Email Marketing: for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs

1. Introduction : Hey, welcome to Email Marketing for small business and entrepreneurs. Hi, I'm Donna. I'm the pitcher on the right hand side. That's me, and I'm going to be your tutor throughout this entire course. What you're going to be learning is you're going to learn, first of all, what is Email marketing. If you're new to email marketing, explain it, how it works, how to choose the right email platform because that's always the tricky one. Ways to build and grow your email list. I'm going to give you some nice tips on that one, how to write emails to get results, designing simple professional emails, using automation to save you time, which is always a really good puck and tracking your emails to see what works. This is going to be a very informative class where you're going to learn a lot and you're going to come away each lesson going, that's what I need to do next. Let's get started. 2. WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING: So what is email marketing? Very good question. Email marketing is a direct digital marketing tool that allows you to communicate straight into your customers inboxes, which is great. So unlike social media where there's a algorithms, those pesky things that control what you see and what you do, emails reaches subscribers directly. The only way they do that is because they've signed up with something that you have to offer, freebie, they've purchased from you previously before. There's different ways and why people sign up to you, but they're interested in what you have to offer. Also it's a really effective thing, email marketing when it comes to building relationships because it keeps your business at top of their mind. When they're thinking about anything or they've seen an email, they might save it and they're like, oh, I like that. I'll go back to it later or they're interested in something. Emails more effective than seeing a social media post. They scroll past, they've not really thought about it as much. Email sticks in the head a little bit longer. It's a great way to build up those relationships as well, which is what you want in your business. And lastly, it works for any business size or niche. You could be a freelancer, you could be a huge business, it doesn't matter. An email marketing list will help no matter what size you business. The great thing with email marketing list is when you start growing it a bit more, you can do so much more with it. So how does an email fit into your business strategy? I would definitely include this in your strategy going forward. It's always helpful to have an email list going on in the background while you're doing socials, while you're growing your business, if you're at that point, because your email marketing and we'll get you more results in social media ever will. I online. Emails really effective compared to social media purely for the fact that people have shown an interest to sign up to it. Social, they just scroll and they might never see your post, to be honest. It's just really effective. When it comes to using emails, you can do it to support product launches, sales campaign, driving traffic through sharing the latest blogs, videos that you have, testimonials, that type of thing. You can build a lot into an email to showcase what you have to offer. Great thing with emails as well, it builds up a lot of trust because you're delivering valuable content, things that they're interested in, and you're showing off what your expertise is as well. Finally, when it comes to say when someone wants to buy something, they're probably more likely to do it from an email than social media majority of the time, probably because on an email, you can be very informative. You can provide a lot of information, data, that sort of thing. That means that that your brands be on the top of their mind when it comes to, do you know what I could do with that right now. And they'll go back and then they can go back through emails and go, yeah, there's the email with it in. Social, sometimes it gets lost unless you save things. Whereas email sticks around if you believe that. So there are different types of emails. These are the four main ones. You have promotionals, you announced your sales, your discounts, special offers, that type of thing. It's a great thing for most people to get one of those. A newsletter, sharing updates, brand stories, educational tips, that kind of thing. People sign up to these especially if they want to learn more about a specific topic or something. Newsletters are really helpful. Transactional, these are like you know when you buy something and you get that order, a confirmation email going, you've just bought, blah, blah, blah, or you've signed up to blah, blah, blah. It's those emails and receipts and service updates, it's the ones where you've done something and it's just saying, thank you, you've done it. And then finally automated. These are your welcome emails, your natural sequence, and your abandoned cart reminders. I'll just say basically what nurture sequences. So a nurture sequence is basically you've got them through the door and at this point, you are trying to basically build up that relationship. That's the part nurturing. You'll probably send them an email maybe once a week, however often you want to do it. And basically what you're doing is you're sharing some valuable content to basically get them thinking, this is actually a really good email, getting them to click through, and you're slowly nurturing them to the point where you could start adding discounts into your emails or talking about products and things. You're slowly getting them interested, you're branding a bit more, you're telling your story. You're just kneeling that kind of relationship. That's what a nurturing sequence is about. So I just thought I'd share this because it's really important to understand the differences between the two. So one of the most common questions I get is, should I focus on email or social media marketing. Wow. I'm going to break it down a little bit. So with email, you reach inboxes directly, so you get full ownership over your audience, what you write, what you send them. There's actually no algorithm limiting what they see, anything. It is in the inbox, they get what you send them basically. However, social media has algorithms. The problem with this, it does limit your organic reach. Unless you want to put money into it or you're on social media, all of the time, it can limit who sees what. So here's what I would suggest for now, is the best approach is to combine the two. Social media you can use to attract and grow your audiences, get people interested in what you have to offer. You can actually promote your say newsletter, your freebie, your lead magnet, those types of things to get those emails, but you need to slowly get those emails into your email list and then from your email marketing list, then you can start nurturing them. I'd say social media can send them into it as such. But for now, if you are primarily thinking of going into Email, eventually, stick with social media for now, just to build up your brand awareness, but don't spend too much time and then invest your time in email. Because email is more of the way to go. You're slowly seeing a lot of people with social media banning out because they're trying to do too many different things at once. Keep it simple and social, show who you are, keep it short, sweet. You don't need to be posting every single day if you don't have the time and slowly try and find ways to grow up your email list and then transition to email list once you've got enough people in the list. 3. WHY EMAIL MARKETING MATTERS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES: Why email marketing matters for small businesses? Let's look at the first point, which is, who are you emailing? This is a really, really important part, especially if you're small business. You need to understand who you're emailing. Define your ideal customer, their age, their business type, the challenges, and the goals, then you'll be thinking about the pain points. Everybody loves a solution to a pain point. You just need to find what your audience is because this will help you massively in understanding how you're going to talk to them, what advice you're going to be sharing, once you understand the pain points that they always have. And finally, when it comes to email, you need to figure out how your emails can help them. Are you going to be sharing just products? Are you going to be sharing blog posts? Are you going to YouTube links? Are you going to be doing topics to cover certain areas, that type of thing? Those are the things that you need to be thinking about in the background before you start sending those emails out. We're just going to briefly cover of the key benefits of email marketing. I haven't covered this quite yet. These are really important things, especially for a small business owner. First of all, it's very cost effective. You will find you'll get a high return, which means I think the averages $36 for every pound spent, which is fantastic. But the platforms, you can get free email platforms up to a certain number of subscribers, and then you'll start paying. But even then it's not that much. And also, you can build customer loyalty and retention, which will turn into new customers, which is really, really great. You can build up that communication. You can build up that bond basically by sharing useful content for your customers basically. Um, next, it drives website traffic and sales consistently. This matters a lot to you, by the way. So this point matters. So the more traffic that you receive on your website, the more likely your website will start ranking higher when somebody's looking on Google. So this is a really important thing. So when it comes to emails, personally, I put in links two parts on my website. Instead of sending them off to different landing pages, I might maybe have one in there, but majority of it is I want it to go to my website for that particular reason because that's another thing that will boost your business as well. Finally, it gives you full ownership of your audience. That's really important small business owner to have that entire responsibility of it's my audience. I can talk to them about what I think would work. You can learn a lot as well about your audiences as well through them clicking here and there, but it really, really matters. So I've got some real life business examples here for you. For coaches, you could share weekly mindset tips, frameworks or quick wins that can lead to promoting a paid program. So that's how they do it. You set them in, give them all the content, you give them all the advice, you come across as an expert, people start trusting you, and then you start talking about the programs and how it can help them. People sign up to them once they've believe in you a bit more. Uh, ecommerce stores, they use emails for the new arrivals, product launches, exclusive discounts, that type of thing. So that's how they use emails. You can see there's a big difference. One's trying to build up the brand, one's talking about the latest what's going on and stuff. But that's what you expect from ecommerce store, to be honest as well. You've got service providers like virtual assistants or designers, so they'll offer free resources and things like that, that can lead to sort of bookings. They're basically trying to entice people in using a free resource to then basically go, well, here's what else I can do as well. And finally, digital product sellers. They talk about product launches, they'll talk about best sellers, what's sales, all types of things. They'll be talking about all that kind of thing. But as you can see, each of these people, basically, if you see them as people, basically choose to use emails in different ways. It's entirely up to your business, how you're going to be using emails overall. And finally, this is a really important part that I thought I would share. It's about why do people subscribe to emails? This is a really good thing. Why do they do it? First of all, they want exclusive content or offers not shared elsewhere. You could be like, only here, well I share, blah, blah, blah, but you get bonus things and blah, blah, blah, if you sign up to this particular email. Um, a lot of people will sscribe for this particular reason as well, the second one, which is they subscribe to learn something new or solve a specific problem such as tips on how to grow the business, that type of thing. Things that you think, yeah, that's really useful. I get some emails from a particular company and they do courses each week. And what they do is every week I get an email saying, these are latest, you know, courses. You can either watch them live or you can watch it right now kind of thing, but they're really useful to me. They help me to learn about about everything. I think that's really useful to me. That's solving a problem about I don't know how to do something. These emails are really useful. And finally, another thing that those big brands out there like clothing or perfumes or whatever there's out there. People will sign up to those emails to stay up to date with the brands they like. So they want to know about the new products or services, that type of thing, the stories behind things, they'll sign up to them because they believe in the brand. If you're a ecommerce store, this is probably why they would sign up to you is for this reason, they might trust your brand already. They've had a lot of good things, so they'll sign up to know more about you. Um, what's upcoming and if there's products that they really love and they're just waiting to see what's out there next, they'd sign up for that. Hopefully, this is giving you a loads of insight as a small business owner. The reasons behind emails, why they subscribe, take some time. Think about who your audience is, what kind of content you want to be putting in those emails, what do you want to share? Do you want to be quite informative? Do you want to share some products? What is it that you want to be putting in those emails week to week? 4. CHOOSING AN EMAIL MARKETING PLATFORM: Using an email marketing platform. Before choosing the platform, ask yourself these questions. What's my monthly budget? There are three plans out there, which I'll show you in a minute. That are fantastic. They're great. But when you get loads more subscribers or you need some certain features, that's when you'll be paying. Think about roughly how much you can afford each month. The next point is, do I need automation features? This is welcome sequences or abandoned car emails, those types of ones. Do you want to try and automate as much as you can with your emails? This might be something you're really interested in. Next, you need to think about, can I integrate this into my website or shop that I currently have? If you're unsure, if you already have a website at this point, do a Google search and ask the question of what apps can I integrate into my website, blah, blah, blah. You often get a list or you can ask, does MailChim integrate with Shopify? I will tell you the answer yes or no. What you'll find is a lot of website builders and all of that shops and things like that do integrate really well with them. It's the setup that can be a little bit tricky. I have a WIX website that integrates into a melt and they work really well. I can create different categories on there, but it translates back into my website WIX very, very easy to use. They do integrate really well. And finally, is customer support responsive and helpful if you get stuck? If you get really suck, nothing works and you're not much of a techie person and you do need a bit more help setting up the email side of things, do you need that support? Some of the email platforms that you'll look into are very straightforward and some will need a little bit of tech skills. Is there someone at the other end that basically can help you with? Right. These four are really, really useful, really good. The top, well, Mailchimp and mail Lite I've used a lot over the past six years, so I can't recommend them enough, really. So if you're a beginner with email marketing, what I will say is start with Mailchimp. Is beginner friendly. I work with a few people that use it primarily. It's very easy to set up. They only use it for newsletters, maybe once a month. It's nice and easy and straightforward to use. You've got ConvertKit, which is another popular one. This is more creators, bloggers, coaches. A lot of automation you can build with it. It's fantastic with the automation side of things. It's probably higher end email marketing tool, I would say, but it is great if you fit in that category of bloggers and that type of thing and creators. Melt is one I personally use now. It is affordable. It's fantastic. It's free up to 500 subscribers. You have one website you can build on that and landing pages, I think it's up to ten, which is really, really useful and especially if you're doing freebies and stuff, you can create landing pages and then everything automates. The other upside to this is, I integrated this into my Wix website and it was so easy, very very simple, straightforward. Instructions are straightforward as well. Automation is easy enough. You can copy and paste templates that you create and just add content in. There's a lot of control with Milt that I personally quite like quite a lot. If you want to upgrade, I think it's something like $9 a month, which is fantastic, really. Then it goes up slowly depending on how many subscribers you have. But it does allow a lot of features to be used. Yeah, so I can't recommend it enough. Shop fi Email integrates with, you know, the Shop fi store. So if you've got Eco MS store, has its own email platform as well. So what I would say now is time for you to do some research. So go off. Figure out what your budget is. Do you need automation? What you really going to use emails for? How often? And then have a look at the four that I've mentioned basically and have a look to see if any of them suit. If they don't, there are plenty of others out there. There are so many out there. Have a look what fits your box. And if you are using Chat GBT, I will give this little tip. I love doing this. Go on there and type in all of the parts of email marketing platform that you're looking for, and ask it to recommend you some because that will narrow down your search quite a lot and it'll offer a little bit of advice on where to look research wise, or do a Google search and say, I want to email marketing platform, he does this, does this, often or not, you will get some really good responses quite high up. Um, but yeah, do some research and have a look at what ones will probably suit you and your business. 5. ANATOMY OF AN EFFECTIVE EMAIL: Anatomy of an effective email. Let's look at what it is and how to make great email. First of all, you need a clear, compelling subject line to grab their attention and to encourage people to open it. There's nothing worse than seeing something and the subject line going, blah, blah, and you're like, what is that? You need to know what it is. It needs to be clear. It needs to be enticing for someone to open it, or otherwise people just end up deleting. The next thing when it comes to an email is making sure it's personalized if you can. If you're using a platform, for example, like Mailchimp, you can insert something that basically pulls the name of the person from your email list into it, it says Sam or whatever name. That builds up a bit of a rapport, personalization really matters when it comes to emails. Next, when it comes to your content, it needs to be value focused, concise. I could solve a problem, provide more information, basically do what you got them to sign up to originally. If it's about tips about something, keep it focused on those type of tips that you said that you provide. Next is call to action, very, very important. What do you want your readers to do? Do you want them to read a blog, download something, shop, buy something? Always provide call to actions because it's really important. It's basically trying to get your customers to basically continue following on in their journey with the content that you've put in your email. That really matters. If you don't put anything like download, people are like, oh, I read the email. That's it. By saying there's more here, here, I've got some downloads for you. I've got some stuff for you, encourages them to click on it. And finally, always include a brand of signature with your business, your website, and your socials. Socials matter as well, by the way, purely for the fact that if someone loves your content and wants to learn more about you or for example, your website link on there, they'll click through or if they want to learn about you, they'll go through your socials. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to break down all the components of an email. First of all, let's start with the subject line. First impressions really matter. When it comes to this, make it very concise, about 50 characters and very intriguing. I've got some examples throughout this entire lesson on the right hand side. You'll see some wording. For this one, it's the secret strategy, top freelancers won't share. So if you're a freelancer, you're going to see that and go, Oh, what aren't they sharing? It's very enticing. It's very like, oh, I want to know more, and that's the effect you want to have with your subject lines. Right. Sender information really, really matters too. Make sure that you ensure your sender name and email address are very clear and recognizable. Spam will kick you out. Your emails go straight in there if it doesn't come across as professional. This is an example of me. Sender name is Donna at Assist AP. Assist up is my website, and my email is donna at assistup.uk. Everything links my name and business are uniform basically as such. Next, let's go to the greeting. A bit of a personal touch really matters. For example, this one says, Hi, Sarah, I hope your weeks going well so far. It's very casual. It's very personalized. It's asking about, I hope you're doing something that first initial bit says, dear, whoever, and then that first sentence after, you can add a bit of a personal touch it. It's really nice. You can even bring in things that are going on around you like heat waves, for example, you can say, I hope you're not suffering from the heat wave. I mean, adding something a bit more than Hi, Sarah, blah, blah blah blah, blah. You're going straight into the content and people are like, Well, okay, that's a bit much. You smoothing them into it. Right. The core part you're messaging. This is really important as well like every other part, but this matters. Make sure that you keep it concise and scannable. People are very busy. You'll see that people do not want to read paragraphs of information. They just don't have the time. Most people scan websites, content, you name it, they scan it, make it very obvious what you're trying to share. Make your senses really short, add bullet points, add white space to break up that text. Sometimes they say not to put as much white space in certain things, but with emails, it's really important. Make sure that the language you're using matches your audience. Avoid jargon, technical terms unless you know that your audience understands those terms, by the way. But keep it a nice casual tone. You don't want to come across as very boring, you want to add some personality from you into those emails. But try and keep that level between professional and casual. I often find emails that have too much of a story about themselves. I loses everything because I've lost interest by the time I get to the bottom. You can add some personal antidokes into emails just to tell a bit of a story. But don't spend the entire email telling them about how you got into a business for the entire thing, you want to break it up into, well, I fell into this business, here's some information, da da da, this is what I did, this what I did. You need to break it up in a way that's keeping your viewer interested. The call to action parts, I've got an example on the right. It's got a little finger. Click here to download your free guide and start implementing these tips today. Very clear. It's very concise. It's telling you to download something. It's free and they're tips for you to help you. That's really important. And on most of the email templates, you can add buttons that can link to booking systems or things like that. I can make the journey a bit smoother. Just think about what you want your audience to do next. Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to go to your website? You can offer as many call to actions as you want, by the way. It doesn't need to be at the bottom. It could be at the top, it could be in the middle. However you want to do it, you can even put multiple calls actions throughout. It's entirely up to you, but give people chances to explore a bit more if they want to read about something, they want to shop about something, they want to learn about you. Provide those of different lengths if you want to if you think they're relevant to your audience. And the closing part. This is signing off. So you can play around with this. I've got some examples like best wishes, take care, speak soon, things like sincerely and best regards. I think they're more of professional to professional, if you know what I mean, when you're working in a business an actual company to a company, sincerely and best regards is how you usually end it. But I always think it's quite nice to add a best wishes or take care or speak soon because it feels a bit more personalized, especially especially if you're talking, from the beginning saying, Dear Sarah, hope you're enjoying the heat wave, blah, blah. Then you've got your content. You want to end on a personal note as well. I always think it's really important to figure out how you're going to sign off. When it comes to your signature by the way, I mentioned that earlier about having an email signature with all your information. It's really important just to put all your information, your email, your website, your phone number. Once you've created your email signature, by the way, you can save it on these email platforms. You only do it once and then it's set up in a template. It makes it nice and easy. But it's just a great way for other people to find out more about you basically. So I'm going to give you a few bonus tips to break up this little bit of a lesson. So Proof reading. Make sure you do it. There's nothing worse than kitting email and going, there's a lot of spelling errors in this. Maybe that doesn't quite read. Double check it. Try tools like Grammarly, check that things read quite well. Next is to ensure your emails are formatted for mobile devices. If you're using platforms like Mailchim for example, they'll already have that formatting for you, basically. But if you're adding things like images, tables, things like that, do check it. You can do preview emails, send it to yourself, check it on your phone, see if it formats quite well. Finally, the bonus tip I'm going to give you on this one is check when the best time for your emails to go out. I will say, Fridays are probably a hit and a miss, so they're either good for some companies and bad for others, purely for the fact that people over the weekends have more time to read emails. But on the flip coin of that is people want to spend time with their families. They don't necessarily want to be spending their time reading your emails. But it's entirely up to you, depends on what kind of business you have, whether you can, but research it. You just do a bit of a Google research, find out where the best times is for your industry that you're in, and then work from there. But you might find that you might do a weekly email and that date might change, that time might change because you're finding out that say Friday at 9:00 A.M. Isn't working. You can test that out. Necessarily don't stick to the same date and time. Play around with it. If you're not getting as many people opening your emails, try a different day, see what happens. So I'm going to share two more slides with you. One of them is let's look at some examples of strong subject lines. I've got a few examples just to get your mind working a little bit differently when it comes to subject lines. Here are some common ones. You're making these three marketing mistakes. It's basically saying, you're making the mistakes. If you open them with email, you'll find out what they are. Then you've ever wonder why your pins aren't converting. Good question actually. That's a very good question to intrigue, it's very clear, it's very direct. Then you've got ones like the secret freelancer won't tell you. It's mystery behind it. You're creating a sense of emotion when you're actually getting people to open your emails. The next one is grow your email list by 500 this month. You've got finally a stress free way to plan content, double your sales with the strategy. They're all grabbing your attention, they're building some urgency, they're telling you basically what to expect when you open email, and that's what you want. So when I open any of these emails from these subject lines, I want to see content that relates to that. I want to know how do I grow my email list by 500 this month. The thing is, if that matches up with the content, that is creating a bit of a loyalty, that's creating that bond because you now know that that email is not going to be full of jargon or the first sentence that actually answers your question or anything like that. It's going to be very informative. It's going to tell me exactly how someone did it. It's going to give me some stories about email list. They're going to give me some examples. They're going to give me enough information to take away and go. Thanks. I'm going to use that now. That's the whole point of it. Finally, we're going to talk about common mistakes to avoid. First of all, writing vague subject lines that don't hint at what's inside, people, simple, they won. They'll just see a spam or nothing of interest that subject line does really matter. Then you've got ones like adding too much information can feel very overwhelming to readers. I've seen it time and time again where it's just text and it's like reading a story basically. I find that I switch off because there's too much information or there's too much of a story without actually a point to the story. Next is a lack of clear course of actions. We've mentioned this. Leaving your readers unsure, what do I do next from here? And finally, not optimizing it for mobile as well. So if they can't look at an email properly and pieces are missing or it goes off the page and people have to turn their phone, it's annoying and people will just not use your emails. But like I did say, if you are using marketing tools like a a mail chimp or malt, that's absolutely fine. They will optimize it for mobile. However, if you do use things like outlook or any of those tools, you will find sometimes when people are reading them, things might disappear or it just doesn't read very well. Hopefully, you've learned a lot from this. Think about those subject lines. Do you know what? Here's a really good task for you to do? Go on your emails, open the emails, and look at the subject lines. Look at the wording. Look at the emails you opened. Why did you open them? Have a look at the subject lines and have a look through the content and see what you quite like, what you'd like to introduce, the formats, write down some notes and just check out ten or 15 emails and write down the things you think, Yes, I like that, I'm intrigued by that, so maybe people will like that too. Because that will really help you get a sense of how to structure an email and how to intrigue your audience too. 6. DESIGNING EMAILS FOR IMPACT: Designing emails for impact. Good design really improves readability and that conversion. How do you do it? Here's four ways you can do it. First of all, you need to be making sure that the layout is clean, simple, and optimized view mobile viewing. Majority of us look at our emails while on lunch while we're waiting for appointments, sitting on the sofa, majority of people do not open their laptops to look at email. Think about making sure it's mobile ready. Layout, keep it nice and simple. There is no point adding los of random things into the background that takes away from the content. It's just too much. People want clean, easy, simple to read. Majority of the time people are in a rush or they're waiting for something, so they will scan something and if it is really busy looking, they'll delete it straight away. You don't want to do. Next, you need to think about using your brand colors, your fonts, your logos to build up that brand recognition. When people click your email, they're like, I know who this from. When it comes to using colors, use them sparingly. Use a lot of blacks, obviously because it's easier to read. But try and integrate some of your colors into the titles, into the call to action buttons because it'll help make them more prominent basically when people's reading through. Fonts, stick to fonts that are legible. Fonts like Aerial is a very popular one, something along those lines because any other font that's cursive or bold or capital, it's so hard to read on a screen, especially. Make sure that you're using very popular fonts. What I will say is, if you're really unsure, look it up, ask for the top fonts to use and you'll find your answer there, or even test a few out and send them to friends and yourself and see how they look. If you can read something very clearly, like the text that's on my screen right now, using those types of fonts that stand out, they're very clean fonts, go for it. As long as you can read it properly because the minute you can't just delete the email. Next, it comes to high quality images. There is nothing worse than having an EMA and it's a poor quality image of an infographic or something and you can't read it, you can't look at it. It's so frustrating because you're like, what was the image about? So make sure that you choose high quality images. Like I said, send the email to yourself, check it out, make sure that you can read everything on the graphic and everything in the email properly. And finally, quarter actions have been mentioned a lot. They really matter and make sure that you can clearly see where they are. Most people tend to do a quarter action in a button form. You can do multiple buttons across your entire email if you like. What I say is if you tend to do the quarter action in the text, highlight it, put it in a different color, make it bold, make it stand out, if you're going to do it that way. But your course actions need to go up and you need to know where they are. And finally, we're going to just quickly skim over about email templates. Very easy one. Every single email platform that you will use will offer email templates free or paid ones depending on what platform, they are great. They will save you time. You won't have to start from scratch. You won't have to worry about, if I missed out putting my logos or anything, they'll be set out in a way that optimizes you basically in the email form. Make sure to keep your fonts, your colors, your logos consistent throughout everything. Don't stop and change because it creates a bit of professionalism, always knowing when you get an email that they're always going to look the same. If something goes from one to the other to other, it makes you seem a bit like you're not sure what you're doing. So what I will say is once you've got a template, you've set it all up, you really like it, save it, use it for everything. You could do tweaks like the layout of, for example, the email itself with the text and images, that's absolutely fine. It's overall, if you're going to keep changing the colors, the fonts and moving your logos around here there where, it gets confusing. Have a look at your templates, and there are some fantastic ones you can do. Keep to trying the simple ones to start out with. There are some out there that can be a little bit too much, but that's for you to decide, it depends on your business and things like that, but have a look at the email templates. Also, his a little task is do some research. You can Google this, by the way, type in about email templates that convert or email templates, designs and there'll be tons and tons of blogs and things showing you different layouts and things like that. Do a little bit of homework and go. Well, actually, I quite like this, but I want to add this in because you can create your own template or you can use a preexisting one and tweak it to however you want. But templates overall will save you a lot of time and energy, thinking about how a layout works and things like that, especially if you're starting out and this is brand new to you. This is what I would suggest, but do homework. Have a look out there. You don't need to stick to the ones that are on the platforms. Like I said, find something that works for you. If you don't see anything like, you don't need to just click on it for the sake if you actually, I'll just do that because it's the easiest. Find what works for you and what you think would reflect your brand the best. 7. SEGMENTATION & PERSONALISATION: Let's look at segmentation and personalization. These two go hand in hand for a reason. First of all, segmenting, if you've not heard of this term before when it comes to email list, basically what you're doing is you're creating groups of subscribers based on their interests or behaviors. For example, you may have a pot of people, essentially call them pot people. That came from a freebie. But the topic would say about coaching. You may have a list of people that came from your website or from a particular thing that they've bought or of course they've bought or something, but they may all come from different sources and they all may have different interests. What you're doing is you're putting them into pots based on what their interest is. One person might be coaching, one might be about a specific product about wellness maybe or something like that. What it does is this will allow you to target them a bit more effectively when it comes to your emails. This is where the personalization comes in. When you're sending emails, you can target these specific groups in different ways. But what you'll notice is by doing this, you'll get higher open rate clicks and conversions because the content is tailored to them. When they have signed up to your email list through something, they've shown an interest in something specific. By sharing information specific to that interest, you basically you're reaching out to them on a way that they're like, Oh, I really like this. Actually, this is what I'm interested in, and it builds up that stronger relationship and they feel like they're understood and they're valued It's not just a generic email being sent to them, sent to billions of other people, it's relevant to what they're interested in. The two of those segmentation, personalization go hand in hand. Here's just a few examples of segmentations. So new subscribers versus long time subscribers, there'll be different levels of interaction that you'll find. New subscribers will probably get more of welcome emails, there'll be different soft touch points of who I am, what I do and stuff. Then you might have customers versus leads. There'll be different ways of talking to them. Customers are people that have already bought from you, so you can upsell them differently, different products, but bit more value. Leads are different type. You're nurturing them, you're talking to them, but you're not hard selling them or anything like that. At that point, you're gradually growing the interest with that type of buyer. The tone and the types of emails you send to the two groups are very, very different. Interest space as well is a very good way of segmentation. I do this because I run different memberships and they're all different topics. I find it a lot easier based on what they've signed up to, what freebie they've signed up to. I'd highly recommend doing lead magnets and stuff like that. But I am going to talk about that in a different lesson as well. We're going to talk about building your list and lead magnets come into it. This relates to the interests. This is where you can find out what their interests are. The content type will vary with interest. I like the fact that you can go by interest based because you can make it a little bit more personalized. You can tell stories, you can provide valuable advice depending on their interest, and you can obviously link in your products and services as well into each different one. But you're talking to so many different people, which is nice. But it feels like when the person os email is like, that's relevant, that's volume and that's what you want when it comes to segmentation. Um, on all of the email marketing tools that you'll find, I use Mil Lite. I can set up as many categories as such, that's segmentation, basically, as I want. Basically, I link anything that I create, my lead forms, everything, and it goes into those categories. Then from there, they get automated emails and they're nurtured through those emails. That's a really good part to think about. Um, so think about how you would segment your audiences. You don't need tons and tons of categories, but it's good to kind of know who you think that they will be, what interests they may have, how you want to go about it. Do you want to do people from your website? Do you want to do people from your newsletter? Like, how are you going to do it basically? 8. AB TESTING FOR BETTER RESULTS: Let's look at AB testing for better results. AB testing is an interesting tool that all people do with emails. It is a very useful strategy because what it does is it tells you what works and what doesn't in a very easy way. What it is essentially is two emails, and what you're doing is you're changing one variable or one of those emails. Basically, you're changing the subject line, called action, an image, maybe you're changing the layout. You're changing something. What you're going to do is you're going to send it to your email list, whoever it is, say 100 people. What you're going to do is you're going to send 50 with one email and 50 with the other email. What you're trying to do is you're trying to work out what works. You might be at this point where you've got an email list and you're thinking, this isn't good enough, this isn't working. Something is not engaging my audience enough to open those emails. What is it? You could have fantastic subject lines. You know, you've tried and tested everything, but you can't work out what it is, or you're at that point, you've got loads of people opening it, but you just want to improve on it. That's why people do AB testing. It's really interesting way of doing it. So the benefits when it comes to this, you'll notice is increase open rate, you'll get to test what works, what doesn't, and you'll see a change in open rates in those emails so you can be like, well, actually, if one has a higher open rate, something has worked in that email. If they're about the same, then there's something you need to change a bit more drastically for it to work a bit better. You'll see an improved click through rate and better engagement as well because you might find that your email subject line, for example, for a particular audience, subject line on one versus the other, one is way more effective. One is way more interest than the other, and that might be reaching your audience a bit better. We've mentioned what they are benefits, it's amazing. How do you run one? Here it is in six steps. Choose what to test. Decide on the element you want to compare. Like I said, it could be something very simple like subject line. It's entirely up to you. And what I will say is don't go absolutely mad, do one email, duplicate it, and change loads of stuff because you'll never know what worked in that email. It could have been, for example, the imagery or the format that could have changed it, but you won't know because you've changed too many things and you can't figure out what it is. With AB testing, you can do multiple ones. It's not just one time you do this. You could do this with every single email that you send out until you get to a point where you get in a really good open rate and you know specifically what works. Don't worry about just doing everything in one email. Do it over a few times. Create variations. Develop two or three different versions of those chosen elements. This all depends on how big your group you have. If you have say about 100 people, that's fine. Do it 50, 50. If you have more than try and split it into three because then you get more data quicker. Then segment your list. This is where you divide your email list into random groups. You could do it where I think on mail you could do it has the tool to basically split it for you. I think a lot of the platforms allow you to split it and they do this for you so you don't need to manually decide who does what. Then from here, you send out the emails. Send out each one nice and simple, press the button, send them all out, exact same time and see what works. Then from here, what we do is say in a week's time, this is the point that is really important is analyze your results. You sent three emails out, say, for example, to groups of 100 people. What did you learn from it? What worked? What didn't? Have a look at those variables. What did you change on them and see which ones work. Then next time you do it, because you've got your winner email, everyone loves it. Do it again. Whatever one, do your next AB test, start with that winning email and say if the open rate isn't quite where you want it to be, then do another one, but that winning email, whatever it was, for example, the subject line was really great. Include the subject line variation, try something else in the email. Try a different heading or different format or call to action might be at the top instead at the bottom, those things. You can tweak it however you want to. It's entirely up to you. Have a thing and about doing an AB test. Once you've established quite a big group, you can even do it with a small group, say, even if you've got 50 people, that's 25 25. It's a nice even amount. That's what you're looking for because it makes it a little bit easier in analyzing the results. Um, so what to test first? Subject lines are a great thing to try basically. They can make or break in email. Call to actions the wording. You could test like Shop Now, discover collection, different types of wordings. There's so many options out there you can try. You could do a sort an urgency statement of only a few hours left or doors closed tonight or last chance, you know, very urgency tone of voice. You can try those. You could try email length. You might find that your emails are too long or too wedy or the format of them in general is maybe you need more bullet points. Maybe people are just zoning out after I read something, maybe it needs a bit video added. I mean, there's so many little tests that you can run from this. But subject line is number one, I test. Call to action is really important email length. Those are, I would say, your first three tests that you would work out, what works and what doesn't. Then from there, then you can work out, if it's still not a great open rate, then you can test out things like images and positioning of things and other things. There's different things you can tweak like your intro language or the type of content you put in it maybe as well. The number of links. There are so many different things. But start with these three first, to be honest, and you'll learn a lot from them. Then just keep testing. Keep doing. Every time you send an email out, do an AB test until you get to where you want to be. 9. Different strategies for list building: So let's look at different strategies for list building. So there are so many strategies you can use to build your email list, and the best approach will depend on your specific goals and audience. Ask yourself, why am I creating the marketing list? What am I going to use with it? Are you going to do newsletters? Are you going to send automated emails? Like what are you going to do with it? Because once you've got audience, you do something with it. Otherwise, what was the point in getting all those email sign ups? So the first way you can do this is by offering valuable incentives. This is a really popular way of doing it, to be honest. I have a look at some of these and think, what could I use basically. E books, white papers or reports, so insights on relevant topics. That's always really helpful. You can do this where you have a pop up on your website where basically it's a sign up. Is a guide on how to do something and people will sign up usually because they want to know more. If it's relevant to what they're interested in, they'll sign up, especially for a free to be honest. Cheat sheets or templates are really useful. They're practical time saving. It shows that you're an expert in it, but it's a great thing because basically, if they've signed up to a cheat sheet about specific topic like meal prep, for example, then it can lead into those emails where you're giving them more value, and a few emails about that, then you can start talking about services a little bit more in those emails. They might not know that you offer services or products to help them. They may have found this on your social, this template. However they found it, signed up to it and didn't realize who you are and then gradually you'll build up that loyalty and communication sort of thing. Webinars and online courses, I see this a lot. This is really useful in particular if you have a particular service or you run a program of some kind. Doing a free webinar is fantastic. You could do it where you pre record everything. Set it up on a landing page. Basically, people get instant access, people sign up to learn about basically a particular topic. You're not giving everything away. All you're doing is you're giving them a bit of a bite into what they can learn from you. Then basically in the video, you basically ups what program or whatever. But you've got them on a bit of a hook into but they'll be on your email list. Even if they don't sign up or do anything from that webinar, you can nurture them going, you watch this. Well, here's something valuable, blah blah blah. You can follow that on by sharing more value until the point where they're like, actually, this is really interesting. This really relevant. I see a lot of them everywhere on Event, there are ads, they're everywhere, and they're so useful for getting those email sign ups. A discounts for coupons. Yeah, that is a really fantastic way of doing it. Special promotions, try this for half the price is always an incentive to people because maybe they were sitting on the fence about something and then you're going, well, try it for half the price because I know it's good and I know that after a month, you will stay with. So Jeremi, if you can do discounts and things, I would because it's a great way to do things. And it's great because well, to get the discounts and coupons, they have to put their email address in to get the code. That's how you link it in is if they want the discount, they have to sign up to your newsletter, usually newsletter to get the coupon. When it comes to sign ups, we talked about the value of incentives. Where do you do these? This is really important because this is where you capture all that information. The best places are on your website. You can embed it as a pop up. There's annoying little things that pop up on your screen when you're shopping or something. You could do it as that. It's really useful. What I will do is make sure that you show a guide or something useful. Don't sign up to my newsletter. You need something go, sign up, get this free. That works usually. You could do it on the end of blogs, you could do it on a landing page. Landing pages are really good. You can set up a freebie on a landing page. Same with courses and things, you can add them to your landing pages. You can pretty much add them pretty much anywhere, to be honest. When you do do it, however, make sure that you're using clear and concise quarter actions, tell people what it is they're signing up to. Be very specific in stating that they're signing up to Bwsleters with yourself and that they can unsubscribe at any point as well. There's nothing worse than signing up to something, I can't unsubscribe them. There's no way for me to do this. Um, make sure that they're mobile friendly forms as well. Making sure that, um, you know, you can do it on any device. You've got, you know, most people will sign up to things from their mobile than desktop. So make sure that, you know, they can fill in the form quite easy. I got enough space for the thumbs to basically type in the letters and stuff like that. And finally, promoting your sign ups. You've got your forms, your landing page, your website, your blogs, you've got it all, you've got your incentives, you've got all your ebooks or whatever you're going to give away. Now, you need to promote it. You need to make sure that you're sharing on social media, you can do it on Pinterest, you can do Inscram, Facebook, I mean Facebook, you can pin it to the top. Inscram, talk about it in your stories, talk about it. Go you get this free guide, but don't throw this guide every single post because that just gets annoying. But share it. Email signatures is the same, included in your sign up link, you know what I mean? If you're emailing people already, put it in your email signature going, by the way, you can get free guide, click this link. Then same with if you go to events or you can print off materials with QR codes. It depends on your business. If you are doing something like events or things like that, you could print off a little card with a QR code like sign up for more information or sign up to get 10% discount on something that's on your store for example. But there's so many different ways that you can do this. But you just need to make sure that you are promoting it consistently because if you don't promote it, nobody knows it exists. Basically, that's how it is. Same with your website as well. Try and push more traffic to your website, have that goal in mind of if I can get people to my website, they'll see my prop up, they'll sign up to emails. Even if they don't stay on my website, least they'll sign up to an email list and then they could potentially be a new lead in the future. So have a look at what kind of valuable incentives you could do for your business. Think about how you would basically promote it, how they would go about signing up. Will you do learning pages? Will you focus primarily on your website? Depends if you have one. But yeah, have a look, write down some ideas on what kind of things that you can create. There are so many useful tools out there, useful tools to help you hat GBT to create a guide. You could do your own homework, your own research to figure out what you can create, do a webinar, it's entirely up to you. But these are the most popular ways to build up your email list.