having automated email sequences gives you flexibility. Your pre-written emails are an asset - not a liability!If you spend time sending out broadcast emails, you can never use that email again, and you won’t get that time back. But if you write your emails into automated campaigns that every subscriber in your list will receive, you're building an asset that’s going to serve you time and time again. Automated campaigns are effective not only because they help you make sales, but also because they allow you to deepen the relationship with your subscribers (or help you re-engage them). It depends on the point of the campaign.The key is to build your email campaigns as an asset that compounds and serves you for as long as you need it to – not just for the time it takes you to do the work. When you write and schedule emails, you have the systems and automations already in place. And they keep working for you even when you can't, for whatever reason. Write your emails when you feel your boldest and bravest self, and pre-programme that content to go out regardless. That way, your emails will do the heavy lifting for you. They can act as a staff member, i.e. a hugely powerful asset in your business that allows you to keep going when you can't.So what are the 7 email sequences you should have in your business?1. A delivery sequenceYou need a simple, engaged sequence that delivers whatever people want to download from you. Even if you’re giving away that product for free (i.e. a lead magnet), treat it with reverence – don’t undervalue it because it’s free. People will decide on the value of something based on how you treat it. They might not be paying money for it, but they're giving you their email address. And data is currency. So show people that what they get in return is valuable to them.Remember that you need a delivery sequence for every product (free or paid-for) that you give out. Send people what you said you'd send them, and keep hyping that. Don’t even refer to your lead magnet as a freebie, if you can avoid it. Because people paid for it with their data and attention. And once they download it, you want them to ask you what’s next.If you're getting started, a

Do you batch your emails? Can batching improve your email marketing? Does it make the process any easier or quicker?We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and these are some of the questions we answer in this podcast episode because we’ve all been there - staring at a daunting list of emails to send, not knowing where to begin.Let's go!Useful Episode ResourcesRecent episodesWarning: 6 Lies Your Email Marketing Platform Is Telling YouHow to Come Up With Your Next Email Campaign (Without Overthinking It)The Surprising Thing That REALLY Impacts Your Email Deliverability.FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. Join our FREE Facebook groupIf you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero BlueprintWant more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Fifi?Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people – those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the psychology of marketing and the 9 things we use in all our email campaigns) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know! 

How can you write better emails? Do you think your emails are boring? Do you need to be funny? Or should you try and be more interesting? And if so, how?We're Kennedy and Carrie, and we're sharing the little things you can do to make your email marketing less boring.Ready? Then buckle up!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:30) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (3:05) Make everyday life sound interesting. (4:35) Take people on a journey with you. (10:27) Stay relevant to your audience. (13:37) Deliver value (and selling is value!) (17:37) Send emails using your name (not your company's). (18:41) Show up regularly and don't shy away from expressing opinions. (22:37) Tell stories (and start from the action). (26:16) Join The Email Hero Blueprint.(26:33) Subject line of the week.Useful Episode ResourcesRelated episodesEVERYTHING You Need To Know About Email Marketing And Storytelling To Write Emails That Sell Like Crazy.Email Marketing Success: How Isabelle Lesschaeve Made An Extra $10,000 With Our Paparazzi Flash Sale Campaign.Tap Into The Mind-Blowing Power Of Familiarity Exposure Psychology In Your Emails To Boost Sales In Your Business.FREE list to improve your email marketingIf you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.Join the FREE Facebook groupDo you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.Try ResponseSuite for $1This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.Join The Email Hero Blueprint Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.Want to connect with Carrie?You can find Carrie on her website or at Fully Leveraged Business. Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcastThanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to write better emails that aren't boring) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.And please do tell us! What do you really fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

So you started sending more emails to your subscribers and now you're getting 'hate mail'. That's right - some people are replying with complaints and negative feedback. And how do we deal with those? Laura Belgray, the founder of Talking Shrimp® and co-creator of The Copy Cure with Marie Forleo, has been a professional writer for over two decades and has won big awards for her work. In this conversation, she tells us everything we need to know to turn problems into opportunities.Because she is The Queen of turning haters into sales. Want to know how it's done? Let's hear it from Laura. SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:25) Want to get more sales from your email marketing?(3:33) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (4:07) Can Laura hold her own on a skateboard or did she appear in the Sesame Street theme on TV?(6:09) What kind of 'hate' emails does Laura get?(8:25) What to do when you receive emails from 'haters'. (11:29) Let go of the people who aren't interested in buying what you sell!(15:22) How to turn 'hate email' into a piece of content to support your launch.(20:37) How to turn 'hate emails' into evergreen content.(23:35) 'Haters' are like hecklers - they just want significance.(28:34) Subject line of the week with Laura Belgray.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you – it's really cool and it's FREE (yes, we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need those clicks on the things that you're selling!So we've got 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. The kind of 'hate emails' Laura gets  One thing we have in common with Laura is using stories as a way of communicating with our audiences. Sure, that makes us a little vulnerable because when you share stories and experiences from your own life and people don't like them, their 'hate' can be directed towards you. So what kind of 'hate' are we talking about here? Oh, let's see. Laura was told her emails were lame and totally sucked, for example. Or that she emails too much and she should 'slow her roll'. And even that people are trying to unsubscribe, but there's no link (an absolute lie!)Sometimes these comments are so ridiculous that they're easy to brush off. But sometimes they sting. And Laura admits she's sometimes tempted to write back and be reactive about the situation. But...There's a better way to do things. What to do when you receive emails from hatersThe right thing to do, Laura explains, is to avoid responding straight away. Don't defend yourself - don't waste your time telling people why they're wrong. It’s okay to lose these 'haters' from your list because they're not the people you want!Instead, Laura does something constructive - she will showcase these comments. She’ll take a screenshot, copy the words, put them into an email and social media posts, and she’ll share with her audience. She might admit she was hurt by the negative comments sometimes, but she’ll also talk about why what people say is wrong and share value with her audience in the process. And do you know why her audience loves it when she does this? First of all, people like to see how we handle things we’re afraid of - things that might happen to them too. Because if you're someone who emails often and is good at this, you'll get these sort of emails too. Truth is - the better you are at something, the more people are going to 'hate' you!How sharing 'hate' emails with your audience impacts youIt's also interesting for people in your audience, Laura says, to see how a person they respect handles the process to turn problems into opportunities. And when you admit that negative words have an effect on you, it's relatable and comforting to your audience. Equally, if you show why you're not bothered by these comments, there will be people on your list who can relate to that.When people in your audience see you handle criticism well, they rally around you - they get on your side and defensive on your behalf. If the ‘hater’ is complaining you sell too much, you might have people react by buying! Because they're on your list to buy from you, and they'll prove it to you by buying your products or services. Let go of the people who aren't interested in what you're sellingLaura knows that the more you email, the more you sell. The more you get your message out to people, the more people you'll help or delight. So by emailing more, you're creating such a positive effect that it’s worth the trade-off of losing some 'haters'. Because the more emails you send, the more unsubscribes you're going to get. But, as we always say, unsubscribes are a good way of cleansing your list. The people who leave are people who don't want to hear from you - they aren't interested in what you have to say or sell. So you don't want them on your

Did you know we started an email marketing agency? If you didn't, you're about to find out why we started one, who it's for, and how it could help you.So if you're curious to find out whether we could take care of your email marketing for you, read on (or click play to listen!)SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our FREE download Click Tricks.(3:38) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?(4:37) Why we stopped our first email marketing writing agency.(6:55) Do one thing at the time (but not forever).(11:00) It's about delegation - not abdication!(14:10) The minimum viable version of our email marketing agency.(15:47) Why we only work with specific types of businesses.(18:26) Who is our email marketing agency for?(21:21) If you're interested in working with us, check out our application form!(23:22) Subject line of the week.Want to get more sales from your email marketing?We put a little something together for you - it's really cool and it's FREE (yes, we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need those clicks on the things that you're selling! So we've got 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. Why we stopped our first email marketing agencyNews flash! We've just started an email marketing agency. But this isn't even the first time we've done this! In fact, we used to have an email marketing agency, but we closed it down. You see, when we first started this business, having an agency was the logical thing to do. So we did. We'd work with clients, plan an effective strategy and implement email marketing campaigns for them. But there was a downside. We wanted to help more people than we had time to. Plus the investment was prohibitive for small businesses and course creators. And those were the very people we wanted to help because we have a background in creating online courses. So to help more people we created our membership, The League. This is where we help course creators, coaches, membership site owners, and other small businesses to do their own email marketing. So we went all-in on the membership and moved away from the email writing agency.Do one thing at the time (but not forever)We very much subscribe to this idea of doing one thing at the time. But that doesn't mean you do just that one thing forever! We love The League, but we also believe that in business you have to take the time to do one thing right and then move on. This is how we get so much done - separately and together - in our businesses. We do one thing, get it up and running quickly, get it refined (that means automated or systemised), and then move on and do the next thing.We like to use the analogy of a circus performer spinning plates. It can look like mayhem at first. But the way they do it is very systemised. They get one plate spinning until it's perfect and then move on to the next one. Once they have all the plates spinning, they just need to give them a little wiggle to keep them going.It's the same for some of the bits of our businesses. We have people in charge of parts of our businesses and will jump on a meeting once a month to check how things are. So here's a key lesson we learnt - get one thing going and do it quickly. If it doesn't work, you can close it down and move on and do something different.So now that we have our membership up and running, and we've systemised that process, we know when to turn up for our deliverables to serve our members, and we're ready to move on to the next thing in our business, which is how to help people who want an affordable way to have their email marketing taken care of for them. Remember it's delegation - not abdication!The fact we're happy with where our membership The League is (at its core) doesn't mean we're leaving it behind! Quite the opposite! We’re constantly working to improve it and add to it. We never take our eyes off it - we'd never abandon it. Delegation or systemisation doesn't mean abdication – you can’t close your eyes and assume a plate is still spinning. Because if you do, sooner or later, you’ll hear the sound of that plate on the floor. And you don’t want that.So when we first started planning out our email marketing writing agency we were super clear about the fact we wanted to deliver good results and a great quality product for our clients. But at the same time, we still wanted to run and serve The League, produce our podcast (The Email Marketing Show), and fulfil our other existing commitments. These were our conditions. The minimum viable version of our email marketing agencySo the first thing we asked ourselves when we started putting our email marketing agency together was to work out what the minimum viable version of it looked like. In the past, we’d been guilty of building huge elaborate processes that took lots of work, time, e

Today we have Sheila FG on the show, who is part of our membership, The League. Sheila helps podcasters and event owners find sponsors for their events. She's been in business for years, but it's only recently that she started creating products for her business and pivoting into coaching and consultancy. This is a fantastic email marketing case study of how Sheila got started and got results by emailing her list. Ready to find out how your business could transform, too? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:16) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?(6:49) Sheila's email marketing before she joined The League.(10:35) The changes Sheila implemented when she joined The League.(13:04) How Sheila's business has changed since she started email marketing.(14:29) How Sheila feels about her email marketing now.(16:10) The things that made the biggest impact on Sheila's email marketing.(17:51) What's next for Sheila's email marketing? (18:30) Has email marketing become a full-time job for Sheila?(19:58) Can email marketing work for YOU?(21:30) Subject line of the week.Sheila's email marketing before she joined The LeagueLike many people in business, Sheila only started thinking about her email list a bit more seriously when she started selling products. Before that, she wasn't sure what to email her audience about. She didn't have a framework, and, in her own words, she felt awkward. She didn't know what her subscribers would want to receive from her and felt uncomfortable with the idea of only sending promotional emails. Plus, with some big-name digital marketers and speakers on her list, she suffered from Imposter Syndrome too. Why would they want to hear from her? After all, Sheila was only just starting out in the email marketing space while they were seasoned and established.Before joining The League, Sheila would typically put together a sponsorship package and email the event out to her list of sponsors from her Gmail account. She didn't use marketing automation at all, and she found the back-and-forth communication time-consuming and not efficient at all. She'd lose track of conversations, and it felt a lot like 'busy work'.The changes Sheila implemented when she joined The LeagueThe first thing Sheila did when she joined The League was to start sending regular emails. Although her emails don't go out daily yet, she emails frequently. She has a Google Doc where she saves any ideas for email newsletters and enjoys finding topics to talk about that have a business lesson behind them.Another thing Sheila started doing was to include links in her emails - something she’d not done before. She now adds multiple places to her emails where people can interact with her, including in her signature. That way, all the areas of her 'marketing machine' now feed to each other. For example, her email list feeds into her Facebook group and vice-versa. She'll often share a post in her Facebook group encouraging people who aren't on her list to join, so they can receive her daily emails.Sheila also implemented automated email campaigns, and she loves that. Once they're done, she doesn't have to worry about that side of things.  How Sheila’s business has changed since she started email marketingNow, Sheila has people joining her list that she doesn’t recognise – she has no idea where or how they found her. Plus, she gets responses or questions from her subscribers. That's led to actual conversations with people, and it's great for Sheila to know that there's someone out there reading and taking notice.How Sheila feels about her email marketing nowSheila now wants to get more marketing campaigns in place in order for her email marketing to run on autopilot. She also wants to start tagging her subscribers to gain more clarity on who's on her list, what they do, and where they are in their journey with her.Sheila's email marketing may still feel like a work-in-progress, and she admits she has a long way to go. But she feels a lot better about it. She says email marketing is now fun work because she can see results almost immediately - there's a progression there. Now that she's using email campaigns and automation, she can spend more time focusing on growing her business.What had the biggest impact on Sheila's email marketing? Taking action and being consistent is what gave Sheila the biggest results. In particular, she noticed how well her email list and Facebook group work together by sending people from the group onto her list and vice-versa. But also, getting responses from people was a game-changer for Sheila. Out of everything she's learnt and implemented since joining The League, Sheila would advise anyone who's getting started with email marketing to prioritise emailing consistently every day. "The more you do it, the easier it gets," Sheila says. Consistency also helps with generating regular conversations.Adding links to your emails is also important to help you figure out where you get more clicks,

How do you improve your email deliverability? What can damage your sender's reputation? How can you make sure your emails land in your subscribers' inboxes?We're Kennedy and Carrie, and we're here to share the truth about all the surprising things that affect your email deliverability so you can have better results.Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:33) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. (2:21) What is 'email deliverability'? (5:06) The technical things that impact your email deliverability. (7:40) Using too many images. (9:49) More reasons for not using too many images in your emails. (13:55) Having little or no engagement with your emails. (16:26) Using 'spammy' words. (21:00) What can you do to improve your email deliverability? (23:03) Keep your list clean.(24:57) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]What is 'email deliverability'?Let’s say this first - nothing will affect your deliverability like not sending enough emails! You can only improve your email deliverability if you send emails! No one gets them if you don’t send them, right?With that said, when we talk about deliverability, we refer to the ability to get your emails into people’s primary inboxes so they can see them, open them, and click the links inside them to go and buy your products and services.You can put great effort into learning how to write great emails with effective subject lines. But if your emails end up in people’s spam folders or are blocked altogether, you won't get any results with your email marketing. You need to ensure that your emails are delivered. So we're sharing the email best practices for you to bake into your everyday processes to improve your deliverability.For this, we assume the people on your email list have chosen to be there. This means you haven't gone onto the Internet and scraped email addresses or bought an email list illegally. The premise of this advice is that you do the same email marketing we do - i.e. opt-in, permission-based marketing. In other words, someone’s seen a good reason (such as a lead magnet) to join your email list, and they've voluntarily given you their email address and permission to send them emails. Because if not, when people start receiving emails from someone they don't know, they'll be quick to hit the spam button.The technical things that impact your email deliverabilityBefore you start emailing people, there are a few technical parameters you need to set up regardless of how big your list is or what niche you’re in. These are:SPF (Sender Policy Framework).DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).And DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).We’re not going into detail, but we suggest you research how to set them up or hire someone to do it for you. All you need to know is that setting these values up helps validate your reputation as a sender to ensure your emails are delivered securely and consistently. These parameters verify you can legitimately send emails from your website. They're measures that exist to protect people, so don't skip this step.If you’re in our Facebook group and have any doubts, come and ask. And if you are inside our programme, The Email Hero Blueprint, we have tech calls where we answer these types of questions.So what else impacts your email deliverability?1. Using too many imagesThings such as using large images or GIFs in your emails might impact your deliverability. But that's if you use them all the time. Think of deliverability as a scoring system. Doing something 'wrong' occasionally doesn't mean your email marketing is doomed! Most of the time, you'll be fine. You won't be immediately blacklisted and put in Gmail jail. Using images or GIFs here and there isn't going to hurt your deliverability if you're otherwise getting good engagement.However, regularly putting lots of massive images in your emails (especially if they’re not compressed and end up being sent as attachments) isn’t great for your deliverability. For the most part, you want your emails to be text and links. And this isn’t just for email deliverability. It’s also (and mainly) because emails that are sent by people don’t have lots of graphics or heavy layouts – that’s what business emails look like. We want to fall into the category of personal relationships here. We want our subscribers to focus on what we mean by the words we use in the emails – not the images.More reasons for not using too many images in your emailsAnother reason not to use too many images is that you don't want people to disconnect from your message because of the images you use. Say you’re telling a story about an awful chair, and you attach a photo of it. Someone who might have the same chair (or happen to like the image of the one you shared) might be offended and not connect with what you're sharing. Instead, you want people to use their imagination and decide for themselves what ‘an awfu

Do you worry about your unsubscribe rate? Do you obsessively log into your email marketing software to check it and then panic over it? If you do, you need to stop that. Your unsubscribe rate is actually a good thing! Want to know why? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:48) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?(4:10) Why you want to build a list of people who want to buy from you.(6:50) Your email marketing should be on your terms.(9:06) When people unsubscribe from your list, they improve your email deliverability.(10:00) Why you should aim to make a profit from your email list as a whole (and not look at individual subscribers).(12:30) Email marketing is about building relationships with people.(13:16) Why you want to keep your email list lean.(14:46) Look at people unsubscribing from your list as the ultimate way of niching down.(16:54) Why you want to create an environment of zero competition.(18:20) Subject line of the week.Build a list of people who want to buy from youWe know getting notifications that say people have unsubscribed from your email list is scary. But it shouldn’t be. Subscribers are not Pokémon – you don't have to collect them all!The truth is when people unsubscribe from your list they're doing you a favour. Because list building isn't about having the biggest list in the world. It’s about having a list of people who want to hear from you and buy from you. If they're not going to buy from you (ever), they might as well not be on your list! You don't need more friends. And you don’t need more people on your list that drag you down.In fact, that unsubscribe link at the end of your emails is useful. It's like a self-cleaning feature. This is your email list cleaning itself and telling you who’s not interested. Your subscribers are telling you that your business isn’t for them. And that's a good thing!Your email marketing should be on your termsBecause your emails are landing in people's email inboxes, it's easy to think you are interfering with their day - that you're being intrusive. But let's turn this around for a minute. Imagine your email marketing is your house, and you’ve invited people in for a cuppa.Effectively, you've put a thing on the internet (a lead magnet) that told people you send an email out as often as you do about the things you want to sell. If people want to receive that email, they’re welcome to come on in and make themselves at home. You’ll even put the kettle on, won’t you?And if at any point they don't like what they see in your house, they can leave. And that’s okay. In case they get so upset they email you to say you’re spamming them, you can always unsubscribe them. So don’t get attached to the idea you have to make their inbox a better place. Because sure, your job is to do good email marketing. And that should make someone’s inbox better for them, but only if they want to be there and they’re interested in what your emails are all about. But remember - this is your house. You invited them. And if they don't like it, they can leave at any point or you can unsubscribe them. So write your emails for you. Send the emails you'd like to receive and then build an audience of people who want those emails. This allows you to focus on serving the needs of the people who want what you have to offer.When people unsubscribe from your list, they improve your email deliverabilityDid you know that email unsubscribes improve your deliverability? That's right. Because instead of doing things that tell Google and the other search engines that your emails aren't very good, the people who don't want your emails just leave.It's when they stay and start doing things like not opening your emails, not clicking your links, or not engaging, for example, that you need to worry. Because that's when your open rates and your click-through rates go down.It’s a bit like having a sad person in the corner of the room at your party - they're bringing the atmosphere down for everyone. But if they leave, the mood of the whole party lifts again.And it's the same for your email deliverability. The minute the people who weren't engaging with your emails leave, your deliverability rate starts to increase. And that's a big win! Aim to make a profit from your email list as a wholeAnother reason why high unsubscribe rates shouldn't worry you is that we shouldn't look at subscribers on our list individually. So if you're running ads, for example, you can calculate your ad spend and the number of subscribers on your list and work out how much it's costing you to acquire one subscriber. And if that person unsubscribes, you now think you've lost that amount. Then you start focusing on the fact that if you emailed less or differently, then people wouldn’t have unsubscribed, and you wouldn't have lost money. But that's the wrong way to look at it! Instead, you want to think about how email marketing works as a bigger picture. So if you're spending $1,000 in ads to get 200 su

Do you want to know why email marketing is right at the top of the digital marketing trends for 2022? Let's face it - if it isn't already, email marketing needs to be the top priority for your business in 2022.Ready to find out why and (most importantly) what you can do to make sure you boost your sales and make more money in 2022? Let's do this! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:46) Our incredible Keap offer!(5:22) Email marketing is the highest ROI marketing activity you can do(9:12) Email is the safest place to build your business.(12:28) Email marketing helps you convert people into paying customers. (16:01) Email marketing has the shortest lead time in turning people into customers.(17:23) There's money in your existing email list.(19:54) Email marketing technology is moving forward - you don't want to miss out!(21:02) How to get results from your email marketing in 2022.(21:50) The price to join The League is going up!(24:02) Subject line of the week.Email marketing is the highest ROI marketing activity you can do That's right. It's as simple as that. Email marketing is the highest ROI (return-on-investment) marketing activity you can do. None of the other marketing strategies out there – social media marketing, video marketing, content marketing, events, speaking, podcasting, or anything in between - will give you a whopping $42 ROI for every $1 you spend. That’s an insane amount! And, according to the experts, that's just an average! When it comes to our business, for every subscriber on our email list we earn $12 per month. To figure this out, we look at the number of people who are on our email list, calculate the amount of income and sales we make, and divide one number by the other. That gives us how much each subscriber is worth to us. We call it Earnings per Subscriber per Month (or EPSPM). And knowing how much we make per subscriber every month tells us how much we can afford to pay in order to get somebody on our email list. But also, it tells us how long we're going to be out of pocket before we break even and then make a profit.So with these kinds of numbers, should you try and skimp on the marketing automation platform you choose for your small business, for example? No! Of course, we all want a great deal - no one wants to pay more than they should. But you also need to find the most effective way to do email marketing. If you're going to shoot for that $1 in, $42 out ROI, you want the best tools for the job. Because not all of the marketing platforms out there have the technology you need. Email is the safest place to build your businessSo that's the financial side of things. But another reason you want to focus on email marketing for your business growth in 2022 is to protect yourself. That's right. Because you just can't rely on social media! There's a lot of turmoil around social media platforms. What if they all disappeared? What if you get kicked out of your social media account? We definitely saw in 2021 how all the biggest social media channels had outages and went down (most of them at the same time). When that happens, that leaves you with no way to communicate with your audience. Of course, your email marketing platform could go down too. But it's likely to get back up quickly because the problems and teams tend to be smaller. Another valid reason to prioritise email marketing is that you own the data - something that's not the case with social media. If you ever had a problem, you could download all your subscribers and send them an email from elsewhere. You can keep a backup of your data because it's yours! Plus, it's safe and it’s protected.Are we saying you should come off all social media? Not at all! Far from it. Definitely use social media to build your audience. But then point your audience to your email list. That's the place where you nurture that audience and sell. And also, don't forget to use your email list to send people back to your social media content. It helps you make it more effective. We post content both via social media (our Facebook group in particular) and via email. And that helps us boost results. But by far, the safest place to build your business is by email.Email marketing helps you convert people into paying customersAnother reason why you should prioritise email marketing in 2022 is that it takes care of conversion for you. Let's explain this with a little analogy. Imagine you have a dinner plate in front of you - that represents your business. And to run it at the scale you want to run it at, you need three things on your plate:Build an audience. You can do that using social media platforms and use those as your discovery channel. You get people who haven't heard of you before to find you. Great.Conversion. Then you want to convert that audience into actual paying customers. Delivery. For us, that means showing up to support our members inside The League of Email Marketing Heroes – our membership. It’s where we deliver

Do you use advertorials in your business? Hang on. Do you even know what advertorials are? Because not many people do (or know what these types of pre-sale pages are called!) So let's hear it from Rachel Mazza, who gives us the ins and outs about advertorials and shares some awesome examples of advertorials you'll want to start using in your business straight away to grow your email list and boost your sales. Shall we get going?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:18) Did Rachel 'accidentally' move in with lots of other people? (And did Rob REALLY mess this up?) (5:22) What are advertorials and what are they used for?(7:36) How to use advertorials to warm up your audience. (9:29) How to use advertorials to reach a wider audience.(11:08) Advertorials and content networks. (12:23) What format do advertorials need to be in? (14:25) Do advertorials come across as clickbait-y? (20:29) How long do advertorials need to be? (21:10) How do advertorials impact on your ad spend?(27:53) Subject line of the week with Rachel Mazza.What are advertorials and what are they used for?Advertorials, also known as pre-sale or interstitial pages, are the pages that go between the initial touchpoint where you first interact with the customer and the place where you want them to convert. Conversion here could mean buying your offer or joining your email list - whatever you need it to be. And the role of the advertorial is to warm people up before you ask them to take action.So let's visualise this. A prospective customer may have come across one of your blog posts or a Facebook ad for the first time, for example. Of course, you'll want to send them to your sales pages or your offer. But at this point, you're faced with a cold and skeptical audience (they don't know you yet!) so you need to get them into the right mindset by providing them with value and information before you ask them for something. The advertorial page sits between the first piece of content where the prospect might have come across your business or your content for the first time and the opt-in page where you ask them to join your email list or the sales page where you ask them to buy.All good so far?How do you use advertorials to 'warm up' your audience?In advertorials, you don't want to sell too hard. Because the goal of an advertorial is not to sell – it’s to give someone enough information to take the next step.There are a couple of ways to do this and move them to the next page.You can use anchor text. Let’s say you sell a weight loss product. You might have a line in your article that says, “Jenny lost 30 lbs before Christmas”. And that can become your anchor text, i.e. you add to that phrase the hyperlink to your opt-in page and lead magnet.Or you can use subtle CTA (Call to Action) at the bottom of our hypothetical advertorial example where you say something like, “If you'd also like to get results like Jenny, click here to get our free Seven Day Course”, for example. Just remember not to make it too promotional. When writing advertorial content, you're in a giving mindset - your audience wants to get something useful. And your job is to give them information, entertainment, or something they want to read. Because when it comes to advertorials, they're not interested in buying something - not yet.How to use advertorials to reach a wider audienceWhether you're buying ad space or trying to grow your audience organically, advertorials help you filter through the people who are interested in what you have to offer. Ultimately, these are the prospects who are more likely to convert.But at the same time, using advertorials allows you to cast a wider net. Because now that you have people coming in and showing an interest in your content, you can re-target them. So even if you have someone who doesn't take the next step with you just yet, at least you know they're interested in what you have to say. Maybe it wasn't the right time for them to buy. Or maybe they needed more touchpoints or a different angle - for example, because they're part of a different demographic.Advertorials allow you to test different ideas or angles fairly cheaply. And once you know what resonates with your audience, you can then carry those concepts through your sales pages or landing pages. You are testing ideas before you try and sell to someone. And by the time you do, you already know that these ideas resonate.Advertorials and content networksAdvertorials work with all traffic sources. They're a really effective strategy for paid ads because they allow you to lower your traffic cost while still converting more cold traffic.But you can also use content networks. This is still a type of ad, but you’re paying a company (like Taboola, Outbrain, or Adblade, for example) to place your content on a website where people will see it as sponsored content or featured content.If you think of the majority of the content that you see on websites like Buzzfeed, these are advertorial examples. It's conten

Is 2022 the year you're finally going to focus on building your email list? You might have heard us say this before, but once you've worked out how to maximise the amount of money you're making from your existing list, you need to also grow your list.  So... want some awesome strategies that will help you do that in the coming year? Let's find out what you gotta do!  SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:40) Our incredible Keap offer!(5:27) Add links to your Instagram Stories.(7:37) Use the question feature in your Facebook group.(9:04) Offer people products or services that best suit their needs.(12:37) Leverage other people's audiences.(15:42) Add a list-building element to your existing campaigns.(18:28) Become a podcast guest or deliver guest training. (20:55) Get endorsements from people.(23:16) Buy another business.(25:36) Subject line of the week.1. Link to your lead magnet in your Instagram StoriesThis is a new development with Instagram, which historically hasn't been the best out of all the social media channels to help online businesses share links. As you know, you can add a link to your lead magnets or sign-up forms in your bio - perhaps by using a tool like Linktr.ee or by creating your own custom link. But otherwise, links weren't clickable, and that's not great for list building. But now Instagram gives all their users the ability to include a clickable link in your Instagram Stories. And as a result of that, you can get a huge number of extra eyeballs directly to your landing page. So use your Instagram Stories to teach great content, share an idea or lesson, or tell a story. And then send people to check out your lead magnet by just clicking on the link. That's definitely going to boost traffic to your website and help with your email list building. 2. Use the question feature in your Facebook groupAnother great strategy to capture email addresses on social media is to use the question feature in your Facebook group. We do this in our own Facebook group - The Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You see, when people ask us to join the group, we ask people to give us their email address if they want to get some free resources from us. And when they accept to download the resources, they magically end up on our email list! Amazing, right? When it comes to list-building strategies, this is a great way to start building or growing your list and collect email addresses - because you can pretty much mention your Facebook group everywhere! Plus, Facebook's algorithm gives you some help every now and again by suggesting it to more of their users, too.Offer people products or services that best suit their needsBecause you can ask your target audience and potential customers up to three questions when they request to join your Facebook group, we recommend you use one of the questions to identify which of your products or services will be best suited for that person.For example, in our case, we might want to find out whether someone wants to learn how to do email marketing for their small business or online business (in which case we’ll tell them about our membership, The League, or our course, the Complete Daily Email Strategy), or whether they might want to have our email marketing writing agency write their emails for them. And if that's the case, we tell them about our agency, rather than our membership or courses. Remembe that people are at different stages in their journey, so offer them the products or services that best suit their needs.Once we have people's answers, we then use different custom fields in our email marketing software (Keap) and put our email list subscribers into different series of automations that take them down different routes. This way, people coming into our Facebook group and email list, will get the solution they need as soon as possible.And this is super useful because if we send our email subscribers a series of emails for products that don’t meet their needs, they disengage and unsubscribe. And no one wins. But by identifying someone’s needs as quickly as possible, we make the sale faster and also get to help people with what they truly need.3. Leverage other people's audiencesThe next tip is to build your audience. It's a hard and slow step for everyone, but it’s essential. And one of our favourite ways to do it is to leverage other people's audiences. Do you know of any other business owners who are not your competitors but work in a similar space to you? For us, it’s anyone who sells to course creators, membership site owners, and online businesses. We can team up with them, even if they don’t offer something that we teach.So figure out how to integrate your products and services into other businesses' funnels and get a piece of space on their land - it's a great strategy for lead generation. You could set up an affiliate programme or put up a banner on their thank you pages that points to your lead magnet

Ever wondered why retention is important in your membership? If you're focusing all your energy on acquiring new members, you want to know what our friend Liz Beadon has to say. Having worked with big brands like Virgin and Samsung, Liz is a retention and loyalty strategist. She works with membership and subscription site owners to help them improve their customer experience and retention rate and to grow their business.If you don't have a retention strategy just yet, you definitely want to know about Liz's framework (it's full of R's!)Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:20) Did Liz meet her husband the day she spilled a drink on him at the theatre? (4:53) Why is retention important for your membership?(6:45) How do you know if you have a retention problem? (8:20) Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?(10:42) Step 1 - Receive. (13:36) Step 2 - Reveal. (16:32) Step 3 - Refer. (20:12) Step 4 - Report. (22:14) Step 5 - Review.(25:30) Subject line of the week with Liz Beadon.Why is retention important for your membership?Running a membership is a great business model - you have lovely members who pay you every month and a regular income.But none of it is possible if you don't nurture your customer relationships. Because when you have a membership site (or any kind of subscription service) retention is key for profitability and revenue.When do you start nurturing loyalty in your membership?If you want to get technical, the process of nurturing loyalty starts with your acquisition methods. You need to make sure you're acquiring the right kind of members.But in terms of nurturing the relationship, this includes everything from the sales process to that first impression when they hit your membership site and see the welcome area. Liz calls it "a bit of an orchestra of experience to deliver that great first touch". We love that.How do you know if you have a retention problem?A lot of membership site owner will mostly focus on the acquisition of new members. But not many know whether they have a high turnover of members. Do you know how many people, month-on-month, leave your membership and cancel their subscription?There are two different ways that you can look at this.Your monthly churn, i.e. what percentage of your members leaves every month.Or (and Liz thinks this is more valuable) your cancellation rate, which is calculated by working out the percentage of people who are still there on month 1, month 2, etc. This gives you a great idea of when you might be seeing an increase in churn and tells you whether you have a retention issue at a specific part of the lifecycle.Of course, if you find you're losing more members than you are acquiring, you probably need to shift gears and focus on your retention strategies.Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?When people first join it’s important to create a really good experience so they feel they're being guided through a process. However, you want to be careful not to overwhelm your brand new members by sending way too much stuff by email.You want to properly onboard your members to make sure you're delivering a great experience and at the same time flag anyone who might be at risk of churn. And the best time to do this is right at the start. Because one of the most exciting times of someone joining your membership is the day that they subscribe. But that excitement naturally fatigues over time.So when onboarding your members, put the most important content at the start of the lifecycle and ensure you deliver a tangible win for your members within the first 2-3 weeks. Because that's the amount of time you have before someone considers cancelling.Typically, the first month sees a massive cancellation spike, so your first 2-3 weeks are an imperative point of the lifecycle to show the value of your membership. If they don't see value immediately (and either don't use the content or don't understand the membership), they will cancel. This is why thinking about retention in your onboarding process is crucial!Step 1 - ReceiveLiz uses a simple 5-step framework that highlights the checkpoints every membership owner should consider when delivering a best-in-class, memorable onboarding experience.The first step is Receive. This is all about making sure you're warmly welcoming your members through that initial email, where you include all the key information.How much information is too much? Keep it as short as it can be but as long as it needs to be. Call out the key elements of the membership, like login details, weekly calls, learning sections, etc.This is an important step because by reminding your members of the value of your membership, you counteract that buyer's remorse and cognitive dissonance that happens when people realise they’ve just spent money and start worrying they might not get the results they want. By delivering a great first email, you're 'reselling them' the membership, so they don't regret their purchase.And

We see people follow bad email practices all the time. And you know what? Doing the stuff we're going to talk about here holds you back from doing better and more effective email marketing and getting the results you want in your business. So are you ready to find out what the top email marketing mistakes you're making (and stop doing these things... yesterday?!)SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:10) Our incredible Keap offer!(6:16) Stop worrying about open rates.(7:07) Why open rates are wrong.(8:37) Stop using RE: or FW: in your subject lines.(12:42) Stop making it difficult for people to unsubscribe from your list.(14:16) Stop letting your subscribers down.(16:00) Stop using misleading subject lines.(17:13) Stop adding so many images to your emails.(19:33) Why emails with lots of images have worse delivery.(21:21) Subject line of the week.Stop worrying about open ratesThe first of the email marketing mistakes that a lot of people make is paying too much attention to open rates. Sure, this is a metric that all email marketing platforms share with you, and it's an obvious one to check. But that number is wrong. First of all, you probably assume that your open rate should be higher than it is. You see 34% and think it's rubbish, but actually, that's a really respectable open rate. So it's important to be realistic here. But most importantly, open rates cannot be tracked properly, so they're just plain wrong! Some Android devices are already blocking the ability to track open rates, which means your emails are showing us unopened when they probably aren't. And on Apple, they’re being shown as open even if they aren't.As more and more platforms like Apple iPhone release privacy updates that block that tracking even more strictly, the open rate metric you're looking at gets less reliable by the day. And you can't be improving a wrong number!So let's go with this - open rates don't matter. Because you can't track them and you can't measure them, you can't work on growing them! It's like trying to follow a map with a blindfold on - you can't see the map or your feet! So pleeeeease stop obsessing over open rates. (Oh, and by the way, yes you do want people to open your emails, read them, click on the link, and buy. So stick to the best practices that can help you improve your open rates. But forget about the number!)Stop using RE: or FW: in your subject linesOkay, everyone needs to stop adding a fake RE: or FW: in subject lines to make it look like the email was a reply or it was forwarded when it clearly wasn't. These things are dodgy, scummy, and dishonest. And by far this is one of the biggest and more damaging email marketing mistakes we see people make.You see, stuff like this might trick people into opening your emails, but please can we all stick to doing things that are effective and ethical?Let's remember that you want people to open your emails because they see your name popping into their inbox, they know who you are and are excited to read what you have to say. When our subscribers see emails coming from Rob//Email Marketing Heroes they know it’s going to be a funny, interesting story with a valuable lesson (and an offer) in it.So let's stop trying to build relationships with people based on bullshit. We want to get people excited, show value, and make sales. But we don't want to lie to them and make them feel ripped off. Because trying to trick your audience into thinking they're already in a conversation with you by mimicking a real, transactional email is the kind of stuff that creates resistance around buying stuff online - and specifically from emails. It's because of email marketing mistakes like these that, as marketers, we all have to work harder to make the sale. And if you're doing this because you see everyone else is, please, just STOP. Of course, when it's a genuine response and you've started a real conversation with your subscribers, by all means, carry on. But don't place that RE: or FW: there intentionally to trick people into thinking something that isn't true. Not cool. Stop making it difficult for people to unsubscribeYears ago, you'd see people adding a huge amount of lines between the end of their email and the unsubscribe link that's automatically generated at the bottom of all your emails. And we see that some people are still doing that. Please stop. If you're doing this, it's one of those BIG email marketing mistakes you want to stop making.If people want to unsubscribe from your emails, just make it easy for them. Because if you don't let them go, they're not going to suddenly start liking your emails! They'll only get annoyed. And then they'll hit the spam button. Or reply to you and shout down in the email. So you aren't winning anything by making it difficult for people to unsubscribe from your list.You want to make it hard for somebody to want to leave but make it easy for them to cancel once they're ready to. So put every bit of effort into making

We know that human beings buy based on urgency. That’s why sales like Black Friday do so well – because the sale is ending soon, and the opportunity is going away. But does urgency only work if you take a product off the market? What happens if you want to keep your membership or course open all the time and avoid the stress (and all the work) that comes with product launches?We do that. Our membership, The League, is always open. And today we want to share some strategies to help you create urgency (and make those sales!) without closing the doors. Ready to find out our best-kept secrets?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:55) Why we keep our membership open all the time.(8:16) Use event-based marketing.(10:42) Add a limited-time bonus.(11:25) Increase the price.(13:30) Include topical bonuses.(15:06) Create personal urgency.(18:00) Automate your email campaigns.(20:10) Use the Complete Email Marketing strategy.(22:30) How to fix the timing issue in your marketing. (24:22) Subject line of the week.Why do we keep our membership open all the time? In our membership, The League, we don’t do product launches. We don't open the cart for a few times a year and then close the doors again. We keep it open - it's an evergreen product.Why do we do that? Because, first of all, it helps take the pressure off doing proiduct launches a few times a year. But also, we strongly believe the reason we’re in business is to help people. Our customers have a problem, and we have the solution. And what would happen if people needed our help when we're closed? That's not very good, is it? Is it okay to tell people you can’t really help them right now because you only do so on your own agenda? In our book, it’s not okay. We don't like doing that because we’re genuinely here to help people when they need help.But we know that people respond well to urgency. And if you don't do product launches at all and never close the doors to your course, programme, or membership, then what can you do?You need to make your marketing urgent.And here's how you can do that. Use event-based marketingThe first thing you can do is something called event-based marketing. This means creating ‘events’ around your marketing. So you can run campaigns that take the customer on a journey for different types of events. Examples of this could be a 5-day free challenge or a virtual summit where you sell your product as part of it, or a splinter offer, where you take something out of your membership, for example, and sell it as a one-off thing.Your job is to find interesting and different ways to wrap up your offer to create an event. So for example, if you're running a 5-day challenge, that has urgency built into it because it only runs for those 5 days. And if people miss it, they can’t join until you run it again. Does it mean that after the challenge is over, they won't be able to get into your membership or join your programme? Not at all. That stays open. But the challenge helps you create momentum. When people participate to the challenge, they follow your teachings and advice for 5 days and now feel like joining your programme is the next logical step. Of course, there are many different ways to create urgency for your evergreen product through event-based marketing. We have over 20 campaigns that help us do this, and they're all available inside The League. Add a limited-time bonusAnother strategy you can use is to add a limited-time bonus that you give to people who join before a certain date, for example. This could be a coaching session, an extra course, or some cheat sheets – your pick. The key is that these bonuses are only available for a limited time. This allows you to tap into the emotional response that human beings have to urgency. Because if your audience wants to grab this thing you're offering, they have to join by a certain deadline. Increase the price over time Something we do in our membership, The League, is to increase the price once we hit certain milestones. We did that when we reached 100 members, for example. When we're about to hit a new milestone we email our list and let them know we're increasing our prices.We then give them three days to join our membership at the existing price. And it works! It helps us create this momentum of urgency but through our marketing, rather than with product launches that mean periodically shutting the doors. Include topical bonusesThe next thing you can do if you want to create urgency around your product without doing product launches is to include some topical extras (or bonuses) for people who join by a particular date.We know someone who does this very successfully – they sell Canva templates for Instagram, and if you join before the end of any given month, you get some extra templates that are relevant for that month. Like a Halloween one in October, a Christmas one for December, or a Valentine’s Day for February. You get the gist.So what could you offer your

This week on the podcast we interviewed former Stanford marketing lecturer and best-selling author Nir Eyal. We invited Nir to share his extensive knowledge and some of the research he conducted to write his book, Indistractable, and our conversation led to some incredible time-saving tips for email marketing that you can also apply to your life and business.So if you're struggling to find the time for email marketing (or anything that matters to you) and want to know how to eliminate distraction and finally get it done, THIS. IS.IT.Ready for the penny to finally drop? Because honestly, this is a-mazing stuff! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:12) Did a member of the British Royal Family really hold a door open for Nir? (6:41) What even is 'distraction'?(11:38) What are the triggers that drive us to distraction? (13:09) The 4 strategies to becoming indistractable.(13:36) Why recognising and mastering internal triggers is important. (15:42) Taking responsibility of your emotional states.(19:00) Does accountability work?(23:36) Do consequences and incentives matter? (25:49) Why time-boxing is better than running your life on a to-do list. (31:20) Subject line of the week with Nir Eyal.What even is 'distraction'? When it comes to email marketing, one of the biggest things that stop course creators, membership owners, and coaches and consultant from getting it done is time. We say we'll get something done, but then we don't. Why don't we follow through? We claim we get distracted, but what even is 'distraction'?Nir started us off by looking at the word distraction and its opposite, which is the word traction. Traction is any action that pulls you towards the things you do with intent and moves you closer to your values to help you become the kind of person you want to become.So dis-traction is any action that pulls you further away from your values. Anything can be a distraction if it's not what you plan to do with your time. And yes, that includes those work-related things that make us feel we're being productive!And according to Nir, this is the most dangerous form of distraction - the one that tricks you into prioritising the easy and the urgent at the expense of the important work you have to do to move your business, your career, and your life forward.This means that all the things that we typically call 'distracting' (like checking social media or playing a video game) can be traction, as long as we do them according to our values and schedules.What are the triggers that drive us to distraction? Nir explains there are two kinds of triggers:External triggers. These at the 'calls to action' that come from our outside environment - the things that others ask us to do.Internal triggers. These are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from, like fearfulness, uncertainty, boredom, loneliness, stress, anxiety, etc.People tend to blame external triggers for distraction. But did you know they only account for 10% of the time we get distracted? The other 90% of the time we get distracted because of something that happens inside of us - it's because of our internal triggers. When we experience uncomfortable emotional states we look for distractions to take our minds off them.Mind-blowing, right?The 4 strategies to becoming indistractableNir explained there are 4 steps to becoming indistractable, and all of them need to be in place if you want them to work!The 4 steps are:Mastering internal triggers.Making time for traction.Hacking back the external triggers in our environment.Preventing distraction with pacts. This is where we use a pre-commitment device to stop us from getting distracted.Why recognising and mastering internal triggers is importantSo the first step to becoming indistractable is to master your internal triggers. That's because unless you know what to do when you experience emotional discomfort, you're always going to run away from those emotions and look for some form of distraction!The truth is that social media (or whatever else we blame for getting distracted) isn't the root cause of distraction. The root cause of distraction has and will always be emotional discomfort. Why? Because discomfort is the source of all human motivation. Anything we do is because of our desire to escape discomfort, which is the core driver of every action.And the mind-blowing truth is that there's nothing wrong with you! Getting distracted isn't a character flaw. It just means we haven't learnt to deal with discomfort in a way that moves us towards traction rather than distraction.Taking responsibility of our emotional statesWhen it comes to distraction, people tend to categorise themselves in two different ways - you have the "Blamers" and the "Shamers". The "Blamers" tend to blame stuff outside themselves, like technology or the news. But these things can't really be blamed because distraction existed before them! The "Shamers", on the other hand, think there must be something wrong with them.

We get asked this question all the time. What's the best email automation system? How do you pick one? And you might be surprised, but there's not one single universal answer to this question! So... want to know exactly what you need to do when you're looking for the best email marketing platform for your business?Then check this out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (4:02) What's an email automation system?(5:45) Always get the best-in-class product for your budget.(8:36) Pay now for the business you want to have in the future.(11:40) Cost vs ROI.(13:40) How to pick your email automation platform.(13:59) Why you should try out a few email automation platforms.(14:59) Check that the email automation system you want meets your needs.(15:52) Pick the email platform you prefer.(17:40) Our email automation system recommendations. (19:00) Subject line of the week.What is an email automation system? So first of all, what is an email automation system? Back in the day, they were called autoresponders - and some people still use the term. But in short, an email automation system is a platform that allows you to do clever stuff with your email list, like making decisions based on their behaviours or creating automated sequences of emails. Very handy! Always get the best-in-class product for your budgetWhen it comes to any software platforms, you have to bear in mind that none of them will do everything you want them to do. We once almost switched to one of these all-in-one platforms that will host your membership site, allow you to deliver your programmes, do your appointment scheduling, your email marketing, etc. But in the end, we found the platform was mediocre at everything and made email marketing too difficult. So our policy is to get the best-in-class product that your budget will allow. For email marketing, we use what we think is the best-in-class for the budget we have. It has to meet certain requirements around list size and email automation, for example, but it also needs to meet our budget. And we follow the same approach with all the other software products we use. So we always advise you choose the best you can afford. Because there are always going to be bigger and better things out there. But it doesn't mean they're right for you and your business.Pay now for the business you want to have in the futureHere's something we swear by. Pay now for the business you intend to have in the future and remember that email marketing will get you the highest ROI. If you’re going to do email marketing  seriously and put effort into it,  it will make you money. The problem with some of the marketing platforms out there though is that they might lure you in with a free or super-cheap account. But once you get to 10k subscribers, hosting a list with them becomes more expensive. And moving platforms then is a real pain in the neck.So the best thing you can possibly do is to commit to taking email marketing seriously right now and invest in it accordingly. Our top tip? Invest for the list you’re going to build and get an email platform that will be affordable then. Cost vs ROIThis might surprise you, but we only have a list of 4,500 subscribers. It may be sound small, but we make about $500,000 from our list. So if our email automation platform costs us around $1,800 a year ($150 per month), we're still making a large ROI. In fact, we make on average  $12 per subscriber per month (and that’s our EPSPM – or Earning per Subscriber per Month). And even if we made the industry standard average of $1 per subscriber per month, we’d still be making $54,000 a year from an annual investment of $1,800. And that's still huge! So even if you have a small list, it’s not going to cost you the earth and sky to put them on a really good email automation platform. And that’s why we think you should never be worried about your email marketing bill. If you are, it’s only because you know you're not putting your all into your email marketing. How to pick your email automation systemHere's what you don't do. Don't go to a Facebook group and ask. Because any crowdsourced answer you get is going to be useless for you. Everyone will be talking about what their favourite platform is – what’s working for them. And that’s not necessarily what’s going to work for you and your particular situation.So here’s what you do instead.Try out a few email automation systemsThe best thing to do is to take a one-month trial for the 3-5 platforms you think you might be interested in. Some of them offer a free trial, but even if they don’t, take the risk of paying for one month. Because trying a few upfront is going to make the process of choosing one faster. And it'll be less frustrating than having to move platforms later. Also, look at how many subscribers you're expecting to have in 4-5 years’ time – because that’s the number of subscribers you need to price the monthly cost at. Remember that i

Do you find the idea of email automation daunting? Well, you shouldn't! Because the right email campaigns can help you get awesome results in your business. This week on the podcast we chatted to Chelsea Martinus from Black Girl Boss Collective, who shared the best cart abandonment emails and tips to help you retarget your audience and increase your sales.Ready to find out Chelsea's best-kept secrets?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:46) Does Chelsea really watch the same three movies every New Year's Eve? (7:45) What is email automation?(9:46) Email marketing isn't something you do TO your subscribers. (11:35) What is a retargeting sequence?(13:20) What can an abandoned cart email sequence do for your and your subscribers? (16:18) Why timeliness is important in abandoned cart emails. (17:22) Why you need to personalise your email campaigns.(18:35) Why you want to 'nudge' your subscribers. (19:50) How to create the best cart abandonment emails for each of your products.(23:05) Subject line of the week with Chelsea Martinus. What is email automation?For Chelsea, automation is the key to a seamless client journey. When you're looking to connect with people who are a great fit for your community, you're not just sending them emails to convince them to buy, right? (Right?)Email marketing is a way of creating a connection with your audience. And the easiest way to do that is through automation.Why?Because email automation helps you foster a relationship with your subscribers and connect with them in a way that's authentic. It also helps you produce high-quality content that will get them to reach their goals.In other words, email automation allows you to build relationships that surpass a transaction and the exchange of money for services and goods. You can use email automation to let your community know they're not alone. This is you showing them they have someone in their corner they can turn to when they don’t know what to do in a particular area of their business or life.Have we convinced you about the benefits yet?Email marketing isn't something you do TO your subscribersUnfortunately, a lot of people think of email marketing as a thing they do TO their subscribers. But it's not like that at all! It's about the subscribers’ journey and their path through your email system - that's the big difference. Creating automated campaigns allows you to take all your customers on the same journey. Isn't that amazing?And the key to achieve this is to make your emails so good that your subscribers will want to be on our list because they're genuinely looking forward to our emails, rather than being there because they downloaded a cool lead magnet once.What is a retargeting sequence?A retargeting sequence is a campaign that gets sent when a subscriber has clicked on a product but hasn't bought it yet. We have a specific email sequence about this that we teach inside our membership, The League. We call it the Tell Me More sequence, and as Chelsea put it, it's probably one of the most underrated email automation campaigns for service providers. Because a lot of people think the automation stops when the subscriber buys. Or when they don’t. And that's not quite the case.Chelsea explains that if you're running a campaign and presenting an offer you believe in – one that’s going to help people solve problems - then you need to take a moment to re-engage and retarget those people. Chelsea refers to these campaigns as retargeting sequences or click sequences. If you work in e-commerce, you've probably heard the phrase abandoned cart sequence.What can an abandoned cart email sequence do for your business?Your retargeting  (or abandoned cart) campaign allows you to check in with any subscribers who clicked on your link but didn't buy. Do they have any questions? Why didn't they go ahead and purchase? Asking these types of questions gives you the chance to receive immediate feedback as to why your subscribers didn't buy. And it might be a very simple reason you can go and fix straight away - like the fact the link didn't work!But you asking questions works for your prospective customers too because it gives them a sense of security. It lets them know that for you this purchase is not all about the money. You're showing your subscribers that you care about what they think and what's important to them. And you're giving them an opportunity to get all their burning questions answered.We need to remember that email marketing is about people! And everyone's different - they're in different situations, in different stages of their journey, and have different questions. In an effort to re-engage your audience and answer some of those quesetions you can offer a free call, for example.  This adds another important layer of relationship building. And it gives a little extra touch to let your subscribers know there's a real person behind those emails who cares about them and their success. You getting in touch might give them the reassur

This week on the podcast we're talking about onboarding emails examples. Are you a course creator? Do you have an onboarding sequence? Or is it just one of those things that get pushed to the side at the end of a busy launch? Well, if you want to find out exactly how to use your onboarding emails to wow your customers, turn them into fans, and make more sales, we've got your back! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (3:23) What are onboarding emails?(4:30) Use onboarding emails to show the value of your product.(5:52) How to counteract buyer's remorse.(8:52) How onboarding emails help you build trust with your customers.(10:16) A sneak peak into our own onboarding emails.(13:00) How to use onboarding emails to hightlight the most foundational pieces of your course.(16:45) How to use the onboarding sequence to set the expectation there's more to learn from you.(18:43) How to make sure your onboarding sequence reflects the style and framework of your other emails.(20:44) Don't confuse your onboarding sequence with your welcome sequence. (23:12) Subject line of the week.What are onboarding emails?Onboarding emails are those emails you send to someone who's bought your online course or product. Why are we talking about onboarding email examples today? Because we know what it's like to launch something new. There's so much work that goes into it that often the part that follows the sale gets overlooked and forgotten. But onboarding emails are important. And you want to be doing a little more than just thanking your customer for buying the product and giving them the username and password to access it. So here are a few things that your onboarding emails can help you do. Show the value of your productThe very first thing onboarding emails allow you to do is to encourage your customers to look at the value of the product they bought from you. With these emails, you want to prompt people to take action and consume the content you've painstakingly put together. Because of course, you want them to get the results you promised them, right?  Counteract buyer's remorseAnother reason why onboarding emails matter is because they help you counteract buyer's remorse. I'm sure this has happened to you - you bought a product or downloaded a lead magnet, and when you did you felt excited.But then at some point remorse kicks in. You worry that for some reason you've made a bad decision and wasted your time or your money. Maybe you shouldn't have bought the thing in the first place. You've been there and felt like that, right?So this is where your onboardg email sequence comes in. You've got to use your onboarding emails to get your customers excited about their purchase. Why? Because this is your chance to reassure them they made a good decision, and sell them your product once again. You can do this by talking about the transformation they'll experience and the results they'll finally achieve. You can show them testimonials and case studies of people just like them. Because this helps you reinforce your subconscious reputation with that buyer and helps them see how they’re now closer to the outcome they want. Your job is to show them they made a great decision!Build trust with your customersAnother reason why we swear by onboarding emails (and we want to share some onboarding emails examples with you) is that they help your customers build trust with you and your business. By sending out emails after they bought from you, you show your customers you want them to succeed. A lot of business owners will sell something and then move on to the next thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that inherently, but it’s also important to make your customers looked after.Show them that you're not just about getting their money and leaving them to themselves. You put together the best content in this course and now you want them to use it and get the results. Because let’s face it – when people buy online courses, a lot of the accountability is on them. If they don't consume the content and implement the strategies you teach them, they won't get results. But you can (and should) definitely still play a part in this process by encouraging them to use your product. Some onboarding emails examplesFor example, when people join our membership, The League, we send them a detailed email showing them how to access it. We don’t just give them the URL, username, and password - we also include an animated GIF of where they go and click into the Members area. Because even if people haven’t accessed the content yet, we still want them to feel like they've already received value from it. Similarly, if you opt-in for one of our free lead magnets, we send you an email with the username and password with an animated GIF that shows the screen recording of a user accessing the resource. We do this because we want people to be able to access the content we promised them and do it easily. This is a critical piece of your relation

You've got an offer ready and have emailed your subscribers. Once. Maybe twice. Sure, you'd like to email them a bit more. That would help with your sales, right? But you just don't know what to email about! So here are 7 sales elements that will give you more reasons to email during your launch and help you create spikes in your sales. Ready to have your mind absolutely blown by these strategies?Let's go! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:31) Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launch.(4:04) Give your audience a guided tour of your sales page through your emails (and learn about the pretend electoral campaign between Paddington Bear and Rupert The Bear).(11:48) Introduce a countdown timer to create urgency (but not right at the start).(14:08) Add a bonus (or more).(16:34) Combine the bonus and the countdown timer.  (17:47) Use your testimonials in your emails.(20:20) Don't introduce payment plans or down sell options at the start of your launch. (22:38) Help your customers remove overwhelm and make informed decisions.(25:03) Handle objections. (28:05) Subject line of the week.Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launchFirst thing first, how many times do your normally email your list when you launch a new product or service? The day you open the cart and then the day you close it? What happens in between? Can we just agree that two emails aren't really gonna cut it?When you’re promoting a new offer, you need to email your list more than once or twice. But how exactly can you keep talking about this thing you’re launching?Use your emails to give your audience a guided tour of your sales pageYou see, the key is to have a plan. And your plan should be all about NOT putting everything you have to say about your launch on your sales page. Hold some things back from your sales page so you have a list of valid reasons to email your list. Because during your launch, you want to use your emails to drip out pieces of your offer – email by email.This doesn't mean you're going to strip down your offer and turn it into something weak and mediocre that no one wants. Your offer needs to be amazing from day one! You're just holding off on announcing some of the stuff that most people announce at the start and breaking down the information that lives on your sales page  and giving your subscribers a guided tour of it. Your emails are the place where you pick one element of your sales page and talk about it. Why? So that you can walk people through stuff they might have missed and make them pay attention to it.By announcing new things throughout your launch, you create extra surges and spikes in your sales. Because we all know how it goes - launches are made of peaks and troughs. The peaks are the beginning and at the end. You make sales on your first day and then again on the last day before the cart closes. But in between? That's when you have your troughs. So you want to create some momentum - have an excuse to email your subscribers, give them more reasons to buy, and generate more peaks during your launch. Here are 7 things (in no particular order) that will help you do just that. Hold off introducing a countdown timerA lot of people add a countdown timer to their sales page right at the start of their promotion. We suggest you don’t do that. Why?First of all, because if you don’t put the timer on the sales page right away, it gives you a great reason to email your list later on and let them know when your cart closes.But also, a countdown timer is a mechanism to create urgency - and a very effective one at that. So don't waste it! Because you won't create any urgency if you set your timer waaaay in the future. If you tell everyone that your offer expires in 2 weeks, they have no reason to take notice now. It’s only when the hours, minutes and seconds are literally ticking that they’ll pay attention and buy. So use it wisely because this is one of the reasons to email your list during your launch.  Add a bonus (or more)Another strategy you can use is to take something you'd ordinarily include in your offer (like an additional piece of training or a worksheet, etc.) and add it as a bonus rather than including it from the start. As the days go by, you offer all these additional features as bonuses via email with a really effective subject line. Why does this work? Because it helps you draw attention to this bonus you just added and encourage someone to buy. Effectively, you're selling your bonuses in your emails. And if you position them well, some people will buy the product because of that bonus. Just make sure it's clear that everyone who has already bought gets your bonuses too - the last thing you want is loads of emails and admin from people asking you if they're included in the offer. Combine the bonus and the countdown timerWhen it comes to bonuses, you might introduce some at the start of your launch a

Have you ever experienced a slump in sales? We know we have. But we've also learnt to read the signs so we know when one's about to happen. And we've come up with a few strategies to get ourselves out of it. So here's what we're talking about today - exactly what to look out for to spot when sales are about to slow down and how to get out of a sales slump. Ready to find out what you've gotta do?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:26) Why you need to keep an eye on the sales data in your business.(4:36) What is your EPSPM and why does it matters? (Warning: there's singing!)(7:16) Focus on making more money from your existing list.(7:57) What to do when you have a seasonal slump in sales.(10:05) All big businesses change their shop window - why shouldn't you?(12:07) How to prevent 'banner blindness'.(12:50) What to do to avoid a slump in sales. (15:24) What indicators to watch to predict a slump in sales.(18:23) How to use challenges to get out of a slump in sales.(21:14) Subject line of the week. Why do you need to keep an eye on the sales data in your business?It happens to the best of us. You put out a product, and it's not just selling as much as you feel it should. Or maybe it did sell for a while, but now... not so much. So what do you do? The first thing to do is to check the data and see what it's telling you. Is there actually a problem? You might find that yes, things are a bit quiet. But maybe you know that's because you have a very seasonal business and things are always a little quiet for you at this time of year - it's a known trend in your business. And if you find that you're making more money this month than you were last month or the one before, then great. You're winning! And definitely doing something right, so now it's a matter of working out what that is so you can make more of it. But what exactly are the metrics you should keep an eye on? What's your EPSPM and why does it matter?We go on and on about this one. But it's important. Your EPSPM (bit of a mouthful, yes) is your Earnings Per Subscriber Per Month. And it's quite self-explanatory, really. It tells you how much money you're currently making for each of the subscribers on your list.How to work it out? Look at how much you made in the last month, for example, and divide your sales by the number of subscribers you had on your list. If you made $1,000 and you have 1,000 subscribers on your list, each subscriber is earning you $1. That's the figure you want to look at - once you know that, you can easily see whether that goes up or down month on month. And you know why this is a fundamental metric in your business? Because while a lot of people are focused on growing their list, if you double your list but your EPSPM doesn't go up or, worse, goes down, then having more people on your list isn't a good thing! Because you're earning less, not more.So if this month you're making $1 per subscriber and next month you double your list from 1,000 to 2,000 people, but you're still making $1,000, you've reduced the effectiveness of your email marketing because your EPSPM is now $0.50 and not $1.Focus on making more money from your listSo here's a quick tip. Focus on making more money from the list you have rather than growing your list further. As we've said many times before, this is the exact reason why we got good at email marketing. Because we couldn't afford to build our email list by investing in ads. And we couldn't afford to upset people to the point they'd unsubscribe from our list either! So we had to really focus on how to earn more for each subscriber.So our tip to you is to track this metric (the EPSPM) and make sure it's not going down as your list grows. Worst case scenario, you want it to stay the same. But ideally, you want that number to grow as your list grows. What do you do when you have a slump in sales?So let's say you are tracking your EPSPM, and it is indeed going down. It's time to change things up. Because most of the time the reason why there are slumps in sales is that your audience has stopped listening to what you're saying. They feel they heard your message and know what it is. And if you have people like that in your audience who haven't bought from you yet, then it's time for you to start thinking about a different way of saying what you need to say. In other words, you need a new shop window. Think about physical shops on the high street. They do this - they change their windows regularly and multiple times a year. Big companies with an online presence do the same by refreshing the look and feel of their website or changing their logos. Even Google does this, often displaying different graphics or animations to celebrate and commemorate historic events, occasions, or anniversaries. As a user and a consumer, things like that help you pay attention and build a deeper relationship with the brand. And if the big names do it, why shouldn't small business owners like us do the same

Janet Murray is the Queen of Courageous Content. This week she's back on the show as our first returning guest - talking about how to come up with content ideas to promote your products and services. So, are you ready to find out how to create courageous content, with the amazing Janet Murray?Grab pen and paper (or whatever you make notes on) and get ready for this. There's some awesome stuff in this episode that you just don't want to miss!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (2:13) How Rob REALLY feels about Email Marketing Wednesday! (3:00) Did Janet think her car had been stolen (but something else really happened)? (5:18) How does Janet create so much epic content so easily? (7:38) Always start with what you're selling - your products or services. (9:00) How to look at the bigger picture first and then break it down. (11:56) Why you should always start with the end in mind. (13:10) Janet's framework for courageous content creation. (20:36) How to use awareness days to come up with courageous content ideas. (27:12) What percentage of our content should be sales content? (30:10) Subject line of the week with Janet Murray.How does Janet create so much content so easily? Creating tonnes of amazing content is what Janet does best. It's what she's known for. But how does she do it so well and so easily?Well, first of all, Janet says she enjoys it - she loves creating content. And that's got to make a difference, right? But she's also so good at this because she has a background in journalism. And when you're a journalist, she says, you can't just say you have no good ideas for a piece. It just doesn't work like that! So in her previous career, Janet came up with processes and systems to ensure that she'd always have content ideas to pick from. Isn't that clever?So what are some of these amazing strategies that Janet uses to come up with courageous content?Always start with what you're sellingThe first thing that Janet recommends (and something a lot of business owners don't do) is to start with what you're selling. So every year Janet works out what she's going to be selling over the upcoming year. She calls this 'overhead planning', and she teaches her clients this exact method too. Except that some of them struggle with this. And when they do, Janet says, it's because they have a business problem, rather than a content problem. Why? Because, quite simply, if you're a business owner and don't know what you're selling in the next 3-6 months or over the next year, do you really have a business? (Something to ponder here!)Thinking about what you're going to be selling in the short to medium term allows you to look at the bigger picture - at the 'wide shot view' of your business. And once you have that, you can then break that down into quarters, then months, then weeks. This is where planning your content becomes a lot easier to do. It's also less overwhelming than doing what Janet calls 'linear planning', where you look at the month ahead to work out what you're going to share on a daily basis. Overhead planning also gives you plenty of time to get organised to ensure you're able to create the right type of content.Isn't that super cool? For us, it's a bit like when we try and teach our members to write email subject lines. A lot of people focus on trying to come up with interesting and engaging subject lines before they've even worked out what the point of the email is going to be. Starting with the end in mind is a lot easier. Once you know what the email is all about, writing the subject line is a walk in the park!A 4-step framework for courageous content, with Janet MurrayAccording to Janet, a lot of entrepreneurs create too much content, which is part of what makes the process so overwhelming. This is why Janet thinks it helps to have a structure, and on this note, she's created a framework based on 4 different types of content:Educational content. This is content that helps your clients solve a problem and answers their questions.Inspiring content. As the name suggests, this is all about sharing stories or anecdotes that will encourage your audience to take some sort of action.Community content. Something that people do really well on their own personal social media accounts is building relationships with others. But sometimes people forget to do that on their business pages! You can't just jump in and ask for the sale all the time - it's about creating content that helps you build relationships with people first.News and trends. The final type of content is all about news and trends that relate to your industry, niche, or product and service. Janet recommends you regularly check the media for interesting pieces that relate to your industry that you may be able to share or interpret for your audience.So if you were to create just 4 pieces of content a week (one for each type), Janet says, that would be more than enough content over the course of a month and then a year. You'd find it less overwhelming and much