More than 4% - Why email marketing is so important in today's digital marketing space? | 38
Are you frustrated by how few people see your IG posts? Is Pinterest gonna make you pull out all your hair? Does FB feel hopeless? These platforms are getting harder and harder to use. But there is one marketing tool that is time-tested and holds true still today… EMAIL MARKETING!
In today’s episode, we chat about the importance of email marketing as you are building and growing your business.
Some key points to think about when considering email marketing include...
the differences between the social media algorithms and the email "algorithm"
Most social media platforms use an algorithm that pushes your content out to about 4% of your followers, whereas the email “algorithm” is still (and will likely always be) chronological order. That means it will end up in basically everyone’s inbox.
remembering that changes are inevitable
Changes like the massive iOS privacy updates will never stop. In the short term, these massive changes can feel catastrophic, but as you grow your list you will have more security and success in your business. If you can sell to even 1% of your email list, then adding 1000 or 10000 new people to your list can be life-changing!
you own your email list
No matter what happens to social media platforms, you own that list. It is full of people who want more from you… more content, a deeper relationship, your amazing offers! So nurture them and sell to them!!
you are in control
There is so much you can control with your email list…
1) how fast it is growing — offer your freebie ALL THE TIME!
2) the open rates — play around with the subject lines and when you send your emails until you hit the sweet spot
3) click rates — focus on one CTA so your people know exactly what you want them to do
Remember, the people on your email list WILLINGLY signed up to be there. I have seen massive success with clients who prioritize this!
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market, Scale, Grow. A podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams. Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest-based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.
Hello and welcome to Markey Scale Grow. My name's Jenzaia, and this is a Saturday strategy session. Today we're going to be talking about how to get your content in front of more than 4%, and where that comes from, you may or may not have heard the statistic, that only about 4% of your followers on social media actually see what you post. So we're going to talk about what I highly recommend as your first priority in building your business and getting your content out in front of most of your audience possible.
That is email marketing right now. Your email list is one of the most important assets in your business. There are a ton of changes, and we'll talk about those in just a minute, but I know people whose Instagram accounts have been hacked and they've lost everybody and people whose Facebook, they get locked out of, or they are not abiding by a policy and they get banned or whatever it is, and then that's just gone, gone. But your email list, you own that. I recently heard somebody say, you can actually print off that list and carry it around with you if you wanted because it is an asset of yours. It is part of your business. These people have willingly signed up to receive information from your email. They have given you their email address so that you can send them updates, send them freebies, and market and sell to them.
So let's start by talking about the algorithm differences. In email, the algorithm is super, super basic. Like it couldn't be more basic than email because that algorithm is in chronological order. The oldest one shows up at the bottom, the newest one shows up at the top, and they're just timestamped from oldest to newest. There are some people like myself who have filtered the bananas out of their inbox.
So the first time somebody emails me, whether it's a company or a person, they show up in my inbox, obviously, but after that, I have filtered them somewhere. Maybe they become a notification or maybe they are a client, so they go into their own folder. Maybe they're a lead, and so they go into my lead folder. They will never, if I'm doing my job properly and if I'm following my systems and my SOP for my email box properly, they should never show up again in my inbox. I also use Gmail. So I have Gmail workspace or a Google workspace for my business, which attaches to a Gmail. What I do when I'm like opting into something because I'm interested in it or when I'm working with my clients, you can use the plus sign and then put something afterwards. So if I'm opting into something that I know is quite obviously an opt-in, then I'll put plus opt-in. If I'm opting into a client's funnel to check and see that it's working properly and pixels and everything, then I put plus client. When those plus signs are there, my email slightly changes, of course. So instead of being Jenzaia DiMartile blah, blah, blah, it becomes Jenzaia DiMartile+opt-in, Jenzaia DiMartile+client. That little plus sign allows me to automatically filter these emails. So when I opt into something, it doesn't go into my email. It goes into my opt-in folder. When I'm signing up for something for my clients, it doesn't go into my inbox. It goes into my client folder. So anyway, and not supposed to be talking to you about how to like, keep your email box organized. I got a little bit off track there, but those are a couple of tips for you.
What I am talking to you about is the algorithm in email, and it's pretty simple. I sign up for something, the email comes to my email box, and it stays in the order that it is sent in. A hundred percent, unless an email bounces, but a hundred percent of the time that email will show up in your inbox. There are very few reasons why it wouldn't. Maybe gets marked as spam and it goes to the spam. Maybe you don't have that email address anymore and so it bounces, but assumably about a hundred percent of emails and up in the inbox, right? Or into those folders that I was talking about, filtered into the folders. So they show up a hundred percent of the time.
Now, whether or not I actually click and open the email, whether or not I read the email, is a different story, but they end up in the email box and show up in front of me a hundred percent of the time. It's not like social media where only 4% of our followers even see the image or the story or the video or whatever it is, unless they specifically click on our account to go and look. So with social media, we are fighting the algorithm to get as many of our followers to actually see our content as possible. In email, we're not having that same fight. So it makes your job a bit easier.
Typically speaking, about 20 to 30% of people will open your emails. You have control over that. You can control your open rates to an extent by improving your titles, by playing around with the time of day or the day of a week, that you are sending your emails to optimize when it's most likely to get opened, and you can continually grow your email list by adding new subscribers to keep the numbers of people who are reading your emails, getting larger and larger.
You can also prune your email list much easier than social media. Because it shows open rates, it's very easy for you, in most email service providers like Flodesk or Convertkit or MailChimp, it's pretty easy to set up a workflow that you send people through if they become cold. With privacy, and we're going to talk a little bit more about privacy and changes like I said, but with privacy, it is getting a bit harder to tell if people are opening your emails. If people are reading them on preview, then the system might not be picking up that they've actually opened it. So it's really important, in my opinion, if you are trying to re-engage cold subscribers or people who are appearing to be cold subscribers, you have at least one, if not two emails before you delete them, that just say, "Hey, you signed up for these things. Please be sure to click on a link so that I know you're still interested." Then if somebody clicks on the link, great, and if not, then they can continue through the workflow and become unsubscribed. But that's another way that you can control your email list is by continuously, like once a quarter, removing people who are no longer interested, who are no longer participating. So you're refining and refining and refining that list to ensure that there are always people who are actually engaged in your email list that are there.
Okay. So we talked about the algorithm. We talked about how you own that list of people. We've talked about the control that you have. So now we're going to talk about the changes you may or may not have heard about the Apple iOS changes that were put in place to protect people's privacy. Apple is really, really leading that charge of giving people very, or trying, to be very transparent and letting people decide. I think it's a really good thing because Facebook does do that creepy thing where it's like, "Hey, you were looking at yoga pants! Now see all of the yoga things!" or, "Oh, you were looking at dogs!? Now here are all of the dog things that'll just start popping up in your newsfeed!" And while there are some privacy things in place, it hasn't been up to the 2021 standards, I would say. I think that Apple has tried, and Facebook is also doing their part to continue moving forward to help us protect our privacy so that they can continue to advertise effectively while they are also not just getting all that information, all that user data.
There is going to continue to be.... This is, I really, really don't think that this is like a be-all and end-all of the war on privacy. I think going forward, there's just going to be more and more and more of a push towards privacy. But like I said, people have willingly signed up for your email list. They have given you their name, whether it's their full name or an abbreviation, or just an initial. They've given you something and they've given you their email address. An email address is not super easy to hand over, right? You have to work a little bit for it, which is why lead magnets work so well is because you're providing that value to somebody. Then they can say, "okay, this is worth it for my email address."
With all the privacy changes, the iOS changes, everything that's coming and what is going to come in the next 2, 5, 10 years, a larger email list is going to provide some sort of security within your business. If you have a smaller list, a couple of hundred people, you can definitely sell to them. I'm not saying don't, you definitely, definitely should be selling to your list. As soon as you start building it, as soon as you have some people starting to make micro offers, small paid workshops, or mini-courses, anything like that is great. The bigger your list, the more people you have to sell to. And that means if Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn all shut down tomorrow, which they won't, but if they did, you still have that email list. If your course was on productivity hacks for teachers, and for some reason, teachers didn't want productivity hacks anymore, you could pivot! Offer a new mastermind or a different group coaching program or a membership instead of that course you previously had, and if your list is a couple thousand, 10,000, 100,000 people, then you can market to them and almost instantaneously have success. I mean, obviously, there's positioning and messaging and all of that that would come with it. But there is definitely security in having that larger email list.
Some things that I don't recommend: do not buy a list. You really want to have people opting in willingly. Second of all, be careful of filling your list with freebie seekers, which is why I'm suggesting that right from the get-go you start offering micro offers for people so that they are used to you selling. They know that you're not just sending freebies, sending freebies, sending freebies, that there are also things that they can buy from you. You're going to be able to start to narrow down your list so that you can identify who the purchasers are. There will always be freebie seekers on your list. You will not be able to get rid of that 100%, but you'll be able to at least be building that list of people who know you sell and are willing to buy. Because when you have that bigger offer, people who have already made, um, micro-purchase from you, $27, $37, are more likely to invest more in you down the road.
So I am just going to finish this off by saying that my clients who prioritize list building and prioritize getting people onto their email list have more success. I'm specifically thinking of a couple of different clients who don't even really focus at all on the selling with their ad. Their focus is on the list-building at the front end, whether it's getting people into their webinar or their challenge or their summit. Their focus really is to build their email list and then let the event itself do the selling, but also knowing that their email marketing game is on point. After somebody's on their email list, whether it takes one or three or six months, they're nurturing their regular content, all of the value that they're providing converts people. So remember that it's a long game and that focusing on building your email list will pay off tenfold in the long run. You just have to consistently be building it day after day after day, to see those results play out in the end.
If you would like help building your email list, you already have an opt-in that is ready to go, you have a lead magnet that you know people absolutely love, I do offer list-building packages, where we work together for 30 days to get your email list supercharged. We will run ads to the opt-in and build your list every single day, getting more and more people in. It's one of my favorite packages to do! If you are interested in that, there will be a link in the show notes to book a discovery call, and we can chat about supercharging your email list so that you can keep making those baby steps towards growing your email list starting today. Thank you so much as always for hanging out with me and spending some time with me on a Saturday. I will be back next week with another exciting episode.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado, my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado. For 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.