Today we’re going to talk about email marketing. First of all, I hope everybody had a happy Easter, not working, you know. But it’s Monday, so back to work. This week is going to be email marketing week. What I’m going to be doing with these is kind of picking a topic and then just seeing how it goes, seeing what we need to cover. Monday is going to be a very general overview, and then we’re going to dig into individual pieces of that topic throughout the week.
In addition to today, for those of you who want to comment on today, make sure you’re watching this on DoneForYou, the DoneForYou Facebook page. I’m going to drop that link in here. That’s the DoneForYou Facebook page. Make sure to switch over and watch the video there. Also, for those of you who are looking to start a business or transition your business online amid this pandemic because you have skills, experience, knowledge, assets, resources that can help either other people through it or you can leverage in a remote, so you can help somebody across the globe through your computer, and get paid for it. That’s the idea.
We are starting, we’re kicking off a brand new group today called Accelerate. Here is the link to today’s kickoff session, which we’re going to be talking about basically picking and validating a business idea. How to arrive at a six-figure business idea. That is at 3 PM eastern today, so I’m going to drop that in this thread here. You are welcome to join us.
I think we’re going to end up doing eight to ten sessions. So the session is probably going to be every other day. There’s going to be a lesson and then a day of homework, where you post whatever you come to in the group. Today, we’re going to talk about business ideas, and then the homework is going to share your niche, your business idea, with the group.
For a couple of reasons. The first is the group is going to keep us all accountable in what we’re starting, and secondly, everybody in the group has different skillsets and knowledge and expertise and networks and connections and I am hoping that we’re able to leverage the group to grow the business. Who do you know who needs accounting work, or whatever? That’s the idea there.
I have to get a new camera setup because this one is weird. All right, today we’re talking about email marketing. Now, your email marketing list is kind of, truly it is the cornerstone, the foundation of, it’s your get out of jail free card right now. It is.
At the end of the day, if you don’t necessarily have a lot of ad budget, or you don’t have a whole lot of things, a whole lot of assets or anything going on in your business, not a whole lot of traffic. If you have an email list, you can always pivot. The biggest thing, is sometimes pivoting in business is so difficult. It is because if you don’t have an audience if you don’t have distribution, there’s nobody to pivot to. You’re 100% reliant on the traffic that is coming into your website or the traffic you’re buying, spending money on media, spending money on ads.
If you have to, if you don’t have distribution, you don’t have a way to pivot, then it’s always a startup. Do you know what I mean? You’re constantly starting the new business model, the new product. You’re bootstrapping this product idea, but if you have an email list, then you’re able to move that email list in this new direction. That’s one of the biggest keys to marketing to your email marketing list and building your list because you’re not always starting.
You’re transitioning. You’re pivoting. Anything that has any kind of a list is that way, whether it’s an email list, whether it is a social media following, people who like your YouTube feed or your Facebook ads, or whatever. At the end of the day, though, you’re able to pivot when you have a following. Your social media following is a whole lot looser, less committed, than your email list, because your email list, you’re hitting their inbox when you send an email. With social media, you might be hitting them, you might not. The email list thing is the key, and pivoting and then launching something new without necessarily having to spend a bunch more money on traffic or do a whole lot to launch this new thing.
Today we’re going to talk about your email marketing list and how to market to your email list. This is going to be a very 101 level Livestream. It is that way because it’s kind of the introduction of the week if you will. In the chatbox, in the questions, just let me know if you want me to restate anything or you have any questions. I want this to be a Q&A kind of deal.
Email marketing, basically it’s writing an email and sending it to your list. It is as simple as writing an email, hitting send, and then sending it to your 10,000 people. That is what email marketing is. You cannot do that from inside of Gmail or inside a piece of software, your email inbox. You can’t copy 150 people or 2000 people or whatever, in a group and just say, “Boom,” email blast-style, and I hate that phrase. When you’re mailing to your email marketing list the right way, that list needs to be live and hosted in a piece of software.
There are lots and lots of different email marketing software and platforms and CRMs out there. They all have their special sauce. Anything that is email marketing-heavy is usually a marketing automation software or a marketing automation CRM. Now, there are lots of different CRMs as well.
There are sales CRMs, there are email CRMs, there’s contact, basically contact databases, but what we’re looking for, very specifically, is email marketing. In email marketing, there are a couple of different levels of CRM.
When we’re building sales funnels, we build sales funnels in a ridiculous number of CRMs. Everything from AWeber and ActiveCampaign up to InfusionSoft, so it just depends on what level you want to play at. If you have a small list, some are better than others. Let’s see, I’m going to open up a browser tab here. Okay. All right. Let me pull this out. There we go. Stop sharing this guy and then we’re going to share this one.
All right. There are lots of different levels of CRM out there. The first level, this kind of classification one CRM is something like AWeber. AWeber is the first CRM that I ever used and basically what it does is it allows you to put your, it hosts your email marketing list, and then it lets you send email to that list. You can set up autoresponder sequences and you can set up campaigns, and now you can kind of add tags to those contacts.
It does one thing well. It emails your list. Everything else it does meh well. But it does what it needs to do. So class one CRM. Another is ConvertKit. Again, very good at what it does, which is to host your list. People can sign up to your list and it lets you send an email.
MailChimp is probably the industry standard. I dislike MailChimp in terms of some of the stuff that we end up doing with our email marketing list and automation and all of that other stuff. MailChimp works, but I highly recommend not using it. ConvertKit is good. AWeber is good, but they don’t necessarily have a lot of very robust automation packages.
If you’re looking for a class two CRM, which does a lot of marketing automation and really, it ties in with Zapier and gives you a lot of integration, a lot of control over how your customers interact with you in your business. Then there’s a couple of other ones. We created one called Axis.
It is at triggers. app. Triggers. the app is where this thing lives. We’re going to dig into this as the week goes on, but, all right. There you go. That is the CRM that we created. Easy to add email, really easy to setup marketing automation campaigns and sequences. The email copy app is in there, so it’ll write your email for you. We’ll dig into this a little bit as we go.
Another one that we like quite a bit, we set up a lot, is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation CRM. Again, it has a lot of features and functionality and integrations and all that other stuff, and it does great from an automation standpoint.
Now, from a big boy standpoint, there’s one, which is now Keep, K-E-A-P.com, it used to be InfusionSoft. For those of you who have been around for a while, you won’t ever call it Keep, because InfusionSoft is just the thing you grew up with. Keap, less complicated to use than it used to be. InfusionSoft was great. It did a lot of advanced stuff.
Typically, when you set something up in InfusionSoft, you had to understand that it was going to take three times longer to do anything meaningful. Inside InfusionSoft, you had to click like three times as many buttons. You had to set something up on one screen. Then set it up on another screen and then another screen, but it worked great once you figured it out.
To get into some of the more complex integrations, you had to tie in a couple of pieces of software to work and whatever. This is a class three CRM. Something that has order forms, has an affiliate program. And stores your email marketing list.
It has pages anymore, so there’s InfusionSoft and then there’s Ontraport, which is a favorite of ours. Ontraport, we still do a lot of our stuff in Ontraport, despite having our CRM, because we have our order forms and stuff in here, and our CRM doesn’t have order forms yet. Ontraport, fantastic tool. It’s the same as InfusionSoft.
From an email marketing standpoint, these are kind of the tools that you can play with. If you want to get heavier into sales, like sales pipeline stuff, then SalesForce is a great one, and expensive. Industry leader. I read that they have 15 or 16 trillion dollars, no. 15 or 16 billion dollars under contract for the next three years, so they could literally not sell another customer for the next three years and still make that much money, give or take.
The other one that we like quite a bit is Pipedrive. Pipedrive.com. Pipedrive is a great one. It’s a sales CRM, so you can have a contact, and then you can drag that contract through a sales sequence, a sales channel. It’s great for sales pipelines and sales workflow, but it sucks for email marketing, especially in an automated sense.
The other one, which, I’m friends with the Pipeline Pro. Pipeline Pro is another one that is very, it’s very sales automation, sales dashboard, sales pipelines, all of that kind of stuff. Appraisal workflow management. Again, also super cool software.
From a CRM software standpoint, those are some of your options, depending on what you need. That class one, like an AWeber or ConvertKit, your class one CRM is going to be great, if you have a list under 10,000 people. You’re not necessarily looking to spend a bunch of money hosting your contact records and you want to send an email every once in a while. That’s about it. You don’t have real complex marketing automation challenges or needs or whatever. You just want to be able to set up an automation sequence, set up a campaign, trigger some emails that go out, and that’s about it.
Your class two CRMs, your ActiveCampaign, your Axis, are great when you need to trigger something happening. A new contact moves to a new list, then you want to trigger a certain campaign that goes out, or somebody goes to a certain URL. You trigger a campaign that goes out, that kind of thing. Then your class three CRMs, your order forms, affiliate program, when you need all that stuff to tie in together, that’s when you need that stuff.
All right, we’re going to look at it, let me grab my notes here. We’re going to look at building lists. When you’re building lists, there are a couple of different ways to go about it. The first and biggest thing is you need to have some sort of an opt-in sequence or some sort of an opt-in page, landing page. There are no two ways about it. To collect emails and grow your email list, you need to be collecting them, which means you need to give value. That’s all there is to it.
What I mean by that is you need to have some sort of an opt-in page. This is, currently, we’re running a bunch of paid traffic to this page. This page has been exhaustively tested. We have logos and this sub-headline and then we have our headline and our cover and the download button and all that stuff. This page format has been tested, I think we’ve run 42 or 43 different split tests on this page. It works. This page, right now, right right now is converting at 43% to cold traffic, straight up cold traffic. Not too shabby. Some of you who are on this might have come through this page in the last couple of days, which is awesome.
Best ways of growing an email list:
- building your email list through an opt-in page some sort of a lead generation mechanism
Bar none, point-blank, running traffic, or getting ranked in the search engines and then sending traffic into a landing page is how you need to be growing your email list. The reason I stress this is because so many of our clients come to us and they say, “Is there a shortcut?”.
The answer is yes, there is a shortcut. You should not take it, buy lists, and you can swipe lists, sure you can. You can pull lists out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There are so many different ways that you can collect email addresses, but at the end of the day, this person did not raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m interested in the thing you are offering. I’m interested in you or your business or your thing.” You do not want to market to these people.
I had one client how was like, “I don’t want to spend money on ads, I just want to scrape a list.” I’m like, “Okay cool. You can scrape, whatever. I can’t tell you what kind of results you’re going to get, but we can try.” So he scraped 1200 emails. We uploaded it into a CRM, we sent an email out. He got eight opens. Eight out of 1200 people. Normally, he should have gotten between 200 and 280 opens if it was an opt-in list if they had been used to getting email. But literally, they hadn’t. It was spam. I told him, “This is spam. What we’re doing here is spamming. They did not opt-in in any way to any kind of an email list.” So it’s just something you need to be cognizant of, you know.
Yeah, so scraping lists, downloading the list, don’t do it. Get somebody to opt into your email list and go from there. Which is a lot of work, it is. You’ve got to run a paid traffic campaign, you have to write content, you have to do live streams, you have to do whatever, but at the end of the day, growing your email list is the difference between being able to pivot and not, or being able to sell something on-demand or not, you know what I mean?
Landing pages, a great way to do it. You need to build an email list. You need to offer a lead magnet. We should talk about lead magnets tomorrow because it is, I don’t know that we’ve talked about it yet, and it is email marketing related, so tomorrow we’re going to talk about lead magnets. This is the funnel effect of a lead magnet.
There are some other things you can do to grow email lists. I don’t have a pop-up here. There’s an exit pop that comes up. Whenever somebody comes to DoneForYou the first time, there is an exit pop that shows up, and the software that we use for that is Picreel. P-I-C-R-E-E-L.com. Picreel is nice exit pop software. It’s also really cheap compared to some of the other ones that are out there, and it’s mobile-friendly, so when you can put a little bit of code on your website and then it’ll pop up, and the pop-up will be constrained within the view parameters. Nice stuff. There it is. This is one of the versions that we use, only we have an email box right here. This just goes right into a page. You can do all kinds of things with that pop-up.
When someone opts in, it gets added to your email marketing list!
The other one that we have lately been testing is Thrive Leads. Thrive Leads list building software, and that is right here. This does exit pops, it does all kinds of really cool stuff. It’s a monthly deal, but it’s just a WordPress plugin that you install on your website. It does the pop-up lightbox and these cool sticky ribbons, inline forms, two-step opt-ins, slide-ins. It just does a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff, different ways that you can generate leads without necessarily going right to a landing page. The trick is you need to be writing content.
Every way you’re going to be generating leads usually lives on your website, so you need to be writing content, you need to do the content marketing, and you need to do the blogging thing and getting traffic to the website so you can suck up the leads, you know what I mean? Without pulling people to your website, there’s no way to do it unless you’re paid, unless it’s paid ads, literally, like Facebook lead ads. And they don’t hit your website, but they opt-in through the ad.
You’ve got to have landing pages. You have to have content or some sort of something, but you need to be making moves to generate these. That’s all there is to it. Now, those are just some cool, and there’s kind of a cool little exit pop there, so just some different ways that you can build lists.
Now, if you’re going to buy an email marketing list, there’s one place that I like. I discovered it because some of our clients, tag-team mail, postcards, with email lists. The one place that I would buy lists from if you’re going to do direct mail and email is this place. Lists.nextmark.com. This is a mailing list finder. I have been sharing this thing forever. Here we go I’m just going to drop this link in the chatbox or comment box, I should say. Did it go through? Yeah.
This is a mailing list search finder that will give you access to an email marketing list database. Let’s say you are mailing to chiropractors. Or your target audience is chiropractors. We’re going to search for chiropractors in all markets and on all channels. We can just say email, but we’re just going to say on all channels. This is a mailing list, basically, a database.
Each of these lists is lists that they have, they’re being brokered from a broker. If we look at this, we have chiropractors’ email, postal, and phone. It is $100 per thousand, and the list size is 181,000 people on this list, which is pretty good. Then we have chiropractors at home addresses, chiropractor medical professionals, offices, and clinics of chiropractors.
It’s up to you to figure out what kind of selects you want. This right here seems to be a hotlist. It’s sold through ExactData. We have our base rate of $100 per thousand leads, so it ends up being 10, yeah. $100 per thousand leads. Then we have multiple per company emails, we’ve got 22,000 emails, 11,000 telephones, and 90,000 Facebook.
We can grab this Facebook audience if we want, or there are some additional selects. The three-month hotline, or we can do, the city is no charge. If we want all the chiropractors that they heard from in the last three months, then it’s going to be $125 per thousand. If we want to see the company size or the number of employees, these are the additional selects as they go up.
You can grab the email and also the physical mailing address. Usually, with these guys, they’re going to the email from their servers for you. You have to email them the copy, and then go from there. This is super nice for when you’re trying to break into a market. We’ve, again, found the best results being when we tag team a postcard and an email address, but since they are mailing this email marketing list from their servers, and they already have a relationship with the customer, then the open rate tends to be quite a bit better. It’s a place to get lists.
You can also do solo ads, where somebody sends the list on your behalf. I used to do, so I started my list years ago doing solo ads. I would pay somebody $100 and then they would mail their email marketing list to my lead magnet, and that’s how I kind of started my email list.
They’re a little bit more difficult to find. Before, I just went to the Warrior Forum and just looked for somebody with lists, but I got burned quite a bit. About 30% of the time I would pay somebody for a list blast and then it wouldn’t go through. They wouldn’t mail them, they’d disappear. There was some of that stuff. By and large, for the most part, the people who were selling solo ads were pretty good.
If you’re going to buy, option number one: grow your email list organically. Option number two: if you’re going to buy a list, buy an email marketing list from somewhere like this, somewhere reputable. This is their business. Data is their business. Having access to data is their business, and these reps, want to do right by you, so that you come back and buy more access to their data, again and again, and again.
Let’s see. The next thing I wanted to talk about was email frequency. When you’re emailing your list, you want to make sure that you are emailing frequently enough that they don’t forget about you, but not so much that they unsubscribe. Every email marketing list is different, every niche is different. What I have found is that normal frequency, my list, I email my list every day, almost. A lot of lists, we kind of start emailing every day.
Sometimes the unsubscribe rate tends to go up, so we will back up the frequency a little bit and email every other day or every two days, like a two-day pause. Like we’ll email today, then take two days off, and then email again. Every list is a little bit different, and once your list is conditioned to expecting to receive an email every day, then your unsubscribe rate practically vanishes. Our unsubscribe rate, we might get four or five unsubscribes a day, but we email every day.
Some business owners think of it as unused hotel rooms. Every day that you let pass without sending them an email, it’s an opportunity to generate revenue that you didn’t take. The way I like to think about it is every day, you need to be conscious about your email list.
Every day that they get an email or don’t get an email, it needs to be planned. If they don’t get an email, you need to consciously make the decision. They’re not getting an email because tomorrow we’re going to send out this promotion. Today they’re not getting an email because we just hit them hard for a promo over the last two or three days.
I try to be intentional about all of the emails, the frequency in email marketing. That way, we encourage as many people to show up, as many people to open up, as many people to click and subscribe, and all that other stuff. That’s the idea with the frequency piece. One of the ways to increase that frequency is to do a lot of bonding. Probably four or five years ago, I just really marketed to the list, marketed affiliate products, marketed everybody else’s stuff. We had some of our products, and I would kind of do a product promo, and then I would turn it into another, turn it into affiliate promotion. I was kind of constantly promoting affiliate, just offers in general.
Four years ago, I was like, “Wow.” It occurred to me that my list didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know what I did or what I stood for because I was so busy promoting everybody else’s stuff and saying yes to all these other affiliates who asked me to mail for them. So I just stopped. I stopped promoting everybody’s stuff, and I started doing blog posts and all that stuff internally, so promoting our blog posts, and now you see me promoting these live streams and not promoting offers all that often at all. That has kind of been my transition, my shift.
A lot of times, the offers that we do promote, they’re usually through a call. It’s usually not necessarily marketing directly to a sales video and then going from there, although we do that. We’re going to be doing more of it. But just treating the list like mine, as opposed to renting it to any affiliate who wanted to pay per sale. That was kind of a big shift for me, and in that shift, I realized that I needed to write a lot more.
- create a lot more content
- write blog posts
- promote those blog posts
- write lead magnets and promote those lead magnets
When using those for additional people who came in joining the list and that kind of thing. That was a really big shift, a big change in the email marketing strategy that we had, and since then, we’ve had incredible growth to our email open rates, to our click-through rates, to our subscriber counts, because now readers, subscribers, were able to bond to something. They were able to bond to me or the teaching or the thoughts or whatever. It just worked out well that way.
Your list, they want to bond and relate to you at the end of the day. That’s what it’s all about. Let’s see. We are at 33 minutes. That was kind of some of the basics of email marketing. Did you like that? All right, cool.
In the next couple of days, tomorrow we’re going to talk about lead magnets and putting together a lead magnet, which I think is going to be powerful because your lead magnet is going to be the thing that you use in attracting people and putting people on your email list, something like this. We have four or five lead magnets. I think we’re going to redo one and then, that way you can see . . . Maybe I’ll try to do that for tomorrow, put up a new lead magnet that is email marketing-based so you can see what it looks like.
Then we’re going to talk about writing email copy, sort of writing formulaic email copy, copy that’s going to move somebody into your process. We’ll probably talk about that Wednesday. Then we’re going to talk about sequencing that copy, so applying triggers, and automation so that email goes out when it needs to. That will be, yeah, Thursday. Then on Friday, I think we’re going to talk about stats, pixels, kind of clean up all of the email marketing stuff.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Excited about this week. If you haven’t signed up for Accelerate and you want to go through that Accelerate training, that is going to be live at 3 PM Eastern. That is right here, so I’m dropping the link again in the chatbox. Go ahead and jump into the group. It’s free, and then I will see you at 3 PM Eastern.
