The Email Marketing Show
Email Marketing Heroes
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We always say email marketing can help you make more sales, more predictably, and in less time. But you shouldn't just take our word for it - that's why we regularly share email marketing success stories from our amazing students. Our client Lucas Reuterstig is one of them. After joining our programme and implementing just two of our email marketing campaigns, he saved his business, and his calendar got fully booked for 3 weeks!
Want to know how he did that?
Let's find out!
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:15) Join our FREE Facebook group.
(3:32) Who is Lucas Reuterstig?
(6:02) When did Lucas get started with email marketing?
(7:57) What was the first thing Lucas did when he joined our programme?
(10:41) How does Lucas feel about his email marketing now?
(13:01) What's the plan for Lucas's email marketing going forward?
(15:29) What's the one action that made all the difference?
(17:13) Would you like to hear more from Lucas? (And get a special offer?)
(18:44) Subject lines of the week.
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Who is Lucas Reuterstig?
Lucas runs a programme (and a podcast) called Presenter Mastery, which is a communication training program that delivers:
- Confidence, so you know what to say and when, and your message becomes clear and engaging.
- Delivery, i.e. the scientific skills that make your audience listen.
- And content, so you can learn to use storytelling in your presentation to increase anticipation, excitement, and buy-in.
In their business, Lucas and his team analyse s a person's presentation style and create an individualised plan for development. They also deliver weekly calls, live training, and coaching to their community of students.
When did Lucas get started with email marketing?
Lucas has worked with David Phillips (a public speaker for 25 years) since 2020. When they launched their first platform for communication training, they didn’t use email marketing at all. However in 2022, with a better understanding of sales funnels, they discovered another way of selling online. This was when they created the Presenter Mastery Programme, and while they knew email marketing would play a part in their business, they didn't yet know what kind of emails to send out.
At first, they'd only use emails as reminders for any events they had coming up. Then in February 2023, they decided to make a change - they wanted their email marketing to have meaning and to be 'spot on'. This is when Lucas found our podcast and then decided to join our programme.
What was the first thing Lucas did when he joined our programme?
Lucas joined our programme (The Email Marketing Hero Blueprint) for a specific reason - he wanted access to our email marketing templates. So the first thing he did when he came into our world was to implement our Paparazzi campaign, which is our flash sale campaign.
Immediately, Lucas found that our campaign was producing results, so in May 2023 he also implemented our webinar sequence to bring people to his live events and then offer coaching calls at the back of those.
And do you know what happened? Lucas and his team sold out on all their spots - their coaching calendars were fully booked for 3 weeks! And at that point, Lucas had to do the unthinkable and shut off the rest of the campaign! That's until his team came up with the idea of selling other courses they had. Phew - more sales incoming.
In a nutshell, the combination of the two email campaigns that Lucas tailored to his business and implemented was so successful that he's been using them ever since.
How does Lucas feel about his email marketing now?
Lucas and his team had the best month in their business in January 2024. And the difference to how he felt before is night and day, he said. He no longer feels like the stressed-out, hustling entrepreneur. Now, Lucas can plan what’s coming ahead because there’s predictability in the business. And that’s thanks to having email marketing in place.
Lucas and his team are comfortable knowing that email marketing makes everything work. If you already have performing ads that lead to a great webinar (like Lucas had) but don’t remind anyone about it, no one’s going to show up! Email helps reiterate what’s happening and tells people why they should take action. Without email, nothing happens!
Email marketing has become a crucial part of everything Lucas and his team do in the business. And that's no surprise. Because email marketing supports the things you're doing in your business by amplifying what already works and making it more effective.
Lucas and his team now have a system that works, and they want to scale it. In fact, because of how successful the company is, Lucas has hired the services of our agency to bring more momentum to everything they do. And the priority is to build their email engine.
What’s the plan for Lucas's email marketing going forward?
Lucas believes he and his team have been lagging with their daily strategy, as they’ve only been sending emails out once a week. So they plan to ramp regular emails up and be more 'on point'. They also want to align their daily email strategy with their social media effort and overall marketing.
Lucas’s business is in a position where they’re driving massive sales through email but also creating higher revenue, which gives them the comfort of a safety net. They don't have to think about where the next conversion is going to come from because their sales are consistent and predictable.
Reflecting on previous Christmas periods, Lucas remembered how stressed he used to feel. But during the Christmas 2023 period, the sales kept rolling in. Coaching calls were booked, and everything was running smoothly without Lucas having to physically do anything. And that's because their email marketing engine is performing.
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What’s the one action that made all the difference?
For Lucas, the ability to focus on email marketing specifically has made all the difference. He zoomed in on email marketing to make it work for their business. That meant setting other things aside and delegating some tasks. But doing this paid off! Because as soon as the campaigns were set up, he could replicate them, and the next part became easier.
You need to invest the time upfront to make it all happen. After all, for most people, email marketing is about revenue generation. And if you dedicate time and commitment to figure it out, it'll give results.
Would you like to hear more from Lucas? (And get a special offer?)
If you want to find out more about Lucas, he has a podcast show called Presenter Mastery where he and David talk about presentation skills every week. You can also find them on their website. Lucas also kindly created a special offer for all our listeners, which you can find here. This resource is something that's normally sold for 37 euros at the end of a webinar, but it’s free for you!
Did you enjoy one of the many email marketing success stories we share from students of our programme? If you want to get access to all the resources that Lucas and his team have been using to create amazing success in his business with email marketing, check out our programme – The Email Hero Blueprint – and jump in!
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Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is one that Kennedy wrote, and it's "Off the record (THEIR NAME)” (i.e. the subscriber’s name). The email was about the fact we were doing a bonus behind-the-scenes talk with someone, and we invited people to attend. It was a conversation “off the record”.
Why did the subject line work? First of all, it doesn’t tell people explicitly to go and listen to us having a conversation with someone off the record. The reader doesn’t know what this is all about, so they want to go and find out. But also, putting someone’s name in brackets makes the whole subject line pop a bit more. And it drives a lot of compound curiosity. So check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
How April McMurtrey Increased Her Revenue By 400% In Just One Year – A Case Study.
FREE list to improve your email marketing
If 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 group
If 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 $1
This 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 Blueprint
Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), 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 flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.
Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about one of the amazing email marketing success stories of our clients) 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!
Want to find out how to immediately supercharge your email marketing copywriting? Then let's find out about the Rule of One. This isn’t just a technique you can use in your email writing. You can use it across any kind of writing you do for your business – sales pages, sales videos… everywhere! And it will massively improve your conversion.
Ready to learn how to apply it?
Let's go!
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:25) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!
(4:21) What is the Rule of One in copywriting?
(7:19) Use the same call to action across a whole email campaign.
(9:18) Send people to landing pages where they can only make ONE choice.
(11:26) Write your emails to ONE reader.
(12:24) Give people ONE call to action (per email).
(14:25) The benefits of stacking your email marketing campaigns.
(15:54) Tap into the power of storytelling.
(18:07) Your Super Signature is the exception to the rule!
(21:03) Subject lines of the week.
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What is the Rule of One in copywriting?
Whenever somebody writes copy for us (yes, we do hire copywriters because we're not professional copywriters ourselves), the one piece of suggestion we always give is to focus on the one idea we're trying to convey. What’s the one thing we want to say? Every time you put out any type of communication (an email, a headline, the opening of a sales video, etc.) you want to talk about one idea.
Equally, when it comes to email marketing, every email you send should talk about one theme. If you're sending an email about risk, the whole email needs to be about that. You don’t want to add social proof to that email – that’s a different theme for another day.
And if you're only talking about one thing, you’re probably also going to use one single story. Unless you have a few stories that demonstrate that one thing you’re talking about. And you do this because otherwise, people’s brains get overwhelmed.
So let's get into the specifics of this...
Use the same call to action across a whole email campaign
The Rule of One applies to individual emails but also to email campaigns. We often pick one call to action and effectively use that across an entire email campaign. If we’re running the Bribe campaign, for example (where we tell people that if they buy one thing they’ll get something else for free), every email we send as part of that sequence is going to have the same call to action. We lead people to that one action by using different hooks, angles, and stories in the individual emails we send as part of that campaign.
Why do this? Because when you say too many things at once, people get confused and overwhelmed and end up not making decisions. The more directions you send people in, the more confused they’re likely to get.
Send people to landing pages where they can only make ONE choice
When we send someone to a landing page, we want them to only have one thing they can do on there. And that’s to click and buy or click an opt-in. There’s only one call to action on that page.
If you’re sending someone to a landing page to opt in for something, but you also have your blog and other items under the navigation menu, you’re giving people lots of choices and other things they could do. So they’re not going to opt in! Instead, direct people to one thing and one thing only so you don't lose their attention. Because confused brains do nothing!
You want to create one singular narrative. Your job is to build a belief, which may start with a story that leads to a theme and some kind of lesson. Then you want to tell people the one thing they should go and do. Remember that people are looking for help – they’re not qualified to know what action to take. That’s what they’ve come to you! So you need to help them take action or make a choice. You’re the one who’s qualified to tell them what to do to get the outcome they desire.
Write your emails to ONE reader
The Rule of One also applies to the way you send your emails. You want to address your emails to one reader rather than a ‘collective’, saying something along the lines of “Hi guys”. Imagine writing to one person and that person only.
When you do that, suddenly your email doesn’t sound like a marketing, corporate one. Instead, it sounds personal - something you'd send to someone you have a deeper relationship with. And when you deepen the relationships with your subscribers, you’re better able to influence them. You get to take them on a journey with you and feel things - experience emotions. And as a result, you get them to take action.
Give people ONE call to action (per email)
Always address just one topic (one theme) in your emails and be clear on the one action you want people to take. Don’t give them plenty of choices because they won’t know what decision to make. Instead, tell them about the best action they can take so they can move on to the next step in their journey with you. That’s what each email you send does – it moves people to the next step of the journey.
At the start of an email campaign, you might want to ask people to watch a video that talks about the problem they might be experiencing. As you progress with your sequence, you can let them know about your course or programme and ask people to check it out. Your call to action can change in the space of a campaign. You can start with a softer approach building curiosity and then, towards the end, make your one main promise.
The benefit of stacking your email marketing campaigns
The great thing about using multiple campaigns in your marketing is that each of them can have one main promise. And each promise can be different, even if you're promoting the same product or service. That's because the campaigns stack over each other. And by using this method, you're not overwhelming your audience by telling them everything at once.
At the same time, you're not blowing all your chances by sending everything you have to say in one go. When you do that, things get lost. With too much being said at once, people miss it. Instead, pick every single important thing you want your subscribers to know and put it on a pedestal. Give it space to breathe – give it a whole email of its own or maybe even a whole campaign! Shine a light on it so that people who are attracted to it see it all lit up - standing high and tall about the crowd - and can see it as the promise they need to go ahead and buy the thing they’re looking for.
Tap into the power of storytelling
To differentiate your emails (even if the call to action is the same, and you’re driving people to the same product), you can use storytelling. It allows you to ‘decorate’ the same thing in different ways. So you take the story about whatever happened to you on a particular day and link it to your main point and call to action. We have a whole podcast episode on that, so go and check it out!
In other words, you can choose to send a plethora of emails that include the same call to action but go about it in loads of different ways. But remember the Rule of One - each email has one story, one lesson, and one main call to action.
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Your Super Signature is the exception to the rule!
There’s an exception to the Rule of One though, and that’s your Super Signature. If you’re inside our programme, you can find some training about this - it's called Super Signature Reloaded. What's your Super Signature exactly? It's a list of links at the bottom of your emails that includes everything that someone can do if they want your help.
The way we see it, the Super Signature is not diluting your call to action because it's a separate part of the email. It's further down at the bottom. You can even put a couple of lines above it to physically separate it from your main email.
And its job is to tell people that if they’re ready to take things to the next level, there are a bunch of ways you can help - the Super Signature gives them options. These can include free things like joining our Facebook group or listening to our podcast, but also buying our programme, or hiring our agency to do your email marketing for you.
It acts like a menu of quick resources that people can access if and when they need to. We stick it at the bottom (in the footer) of every email we send - it's a constant for us, and it makes us sales every week because people click on it!
You can make your call to action multiple times
One last thing to point out is that in the main body of the email, you want to make sure you have one call to action, as we said. But you can make that same call to action multiple times. In a daily email, we might just have one. But sometimes when we send emails inside our campaigns, we may have links to the same call to action two or three times.
Join the Email Hero Blueprint
If you want to know more about the topics we talked about here (including how to wave storytelling into your emails and set up your Super Signature), check out the Email Hero Blueprint. It’s our flagship brand new programme where you can find everything you need to get more sales from your existing subscribers.
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Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “anyone there??” It sounds like the typical subject line you’d use for a re-engagement campaign (such as our Revival campaign), but it had nothing to do with that. It was just a story that Rob told about being left alone somewhere.
It’s interesting because it’s designed to sound like a prompt or a nudge for people who haven’t been paying attention, but it's not. So you’re threading the line between using something attention-grabbing but that doesn’t feel clickbaity. The last thing you want is for people to feel like they've been deceived when they read your email. Also, with two question marks, you’re making a slight exaggeration, and that grabs people’s attention even more. So check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
The Biggest Mistakes You’re Making With Your Email Marketing Copywriting.
Mindblowing Techniques To Connect More Deeply With Your Email Readers With Rob Marsh & Kira Hug.
Comedian’s Secrets to Storytelling – With Kevin Rogers.
FREE list to improve your email marketing
If 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 group
If 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 $1
This 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 Blueprint
Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), 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 flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.
Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about mastering the email marketing copywriting technique of the Rule of One) 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's the latest in the email marketing world? Let's find out about the email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. What can we all do to make our emails work even better for our businesses?
(And yes, we'll talk about AI, but probably in the way you expect us to).
Ready to go?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:12) Join our FREE Facebook group.
(4:57) Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification.
(7:35) The technical bits that are important for validation.
(11:11) We need to focus on engagement with our list.
(13:30) Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers into customers!
(17:02) Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building.
(20:27) Stand out by humanising your content.
(24:02) Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint.
(26:44) Subject lines of the week.
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Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification
In 2024 and beyond, email deliverability is going to become more ‘problematic’. And verification is going to be more important than ever. These two elements go hand in hand. And we recommend you have all your ducks in a row to make sure your emails get into the inboxes of your subscribers.
Email marketing platforms are tightening their belts around deliverability and engagement monitoring. They're doing this so we're not all building mammoth lists of people and bombarding them with emails whether they're reading them or not.
Kennedy did a little experiment recently. He had a look at the emails he receives in his inbox and was amazed at how many big brand names whose emails he hasn’t opened for ages are still emailing him. These marketers aren't taking their list hygiene and verification as seriously as they should!
The technical bits that are important for validation
Now more than ever, you need to focus on validation. So make sure you set up your DNS SPF and DKIM records. If you’re not familiar with these, look for some simple tutorials on how to set them up. It’s a one-time job, and yes - it's boring. You can pay someone to do it for you if you want. But get it done because people need to know for sure that the person sending emails is who they say they are. And that’s why these measures are coming into force.
A few years ago, anyone could have opened an account with an email marketing platform and pretended they were an ex-president of the US. No one would have batted an eyelid! But we now live in a world where people are being scammed left right and centre. So these measures exist to protect us all. You’ll have noticed how many scams you receive via text message compared to email. That's because the world of text messaging is still unverified.
You can't just ignore validation because you know you’re a good, legitimate person who isn’t scamming anyone. So do that piece of work! It's similar to what's happening on social media. You can now pay a monthly fee to receive a blue tick and show you're a verified account. More people are choosing to do this because they’re genuinely finding that others are cloning their profiles!
We need to focus on engagement with our list
If you’re a customer of ours, we give you all the resources when it comes to re-engagement campaigns and processes to make sure the people on your list are those who are paying attention to your emails. Don't end up with subscribers who haven’t looked at your stuff in years!
We might even start tightening up the window of time that we allow people before we consider them disengaged. We'll then put them through our re-engagement campaign, and if they don't engage we remove them from our list. Permanently.
If you’re a member of our programmes, as part of our monthly calls, we’re going to keep you up to date with the latest email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. If things change in the email marketing world, we'll tell you!
For example, when we started a few years ago, we would measure engagement based on open rates. At the time, that worked because they were fairly accurate. But now we measure engagement based on clicks. As always, we develop and respond to what’s working.
Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers!
The next thing to consider when it comes to email marketing trends for 2024 is the cost of ads. A lot of us are building our lists using paid advertising on various channels. And you’ll notice that the cost of advertising is the highest it’s ever been! This means that the cost of getting new subscribers is going to increase. And the one skill we all need to master is our ability to monetise the subscribers on our email list.
First of all, we need to build the skill of converting subscribers into paying customers for the first time. And then we also need to maximise how much we're able to earn from the subscribers on our list because if we’re paying more for each person we bring in, we have less time to make that money back. The marketers who are going to survive and win the ad game are those who manage to win the customer (not just the subscriber). The same goes for organic reach, as these costs are expected to increase as well.
Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building
We can't talk about email marketing trends for 2024 and not mention AI! If you work with media agencies or pay-per-click advertising, we believe they'll also change the way they work and focus more on the creative. This is because, with billions of dollars invested in Google AI, they'll always do a better job of figuring out what ads to place in front of whom, on what devices, what times, etc.
There are lots of different criteria that you need to get right – it’s a complicated cocktail. But AI is going to be able to do a better job than anyone else because they're collecting data from advertisers that are way bigger than any of us. And then they use that data to optimise the process.
The money in media buying is going to go to people who are good at figuring out creative artwork. And a lot of them are going to use AI to make it more engaging. It all comes down to humans with AI replacing humans without AI (rather than AI replacing humans).
The big opportunity here is in your ability to use AI to analyse which ads are likely to perform best. For example, you can use AI to look at 10 bits of creative, 10 headlines, and 10 bits of body copy and work out which combination will perform the best. It’s all going to be about AI informing the creative!
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Stand out by humanising your content
With more development in AI, we’re going to see a proliferation of content and profiles that are non-human. So humanising your email marketing is the way to go.
One of the greatest opportunities we have with content is to be human. It’s about creating things that AI cannot create, such as personal stories about what's happening in your life and how you feel about them. It’s about expressing your personal opinions - something AI cannot do (yet) because it's not in your head!
AI is a content factory that’s pumping out this bland "How-To" content that might have some personality and may sound like you. It's certainly going to get better over time at understanding your style, but it's never going to know what you experience daily. Not in 2024 anyway!
So when everyone on your email list is receiving so many AI-generated emails, which send people to AI-generated sales pages with AI-generated sales videos to AI-generated products, you have a huge opportunity to stand out by being human. By sharing things that aren't AI-generated. You can be different from all those content factories that create their emails, landing pages, sales videos, and even products at the push of a button.
Maybe there will come a day when even podcasts will be completely AI-generated. We had an idea a while ago to start another podcast that used a combination of text-to-speech to introduce different sections and then grab bits of content that we created elsewhere and put them together. We didn't do it. But just remember that something real is going to stand out among a lot of that type of content.
Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint
Email marketing has been around for a long time and will continue to be in 2024 and beyond because it's the highest return-on-investment marketing activity you can do in your business. The level of engagement you get through email marketing has not been equalled by anything else that anyone’s ever attempted. It enables long-term growth and sustainable scaling.
In 2024, email remains central to everything we’re doing. We believe we all need to double down on building smaller, more engaged audiences. Our job is to deepen the relationship with our subscribers using AI where possible but never at the risk of replacing or butchering those relationships. And this could easily happen if you remove the human from the messaging.
Focus on deliverability and remaining human, continue to tell stories and share personalised content, sell in every email, and increase the frequency of your emails. This is going to be the winning path through email marketing in 2024.
And if you’d like to be kept up to date with the email marketing trends for 2024 (and beyond) and what's working right now, as the email platforms develop a way to respond to this massive uptake in the volume of email and AI becomes even better quality, more realistic, and more human-looking and want to know how to use AI ethically, come and check out our flagship programme, The Email Hero Blueprint.
We take you through how to set up every single element of your email marketing (including the technical bits) to make it work for you so you can turn more subscribers into customers and master the central skill you're going to need in 2024 as ad prices continue to go up, and there's a proliferation of AI-generated bland content.
Check out all the details of why it works, how, and what's included to get the incredible results that our students get.
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Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “Warning: this is HOT”. It sounds like there might be something in the email that’s considered hot, like a hot recommendation, for example. But the subject line comes from the story in the email that was based on picking up a plate that was too hot (after being warned that the plate was indeed very hot!)
Why does this work? The subject line is a bit cryptic, but not in a way that sounds clickbaity to the point that people feel deceived when they open the email. So check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
EVERYTHING You Need To Know About AI For Email Marketing.
How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).
FREE list to improve your email marketing
If 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 group
If 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 $1
This 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 Blueprint
Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), 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 flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.
Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the hot email marketing trends for 2024) 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!
Is it possible to get awesome results from email marketing? Can email take your business from the brink of collapsing to amazing heights and success? Yes, it can. And we're getting to hear from one of our clients - the lovely April McMurtrey from Learn Reading, who's sharing how she increased her revenue by 400% in just ONE year!
Pretty unbelievable, right?
But it's true.
Let's get the whole story from April!
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:19) Join our FREE Facebook group.
(2:51) Who is April McMurtrey?
(5:07) When did April start using email marketing in her business?
(6:42) What did April's email marketing look like when she first started?
(7:54) What's the first change April made when she joined our world?
(9:08) What happened when April started making changes to her email marketing?
(12:55) How April got a 400% increase in sales in just 12 months.
(14:32) How does April feel about her email marketing now?
(16:46) What's ONE action April recommends people take when it comes to email marketing?
(19:31) Subject line of the week.
[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]
Who is April McMurtrey?
April is a Dyslexia and Reading Specialist who teaches struggling and dyslexic readers how to read. In a nutshell, April’s come up with a better, easier, and faster way of learning how to read. Isn't that overwhelmingly awesome?!
After teaching reading for 30 years, April started her private practice as a reading specialist. She then got certified in dyslexia therapy and testing and went on to develop her programme after 25 years of experience in seeing what works and what doesn't. After creating her curriculum for dyslexic and struggling learners, she launched her business and programme (backed up by a lifetime of skill and expertise) in March 2020.
When did April start using email marketing in her business?
April started using email marketing about a year after she launched her business. She knew she wanted to do email marketing from the start, but we all know the learning curve at the beginning is quite steep. And April had no idea where to start. Like most, April is in business to help people – not to necessarily learn all the stuff that goes with running a business.
When we asked her about her biggest barrier to getting started with email marketing, April told us she didn't know how to find someone who could help her learn. She had a lot of subscribers on her list but no idea what to do with them.
April recognised the power of emails though. She could see all the professional-sounding and impressive emails landing in her inbox, and she knew the marketers who were sending those emails were following some sort of sequence to be able to sell. That's what April wanted to be able to do, too. But at the time, she just didn't know how.
What did April’s email marketing look like when she first started?
At the start of her email marketing journey, April would send an email once every couple of months just to tell her subscribers about any products she had for sale. People on April's list had no real idea who she was, and she's pretty sure a lot of them would unsubscribe as soon as they realised she was trying to sell to them. So her emails were sporadic, and she had no automation.
What’s the first change April made when she joined our world?
After spending some time trying to learn about email marketing through podcasts, April started binge-listening to ours. And that's what eventually led her to join our membership The League and start implementing our strategies.
One of the first things she did was to send out daily emails. And that’s where everything changed for April. She discovered she loves the creative process of sending emails every day. She enjoys sharing what’s going on with her days and tying that into something she can teach people. Now, seeing the relationship with her audience build through daily emails is one of April’s favourite things to do.
What happened when April started making changes to her email marketing?
The first shift happened in April’s mindset. After joining our world, she felt she finally had the tools she’d been looking for and everything mapped out for her. She could see where she was, where she was going, and what she had to do to get there. And she was on fire with it!
When April started implementing email sequences (such as our Overture campaign and our Getting to Know You sequence) things picked up for her. In particular, when April launched our Golden Cloak campaign, her sales went from trickling to skyrocketing.
Finding her people
The combination of sending daily emails and automating a few campaigns gave April control. It filled that gap she felt she had in her business, and April discovered she loved communicating with her audience. Suddenly, because of all the emails, the subscribers on her list turned into her people – April became their reading teacher, and they started caring about her. And that was fun.
Plus, because we always teach our students that you should give your subscribers something to click on (or something to do), April did just that. And people started replying to her and telling her just how much they loved hearing about her life and receiving all the little tricks she shared with them. April was pleasantly surprised at the rapport and deep connection that she started to be able to build with her people.
What April has now, thanks to email marketing, is a relationship with the people on her list. She’s open and honest about her days and her ups and downs, and people are supportive and encouraging. April truly cherishes those relationships, and sending emails is one of her favourite things to do because of the connections it allows her to build. It’s like having individual relationships with 21,000 people! April’s list is not just a crowd – the connections she established feel very personal.
How April got a 400% increase in sales in just 12 months
After she started doing email marketing consistently, April experienced a 400% increase in sales in just one year. During this time, her social media presence also increased. But April attributes at least 80-90% of the increase in sales to what she learnt about email marketing from us. We showed her the perfect route to take, she said.
Now, her social media is her traffic source. Just like we recommend, it's where she builds her audience. But she built her business through email - because that's where April gets to establish and deepen her relationship with her subscribers.
With around 21k subscribers, April has a considerable list. But as we all know, having people on your list is one thing - converting them is a different game! And without the right skills and techniques, it’s a hard thing to do.
[thrive_leads id='8822']
How does April feel about her email marketing now?
Email marketing saved April’s business. A year before our chat, April's business was 'on life support' - she felt she probably only had one month of a viable business left in the tank. Email marketing not only helped her business get off of life support but, a year later, to also thrive well beyond what April could have ever imagined. And that’s thanks to the email strategies that April learnt from us.
April is a writer – she loves writing and being creative. Above all else, she loves building relationships and deep connections with her audience. And spending 10-20 minutes a day putting her hands on the keyboard and getting her brain engaged is her favourite thing to do. But it’s also the most effective thing in her business – it's what saved April’s business and got it to where it is now. If you think about it, 10-20 minutes a day is a pretty good deal!
What’s ONE action April recommends people take when it comes to email marketing?
The one action April recommends people take is to trust the process. It’s not all about you, what you can provide, or how you can perform. It’s the process that works – it’s the campaigns and the sequences that have been developed inside The League.
So think about the expertise you have to offer. Be confident that the people on your list need what you have to offer and don’t give up. When you’re thinking about what you’re going to say in your emails, focus on your desire to help your people and the connection that will result from it. Don’t give up because the process works!
In even more exciting news, April is also launching a book, and setting it up for success (with email marketing, of course) is next on her agenda. If you're interested, you can find details about the book here.
[thrive_leads id='8854']
Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line (courtesy of Kennedy - for once) is “Insurance payout (the whole £30)” The subject line works because it has compound curiosity but also uses specificity by mentioning the exact amount of the payout - £30. Kennedy didn’t just mention the specific amount of money but also decided to contrast it with “the whole”, which makes it sound like it should be a really big number, but it’s not! First, he tries to build the whole thing up, but when you read £30, the whole idea comes crashing straight down.
So as you can see, Kennedy used a few techniques here – the subject line triggers curiosity by mentioning the insurance payout. People want to know how he won because insurance companies are well known for wiggling out of it. But also, who won? What happened? And what's the £30 all about? What does this whole thing even mean? No surprise that this subject line got really good open rates. So check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
And How Our Client Hillary-Marie Made $16k With ONE Email Marketing Campaign (And Then Did It Again!)
FREE list to improve your email marketing
If 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 group
If 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 $1
This 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 League Membership
Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.
Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how our client April increased her revenue with email marketing by 400% in just one year) 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!
Is there a difference between B2B vs B2C email marketing? What works best? And can we take some of the best strategies from B2C and apply them to B2B?
Let's have a big ol' email showdown and find out which type of email marketing wins!
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:29) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!
(3:23) What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C?
(6:50) The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing.
(9:46) What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?
(12:13) Who is sending your emails?
(16:06) How do people join your list?
(19:33) What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?
(24:20) Subject line of the week.
[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]
What do we mean by B2B, B2b, and B2C?
We believe there are three categories of businesses when it comes to selling:
- B2B - business to BIG business.
- B2b - business to small business.
- And B2C - business to consumer, where you sell things to do with people's hobbies and lives.
Most of the businesses we sell to are B2b, which means we sell to owner-run businesses or a one-person band. The owner may be working with a partner or a small team, but the business is small. And we consider ourselves one of those businesses too as unless you’re making more than $10 million a year, you're still a small business.
The key here is that businesses in the B2b category behave like consumers. When buying products or services for their company, business owners tend to use their own money. So it's worth bearing in mind that at the end of your emails, there are human beings who expect to hear from you in a certain way.
The difference between B2B and B2C email marketing
Let's say you're a large government lobbying organisation to do with climate change. You'll be expected to show up in a way that's very different from the way we show up in people's inboxes, for example (i.e. with rude jokes full of innuendo and swear words!) The reason we act the way we do is because of our understanding of ourselves and our market. We show up in a way that’s acceptable by our market but that’s also different and makes us stand out.
A large government lobbying organisation will communicate with its clients in a completely different way. They still have to build trust and authority, just like all of us do, but it’s done differently. If they started going off on a tangent about something silly (like we do in our emails), that wouldn’t give the right indicator for them as a company.
And it’s not just about the words because those only contribute to a small percentage of the way someone may interpret that message. How you say something is what allows people to read between the lines and get the real essence of what you're like. You can build trust and authority by showing testimonials and social proof, but you can also do it through the tone in which you speak. If you get an email that reads as if a college professor wrote it, it'll have a different level of credibility than something jokey.
The words aren’t that important. What matters the most are the campaign structures that you create, the stories you put together, and the tone you use. They can be ridiculous and funny (if you want to) for B2C but more authoritative and professional if your market is more serious. And the beauty of the campaigns we offer inside our membership The League is that you can take the emails and change the words without breaking the whole thing.
What about the different sales cycles between B2B and B2C?
Sales cycles may take a little longer for B2B compared to B2C. With B2C (and possibly B2b), you may find that consumers have the ability and the power to buy a little faster. And yet, they will still need your product to be presented through different offers before they buy.
For example, in B2B, you could use different email sequences or email engines (as we call them) for different phases of the sales cycle to move your prospective clients through the cycles. We often talk about having three email engines:
- The lead or subscriber engine is designed to get leads to become first-time customers.
- Then you have the customer engine to get people to buy from you again.
- And then you have the winning customers back engine, aimed at the people who haven’t bought from you for a while.
With B2B, you may even have multiple phases of a sales cycle. It could be that you've identified some leads, then booked an initial meeting, then maybe booked a demo, followed by a consultation period. After that, you may need to go through Ts&Cs and the specifics of the product the client is going to buy, and then finally you seal the deal. You may even have a maintenance package after that. So you might need a bunch of email campaigns to move people from one phase to the next. That’s what email marketing helps you do. It helps you move people from where they are to the next step until they’re ready to buy. It’s a bit like a game of rounders or baseball, where you need to focus on moving from one base to the next.
Who is sending your emails?
Something we recommend for B2B and B2b as well as B2C is to be consistent with who the email comes from. Because people buy from people. When you send an email with the objective to move someone from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next, you want that email to be from a human being.
That's why we recommend you use your name, the salesperson's name, or even a fictional character’s name if you want. Whatever you do, use an actual name, and you'll see your open rates go up. That's because the level and depth of your relationship with that person are going to increase. Relationships are established with people and things we can relate to. So both the person sending the email and the copy of the email itself have to be something that people can relate to.
Think about it - on a day-to-day basis, we all get emails from a lot of institutions and organisations (such as banks or credit card companies), and they all tend to come from the company. But we think that should change - emails should come from a person. Because that allows us to establish deeper relationships and feel like we're communicating with actual humans.
In the past, small companies would pretend they had several members of staff to make themselves look bigger. Faking having bigger operations was a thing! But it's not anymore, and small businesses embrace having that personal touch. The world has shifted, but big businesses continue to try and look like big businesses. Remember - there's power in being seen as an individual. In a world that's being taken over by robots and AI, you want to know that there's an actual human being behind the emails you receive. If all big businesses started doing that, it would be powerful.
[thrive_leads id='8822']
How do people join your list?
What was your relationship with that person in the first place? If someone joins your newsletter with the expectation that John will be sending daily tips about DIY, make sure John sends daily tips about DIY! Don't have the emails suddenly come from a company people can't even recognise.
Also, always remember you're sending emails to human beings. People in B2B or B2b might be buying your product because they're trying to help their business or the company they work with, but they’re also serving themselves. So how can your lead magnet, your email content, and the offers you make benefit the person directly? Can you save them time? Can you make them look better with their boss? Help them get a pay rise or a promotion?
Think about serving the individual at the end of each email, even in B2B and B2b. We have a structure we teach our clients that is a way of extrapolating and communicating the benefits of something in a deep way that resonates with people. So if you're selling a solution that helps people grow their business, you can mention it'll get them more employees, or it'll afford them a better live streaming setup, for example. These are all business benefits. But because you're talking to the human being who’s running the business, you also want to mention the personal benefits to the individual.
For instance, we may say that by building our SCORE email engine, you’ll be able to grow your business, but also for you personally, you’ll know that every new lead that comes in is being taken care of and always presented with the best possible offers and opportunities to buy without you having to be physically there. A great personal benefit is that you can be at home with your family and spend more time with them, for example. Your business will be growing, amplifying, and compounding the sales while you take the dog for a walk or your children swimming.
What can B2B learn from B2C email marketing?
Largely speaking, B2B needs more personification - we need to bring some elements of B2C email marketing into it. How? You can get creative and use a mascot or someone who works in your business and push them to the forefront of your marketing. You could even create characters to establish an emotional bond with your audience because that's essential to be able to relate to someone. And without a human being, there's no connection. How can you connect with a brand if you think of their company in terms of tall glass skyscrapers in the middle of some city?
People in the UK will be familiar with comparethemarket.com, which have a meerkat as the character that’s front and centre of their marketing. They personified an insurance company, which is traditionally something very dry. And that's genius because the meerkat allows us to create an immediate emotional resonance with that brand. And that takes up more space in our brains than a company without a person behind it. Or think about gocompare.com, whose face is a Welsh opera singer. You may not want to go to these extremes, but whatever you do, show up as a person.
You could do that by introducing people from your team and sharing something they said, for example. If you look at a lot of what comedians do, they share naturally funny stories inspired by their family or friends. All the comedian has to do is deliver the story in a way that doesn’t remove the funny aspect of it. So you could share things that your team or your customers say. They don’t have to be funny - it's just about using natural content from what’s around you. Because these are the things that build relationships with people. It’s about humanising your content because you’re human and your customers are humans! And it’s time to push a more H2H (human-to-human) type of communication in email marketing.
[thrive_leads id='8854']
Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “I’m spilling the tea…” which is a phrase that commonly refers to gossiping. But the story in the email was genuinely about Rob spilling a cup of tea on a plane! And this makes the subject line interesting. You take a commonly used phrase that means something, and you use it literally in your email. It doesn’t feel like a tricky subject line. But when you read the email, you find it goes in a different direction than where people expect. And that's what works well, so check it out!
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
5 MAJOR Problems With Your B2B Email Marketing (And How To Easily Fix Them).
How To Send Personalised Email To All The Right People – Getting Friendly With Joe Fier.
FREE list to improve your email marketing
If 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 group
If 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 $1
This 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 League Membership
Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.
Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about B2B vs B2C email marketing) 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!