← Social Media Marketing Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Over 3000 marketers are gathering in Anaheim this April for Social media Marketing World 2026. They're not coming because it's trendy. They're coming because it works. Martha Cromer told us quote I've been to conferences where I've only heard things I already knew. I learned so many new concepts at Social Media Marketing World. I definitely got my money's worth. Unquote. Year after year, marketers credit Social Media Marketing World with career advancements, business breakthroughs and and strategies their competitors haven't yet discovered. Maddie Young shared quote this year was my first time at Social Media Marketing World. It exceeded every expectation I had. The value of the sessions and networking experiences cannot be overstated. Unquote. While you're deciding whether to attend, thousands of marketers have already secured their spots. Get your tickets now at social media marketing world.info that social media marketing world.info. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:13]
B
Hello, hello, hello.
- [01:14]
A
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, we're going to explore the idea of using email, particularly in sequences or series, to develop an extremely loyal audience that wants to do more work with you, wants to share what you're working on and all those great things. And we'll be joined by Paul Gowder. Also, if you're new to this show, be sure to follow us on whatever podcast app you're listening to so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Paul Gowder, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Paul Gowder. If you don't know who Paul is, he's an expert at developing communities via email. He's the founder of powwows.com, the leading online community for Native American arts and culture. Paul is also the host of the Side Hustle Suitcase podcast. Paul, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:24]
B
I am good. I've been looking forward to this all day. It's been one of those days. And this on my calendar has been like, you know, the highlight. I just got to get to this afternoon. I just dropped my daughter off at the airport, so Kind of sad. And then been dealing with health insurance all day. So you are the bright spot of my day. I've been looking forward to this.
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A
Well, nobody likes to deal with health insurance. And sometimes having your daughter go away is a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing. But generally it's a bad thing.
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B
So it's a bad thing. Yeah, it's a sad thing.
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A
I know. I've got three girls. I totally know what it's like. It's almost always a sad moment. Well, today Paul and I are going to explore using email to develop community. Yes, you heard that right. Using email to develop community. We'll get into what that all means in a little while. But Paul, I would love to hear a little bit of your story. How did you get into email in general? Like, start wherever you want to start.
- [03:10]
B
I like to tell people I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I didn't set out to build a business. I was playing around with building web pages in college, and I built pages about things I knew. So Star wars toys. I still collect Star wars vintage toys. And. And I started building pages about Native American powwows. At the time, I was just researching my family background and friends were taking me to powwow. So I was literally just like, hey, I went to a powwow this weekend. This was really cool. Here's what I've learned. And that was it. And back in those days, it was before SEO and social media, those pages got indexed and put into whatever the search engines were back there, AltaVista or whatever, and people started coming. The Star wars didn't go anywhere. It was. It was 1996. Nobody cared about Star wars back then. Disney had not bought them. There were no prequels, so nobody really cared. But the native stuff started taking off. And it was early on that people were asking me, hey, we want to have that same environment that we have at powwows. We want to be able to talk with each other and share. And so we, we put up a. A forum and we started growing the forum. And it was really those first couple of years of having a forum and trying to figure out, like, how do I effectively talk with people? That I figured out. Sending email was so powerful and being able to communicate directly with people, it was a touch point that you just couldn't do. Yes, forums are good and you could have conversations, but to be able to send a message to everybody and get everybody to have the same information at the same time was really powerful. I remember, for those out there, remember V Bulletin. I remember Hitting the thing in V Bulletin and it would actually show you everybody it was sending to. And you just sit there and watch the screen go and see emails going by and being so excited that, you know, a thousand people, ten thousand people just got my email. It was really cool. And it was there that I started developing that email needed to be personal and having, you know, you know, crafting my own voice and not just being a brand. It was trial and error. But that's really where I started seeing the value of email inside a community was those early days in V Bulletin.
- [05:10]
A
For those gray hairs that are listening like myself and Paul, you do remember. I remember back when I started in the mid-90s as well. And back then, then the idea of a website was pretty much like born, you know what I mean? And the idea of forums were really interesting. The business that I had before Social Media examiner was called White Paper Source. And we had a forum which is kind of like little Facebook groups is probably the best way to describe it today with all these little subcategories and everybody would interact inside these forums and it was the way you did community. And if you want to go way back, it was bulletin board systems even before then with dial up, you've got mail, all that kind of crazy stuff. Right. We're aging ourselves for the younger generation. We're just giving you context here. But there was before social media, social activities online, and it was predominantly done through forums. So what I heard you say in your journey is you started in the 90s. And for folks that aren't watching the YouTube video right now, Paul has incredible Star wars stuff all around him. He's wearing a Star wars comic shirt. He's got what looks like the top of C3PO on his microphone and there's all sorts of stuff behind him. And it's really cool. So basically, when you were early in your journey, were you mostly just what we would call blogging? Is that effectively what you were doing when you were first going to these pow wows?
- [06:28]
B
In the early days, I wasn't doing like a write up after every powwow because it was for me, I wasn't even thinking about building an audience and all that. It was, hey, I learned that this particular dance style is about this. And here's what their outfit looks like. And at a powwow you may see a grand entry. And that means this. And these drum groups, the singers at powwows, this is the type of songs they sing. It was really more of Wikipedia style, like reporting as like, here's this stuff, and here's what it means. It wasn't even, hey, I went to this powwow and here's what I saw. It was really just kind of a high level at the time. And then we had those pages out there as just static pages and it was the forums that, that really built out. And then from there we added an event calendar. And that was the first thing people wanted as a way to track all the powwows across the country. So, yeah, writing the first PHP script myself and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's where we started growing the calendar. But forums in the community is really what made in. Still to this day, it's our community that, that keeps us going.
- [07:28]
A
So kind of bring us up to the present right now. Like, what are you doing today with email for either powwows or clients? Like, talk to us a little bit about kind of what you're doing now.
- [07:39]
B
I like to tell people that I define community a little different than most people in social media. I like to think community, it can be anybody who feels a connection with you or with your topic, your, Your niche, your brand, and has things in common. A lot of marketers will say community is your Facebook group or your substack. I think those are places that you can have community interaction, but your community is bigger. So I treat everybody that's touching my content, whether it's on email, social media, or in person. They are part of the powwows.com community. They're part of powwow Nation. And so I always try to think when I'm writing emails or anything, I'm thinking community first. So when I write emails, I am talking to them like I'm talking to them at a powwow. I'm saying I, I'm not trying to be a brand and I'm telling personal stories and my personal experiences at the events and, you know, what we did this week kind of thing. And I don't think a lot of people think about email that way. So many people think of email as an afterthought, as I'm going to put a lot of time into my reel for Facebook or my vlog or their podcast episode. Right. They're going to put all this time and effort into creating that content. And then email is just a place that I push that out and send everybody a link where some of my emails I think of as my content source first and then we can repurpose some of that into other places. Now we do a lot of, you know, pushing out our content through email. But I'm always trying to think community first and, and really trying to have conversations. I work hard in my emails to get people to reply because I think that's the most valuable thing you can get is when people offer their time and reply to you and ask you a follow up question or give you a comment. Then we can have relationships. And having a one on one relationship, that's, that's the best thing we can, we can do with our, with our readers, I think.
- [09:30]
A
Love it. Okay, so we're going to break down kind of some of the fundamentals of how this all works and stuff. But before we do, I would just like you to answer this question. What are the benefits or the upside to building community with email? Said another way, when this is done really well, what does it unlock?
- [09:48]
B
Number one, things are going to change. I started, you started back in the 90s with these V bulletins and bullet points. It's going to change. We have Facebook groups now and all these other things. It's going to change. Nothing on social media, nothing online is constant. But my friend Lou Mangello likes to say there's only two things in this world that we own and control in this whole digital world, and that's your podcast feed and your email list. And so I think it's super important that we build the backbone of our business on something we control. So in the past year or so, I've had a Facebook group with 85,000 members deleted overnight. Facebook, this was a couple of years ago, changed and like deleted the whole podcast feature off of it. Lately they've been changing the rules on how groups work. Things change. And if you build your email list, you'll always have that as your backbone and a way to communicate with your readers, regardless of all this other stuff that's changing. But then also, I mean, there's other benefits too. This is the only way that you can directly message your readers. We have a very active Facebook page and I'm very thankful that we have a big Facebook page. But when I post something on there, I have no guarantee of who's going to see it. If 1% of my audience sees a particular message on Facebook, sometimes that's I'm doing great, right? It's 10% see it, man. It's a dream day. But with email, if I'm doing good open rates, you were at 50 or 60% open rates then a lot of people saw it. And it may sit in their message. They may not see it till next week. But I know they got the message.
- [11:18]
A
I Love that. I can relate because we have almost 600,000 people that are following our Facebook page. And I can assure you that it's just a teeny, teeny little fragment. We're talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands will ever see any of the posts that we make anymore. I love what you said here. Some of the key things I heard you say is, number one, this is the only, only thing that you really have control over. Number two, you kind of implied this, but there's going to be a much higher percentage of people that are going to receive your message than ever on a Facebook group. Now I'll throw this out there because I know it's true and you know it's true that there are filters out there that are going to stop that email from maybe showing up in the primary inbox. It might go into spam or might go into promotion, but the fact of the matter is that the percentage that's going to get through is incrementally higher, which is really, really valuable if you want to be in front of an audience that reads email and, and a lot of people do. So now my next question is, are there any important concepts that people need to be thinking about when it comes to developing communities via email?
- [12:16]
B
I love building that community feeling with building sequences. So that is on how wells.com, we probably have, I don't know, 20 different email sequences. And a sequence is just a series of emails that you build inside of your platform, whether it's kit or flodesk or whatever else that are, that is delivered over a period of time, whether it's once an hour, once a day, once a week, whatever. So it's just a serialized piece of content that you're writing in emails. And I build these sequences. I'll start with topic based sequences. So our most popular and probably most successful is a sequence that is what to expect at your first powwow. If you're new, you've never been, you're a little anxious about going to something like this. We have a free email series that walks you through the entire process that is much more effective than when somebody subscribes to our newsletter that we send them out the weekly broadcast first because weekly broadcasts are great, but they are for your, your readers that you already have a relationship with when you build a sequence. Those are for new people and that's how you build trust and relationship deliver value and then they're kind of bought in. And your weekly emails that you send out your broadcast to everybody will be much more effective once they Kind of buy in and understand who you are. So that's the first way I like to build community is by creating these sequences and doing several of these based on different topics and different questions. And it really does develop a much better relationship and buy in from your reader.
- [13:43]
A
Love it. Okay, talk to me a little bit about understanding who our audience is maybe before we start crafting and anything about like how we ought to maybe craft the mess, you know, using our unique voice and stuff like that.
- [13:54]
B
Right. You have to start taking notice, but start thinking about what's the question that you're getting over and over again. For me, I was getting questions like, what is a grand entry? How do I find a powwow? What do I wear? What do I bring? Okay, start writing those down. There's an email series. Start figuring out if there's different groups of people. I work with a lot of people in the travel space, you know, especially I'm a big Disney fan. So people in the Disney travel business and they, they may have people coming to them wanting cruises or wanting the theme park or wanting a guided tour. So you, you can start kind of positioning your audience that way. Just look at the messages and the interactions you're getting, the comments you're getting on social media. You can kind of start breaking people down into buckets and then you start getting to know what your audience is and to start thinking about their age, their, their demographics and you can start kind of tailoring that to them. When I write these sequences, you need to develop the voice and I think it needs to be. You should try to write these emails in the way you speak. Not completely. Right. You want to put a little bit more information, a little bit more formal into these than just a conversation with friends. But that's kind of how you need to think about it. These need to be conversational. Please don't send a message out that looks like an Amazon or a Best Buy or some brand with all the pictures and the layouts. These need to be text based mostly. Back to your point. That's what's going to help you get through those promotion tabs is when you're sending more text based emails and people are going to read those more readily. And if we make it conversational and we kind of break it up into more scannable text, people do digest it easier. I wish that people did read the vlogs that I spend or blogs. I spend hours crafting a 5,000 word blog. I wish they read them, but they don't anymore. They're going to scan it, they're going to skim it. So write your emails in a way that people can digest it quickly.
- [15:45]
A
Love it. Okay, so a couple quick things that I heard you say, number one is to make sure that you're writing in a way that sounds like a conversational style. If you've been trained, folks, as a writer to write very formally, you can just pop it into your favorite AI tool and ask it to make it more conversational and or to help it teach you what is it about your writing style that needs to change. Because AI is really good at taking something and kind of reformulated in a little bit of a conversational way. And then you could formatted a little bit. And the other thing that you mentioned was that you should understand what your audience is interested in and maybe think about creating different buckets for the different kinds of things that they might be interested in because you might have an audience, for example, in my case that's very into AI. And then I've got another audience that's very into social and marketing. And there's overlap, but there's not always overlap. And it's important to kind of understand that. So earlier you mentioned the idea of putting a sequence or a series together.
- [16:42]
B
Yes.
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A
And what I heard you say and what I'm going to kind of explain in my own words for folks is that a series or a sequence is effectively a list of emails that are scheduled to go out over a period of time. Like you just say on day one, day five, day seven, whatever. Am I right? Explain a little bit more about these series and how they work a little bit and let's just kind of dig in a little deeper on that.
- [17:08]
B
And I will say too, as far as putting your emails into AI, I do that all the time. Don't take it word for word. But like my daughter tells me all the time when I, she, she says I write very direct. And a lot of times she'll, she'll actually call me or send me a message like, are you mad at me? I'm like, why? And she's like, the way you wrote that text. I'm like, I just said what I said. And she's like, no, you need to read that again. So I do. I take what I write.
- [17:29]
A
As a dad, I can relate. And also as an employer, I can relate. So many people have been, yeah, misunderstood because I'm just a quick to the point kind of guy. You know what I mean?
- [17:38]
B
Right. So, yes, take your message and put it into something and tell it. Please make this more conversational make it more friendly. Yeah, let's talk more about these sequences. Absolutely love these. There's several that we have. I'll talk about them. But think about taking your content and breaking it up into chunks that you can tell stories across a longer period of time. Instead of trying to put everything into a single blog post or a single podcast, we can break our topic up into several chunks. I did this at a conference recently. I showed people that were kind of stuck on figuring out how to write their first sequence. So I took again, going back to my friend Lou Mongello, I took one of his web pages and I put it into ChatGPT and I said, please create me a welcome sequence that explains what I do for people and break it up into five emails. And it spit it out beautifully. It was great. So, you know, look at your content and figure out how you can break it up into pieces. I like to do what to expect at Traverse Powwow. I like to do that and tell people in the first email, hey, look, I'm over the next seven days, I'm going to send you a message. It's going to be once a day. And I'm going to take you through all the things you need to know about going to your first powwow. And then from there, we'll work through it. These are shorter emails. These aren't super long. I'd like to break them up into kind of one topic at a time. And then for Powells.com, one of our revenue sources is advertising, so I make these shorter with a link to go read more information so that they do to build traffic with our email sequences so you don't have to do that. But that's one of the techniques we use. But you want to be, you know, as short as possible, give them information, and then the next day you can move on to the next topic. So again, if I go back to my Disney example, if you're planning for your first cruise, maybe the first day is here's what to pack. Number two is like, here's what to expect on your first day. Here's how you check into a cruise. Number three, maybe here's how to plan all of your excursions and what you're going to do on the cruise. So start thinking about content that way and you can start breaking them down.
- [19:31]
A
Okay, help explain why this is so important. Because, you know that example you just gave about the cruise could just all be in one message, but why break it across multiple messages? Like, help explain what that's achieving if you will.
- [19:43]
B
I'm breaking the rule. From what most email marketers will tell you, most email marketers will tell you you want to build these fancy lead magnets and put everything into this nice PDF. And I think that there's some benefit to that. And people like a download. But if you're like me, I have a folder on my computer that's full of PDFs that I've downloaded that most of them I've read, some of them I read once but never went back. So I think you get much better retention. Especially over the years that I've been doing this. This is what I see is that I take something complicated and something that's a lot of information and I break it up over 5, 7, 10 days into smaller chunks and I get a much better retention, I get a much better engagement, and people actually read and digest the information. So in that what to expect to traverse Powwow. In some of the first couple of emails, I ask questions. And I know, I mean I can look at my stats and see the opens and the clicks and all that, but I also know that in the morning when I check my inbox and I see that, you know, I've gotten five or ten responses to those questions, I know it's working and I'm getting feedback and I'm, you know, people are actually reading it and then when they're responding to the 10th email and they're still answering questions, I know I've got them. And they didn't just take a PDF I gave them and never came back. So I know that I'm actually getting them and they're continuing to read the message. It is a much better way to build that trust and that relationship that, you know, we're in the relationship business, right? If you're not trying to establish these one on one relationships, you're missing big opportunities. It's not just about shouting and shoving information in front of people. You have to find ways to actually get them to read and engage.
- [21:22]
A
Wish you could experience social media Marketing World 2026 without having to leave your home or office. Our virtual ticket includes both live streaming and on demand recordings in one powerful package. Here's what makes this special. You can watch all the marketing sessions and keynotes live as they happen in Anaheim. Yet you also get recordings of everything to study and implement at your own pace, access exclusive AI training not available anywhere else, and learn Instagram and Facebook strategies from practitioners that get real results. The very people you've heard on this podcast, Julie Dougherty told us Quote, My eyes are sore as I've watched way too many sessions today. All awesome stuff. It's like Netflix, just one more unquote. Unlike the in person experience, you can also pause, rewind and rewatch every session while you implement. Plus, you'll save thousands on travel and hotels while getting the same expert insights. Secure your virtual ticket right now at social media marketingworld.info that's social mediamarketingworld.info well, there is another benefit also to doing it the way that you're doing it, which is dividing it up into multiple messages is that the AI systems are watching.
- [22:38]
B
Yes.
- [22:39]
A
Like, let me rephrase, the email systems like Google, Microsoft, they're watching to see if you are opening and or clicking on these emails because that's called an engagement metric. Just like on social media, if people engage with your posts, they'll probably see more posts from you. It's exactly true. The same with email if they mean Google or Microsoft, see that there are actively people engaging with your message, they're going to show that person your next message and it's going to increase the likelihood that your future messages will are going to get into the inbox, which is something kind of really, really important. Now let's see here. So what about giving us some places where we can come up with concepts and ideas? You already mentioned, do you have a lead magnet? And you kind of inferred that you can take that lead magnet and divide it up into a series of emails. But let's just talk about some other places where we can come up with ideas to come up with the series, if you will.
- [23:34]
B
So another one of my favorite series is on Thursdays. We have what we call our Throwback Thursday. It is a sequence, but people on my list don't know that it's a sequence. They just think that I write these every Thursday, which is fine. And all it is is we, we've been writing content on Powell.com for 20 years or more. This is our 30th anniversary actually and we have a ton of content. So every Thursday I send in a message and at the beginning of the year we write these out. But here's what the message says. It's hey, we have a piece of content. Let's say it's here's an article we wrote about the Choctaw Cultural center in Durant, Oklahoma. And I think you would really like this. And if you ever travel to Oklahoma, you want to visit this. Here's why. Here's some of the things they have with A link, and it's that simple. That sequence is fantastic for building engagement, building traffic and all that, but people also look forward to it because people don't necessarily go through your entire website. This is a way for me to take some of our best content and make sure that new readers see it. I've also used this with podcasters. So anybody who has more than 10 episodes, this is something you want to think about. Your best podcast may be episode five.
- [24:48]
A
You're 700 and something. So I've got a lot. I've got a lot to work with.
- [24:52]
B
You know, exactly right. So you probably know from looking at your stats and hearing from people what, what your top 10 top 20 podcasts are. Somebody who subscribes to your podcast in your email tomorrow may never go back and re and listen to those episodes. So why not create an email sequence that you send out, whether it, you know, podcast Monday or Throwback Thursday, whatever, and you highlight those episodes. It's a great way to make sure that every listener gets the best episodes. So that's another way you can do it if you're a podcast or if you're a YouTuber, whatever. Take your old content and put it into one of these sequences. It works so, so well.
- [25:29]
A
Now, the key is it's going to have to be Evergreen, right? Oh, yeah. You got to make sure that this is something that doesn't go out of date, right?
- [25:35]
B
Yes.
- [25:35]
A
That's the challenge that I face. So much of the stuff that we do is so constrained by, you know, the constantly changing industry that we're in. But a lot of people that are listening are still getting asked the same questions all the time, as you mentioned earlier, or people are interested in certain kinds of things that are timeless, and that's all great context for stuff that you could use over and over again. All right. I love it. I want to get into how we get people into the series. But before I do that, just out of curiosity, like, how big should a series be? Because that's a big question. Like, it sounds like you've got some that are all over the place, right?
- [26:09]
B
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the Throwback Thursday is 52 weeks. We send it out every week. And at the beginning of the year, I'm working on it now, and I have a va that helps me. We'll come up with a list of the 52 posts that we're going to cover this year, and we'll write those out. So that's 52. My what to expect at Traverse Powwow. The first time I wrote that sequence. It was probably seven messages. It's now maybe up to 13 or 14, which is another great thing about these series is they, they're not set in stone. You can edit them over time as you add more content or things change. You can go back and edit these. It's not set in stone like a PDF that you, you did. And it's very tough to change. But I have other sequences that are two emails because it's a very specific question and I can answer it in two emails and be done and then I move them on to something else. So it just depends. We have another one that, that we did just for Native American Heritage Month and it was 60 emails delivered over the course of two months. So it depends. We have them all variety sizes. Again, they don't have to stay the same. Keep looking at them, keep editing them and who knows what what you'll build. But yeah, we have mall size.
- [27:14]
A
How often are you sending these messages?
- [27:17]
B
So for something like what to expect traverse powwow, it's once a day. And I do tell people in the first one like, here's what to expect. You're going to get these over the next seven or 10 days. Then other ones like we have after you finish what to expect at your first powwow, you're then put into another series. That's just a general. Let me get you acquainted with who we are@powwows.com and the resources that we have. And we can offer you that one is once a week and then even after the first four or five messages it kind of goes to once a month. And so that one is spread out over a much longer time because I don't want to bombard them with information. I want to get them, you know, the value that they need and then I can just remind them every once in a while. So it depends for something where you're answering a question or giving them the value that you promised them in whatever your opt in was, I like doing once a day and pushing that out over the course of a week or two weeks. But then other ones that aren't as urgent, you can push them out once a week or so.
- [28:14]
A
For folks that are really savvy, you probably already connected the dots that this strategy of reusing some of your older content in email series could also be used in social. You could take this throwback Thursday stuff and you could every Thursday post something on the social platforms, couldn't you? I mean, have you, have you thought about that, Paul?
- [28:31]
B
For sure, yeah, we're doing that, you know, I was talking about, our Facebook page is pretty active. We, I think we're 1.6 million right now. So we're posting a lot of that. We're probably posting 15 to 20 times a day.
- [28:42]
A
Wow.
- [28:42]
B
So we're doing a lot of that kind of content, resurfacing old stuff.
- [28:45]
A
Okay, so to the question I hinted at earlier, which is how the heck do you actually get anybody into a sequence? Right? Because in your case, you've got a bunch of sequences, you've kind of hinted, you've got Throwback Thursday, you've got what to Know about a Powwow or how to Get Started with Powwows. And then you've probably got a whole bunch of others. So now the logical question is like, what's the top of the fun funnel? Or what's the way that they get into these series in the first place?
- [29:08]
B
There's several different ways. My favorite though is I use a plugin from Mediavine called Grow. I think it's Grow me. And what it does is, and we've all built like, you know, email opt ins, right? It's a free plugin that puts an email opt in in the middle of your WordPress article. And so as people are scrolling, this opt in form will pop up and kind of highlight itself. It's really, it's a really, really cool tool. What's even better is that if you're a WordPress user, you can do it based on your WordPress category. So you can have a different opt in for going back to my Disney example, for cruises, for theme parks, for all inclusives. Each one of those can be a different opt in and putting it in the middle of the content I think is the key here. I see so many people building these beautiful web pages that they spend all this time in and their email form is in the footer or in the sidebar. And if you're on mobile, nobody's ever going to see that. So using something that puts it right in the middle of the content and is topical. So for us, like on pages where people are asking questions about tribal enrollment, tracing their, their heritage, those kind of things, I have one that displays and says, hey, by the way, we have a step by step instruction on how to trace your family history. And so that is a very topical thing. And they subscribe to get a series about how to trace their Native American heritage. So that's the number one. And that works incredibly well. But then I also, I love doing landing pages where a landing page is page without your normal Headers and footers, not your navigation. It. The only thing on that, on that page is maybe some text and an email opt in form. And I like doing that because like if I'm on a podcast like this or speaking at a conference or even just talking with a group of people, I can say, oh, you're interested in going to your first powwow? Okay, great. I have a place that you can go. Powwows.com powwow101 It's a free email series. All you have to do is go there and sign up and over the course of 10 days I'll explain all the do's and don'ts. So I use a simple URL, send people to that landing page. I can also use that same URL on social. I can share it in stories, in reels. It is a great way. And again it's a one call to action page and the only thing I'm asking for them is to sign up. That is extremely powerful. But I'm doing other things too. We're putting things in social media. We are doing some paid and using Facebook's lead ads to actually get their email.
- [31:32]
A
I'll explain that real quick just because I know what it is. But not everybody knows what that is.
- [31:35]
B
A lead ad or lead form is where they stay on the Facebook platform. So if they click on your ad they're able to stay on the platform and supply the email address. So it comes to me, you know, you have to use an automation in the background to, to send it over to your email platform but you're able to collect the email address without them ever leaving Facebook. It's a lower friction type of ad. Instead of trying to send them to something on your page that they then opt in for, it's all stays in the Facebook platform. It's, it's really powerful. And you know you can get email subscribers. I think I'm depending on campaign. I'm paying anywhere from $0.12 to $0.20 per email subscriber, which is just incredible. Right?
- [32:11]
A
That's a really good deal. Tell everybody about link triggers and how all that stuff works just so people.
- [32:16]
B
Yeah, that's the other one. Yeah. So as you're crafting your weekly broadcast messages, this is a great place to tell people about those other sequences that you have. And so in a message I may say, oh by the way, and here's one we're doing right now actually it's our 30th anniversary of palace.com and we're building for this big celebration this summer so when I send out my weekly email, I'm mentioning, hey, by the way, this is our big anniversary. We're, we're planning for this big giveaway and all this contest that we're going to do in the summer. If you're interested and want to get on the wait list and know when we start this big contest in the summer, all you have to do is click here. And so if they click there, I use kit, and kit will then tag them as somebody who's interested in our 30th anniversary. That triggers off an automation that they're put into the sequence about our 30th anniversary. And then they're delivered a series of emails and all they had to do was click a link inside of an email that they got. So I love doing that. In fact, at the end of all of my sequences, I'll tell people, hey, look, by the way, you just finished our what to expect at your first powwow. Just letting you know. We also have some other things that may help you. Here's one on how to trace your family history. We also have a Native American book club, if you want to be a part of that. We have a travel group, you know, so I'm offering ways in these other emails to keep funneling people into these other series.
- [33:32]
A
I love it. Okay, talk to me about the art and craft of actually making these emails, because you have a very specific methodology, and I really want to break it down so people can understand it.
- [33:43]
B
I learned early on that I needed to have my own voice and to speak as myself. And I'll go back to V Bulletin, where I learned this lesson the first time. And I have to be reminded of this lesson every once in a while, too. But when I first started doing things on V Bulletin, I registered my account and my username on my own website was Webmaster. Because that's what we were back then, right? We were Webmaster, and that was my username. And one of the moderators told me, she's like, paul, everybody thinks you're like this automated thing. They don't know that you're actually a real person. When they see Webmaster, they just think it's some kind of part of the system talking. So I changed my username to Paul G. And I started talking as myself and being more personal. And the difference it made was incredible. It's kind of cool to still go to powwows now, 20 years later, and people will come up and say, what's up, Paul G. Because they still remember that's how they Interacted with me. So when you're writing your emails, don't write as a brand, don't write as we and talk to one person. This is the same thing we try to do on podcasts. Right? Don't try to talk to an audience, a room full of people. Try to talk just like you're talking to one person. Be intentional. Say things like hi friend or hi, you. Don't say, oh, hey everybody. It's so great to see everybody here today.
- [35:01]
A
Ideally, hey, first name, right?
- [35:03]
B
Exactly right. Use the, the things in your email tools to be very personal and talk directly to one person that makes such a difference. But yeah, that's what I try to do in all of these emails. And like I said earlier, you know, keep them short and skimmable so that people actually retain them and do other things too. Like I was talking to Kit the other day, you know, if you're going to put a link in your emails, you know, maybe have that link once or twice, once as a button, once as a text link. You know, there's some things you can do there to increase your click through rates. But the big thing here is just develop your voice and talk as yourself. It'll make a huge difference in how your readers engage with you.
- [35:37]
A
Okay, tell me a little bit about images and stories and all that fun stuff, how you can add some of that into there and kind of what your thoughts are on this. Because what I want to do is have people develop a picture in their mind of what something like this might look like.
- [35:50]
B
Yeah. When I talk to people, and you and I talked about this before too, is when I start telling people these strategies and talk as yourself, ask questions, people get a little, a little scared because our list is about 100,000 and people get really worried that what am I going to do if 500 people reply to my message today? You know, how are we going to do this? So we're trying to scale the unscalable here. We're trying to do things that not everybody can do. So when you're crafting your message like this, you want to ask questions, you want to do that, you want to be text based, maybe use an image or two, keep them simple. But again, you're wanting to send these messages that they look like they're from a friend. We have a mutual friend, Jeff C. If anybody gets on Jeff C's email list, when you see one of his messages, he still has people that, that think that he's writing directly to them. They don't realize they're on his newsletter because he's so personal and it's a text based email, they think he's writing directly to them. And that is ultimately what you want people to do is you want them to feel like you're writing directly to them because your email looks like it was sent from a friend. So you can have some images, you can do this. The other thing I'll tell you again, scaling the unscalable. We have 30 something sequences on palace.com I'm writing. We send maybe four to seven broadcasts a week depending on what we have going on. It's a lot of content and so I do have somebody helping me with that and I do have VAs that help and write some of these messages for me. But I always reserve the top of these emails for me and that's where I can tell stories, I can be personal. So when I send out this week's message, we'll be sending one on Friday because we have a powwow live stream this weekend. And I'll say things like, it was a rough week for me because I had to drop my daughter off at the at the airport and I missed her. But it was great having her here for a few days, getting to visit with family. That was really awesome. But I'm excited that this weekend we're going to be able to bring you this live stream. So I'm going to tell those stories and be very personal in those emails, even though the rest of it is kind of here's what's going on@pace.com. here's the links, here's the latest podcast, here's the latest article, and those are all written by the virtual assistant. But I always leave that top part of the email for me to be relatable, tell stories, all that kind of stuff.
- [38:01]
A
Fascinating. Okay, I love that part. Tell us a little bit about how you actually end these as well. Because you mentioned, I think earlier in this discussion about asking questions and stuff like that. How do you normally do that?
- [38:13]
B
We'll use again the what to expect at your first powwow. The very first email I send out, it's kind of an introduction and I say things like, hey, I know this is going to be very overwhelming. It's a lot of information and I know you're excited and want to get as much information as you can because you're eager, all that. So hey, what are you most excited about? Are you most excited about seeing the dancing? Are you most excited about hearing the music? Or is it the food and the crafts that you're more excited about. It's a really simple question and that is like I said earlier, every morning I know If I have five or 10 or 20 that I know people subscribed yesterday and they read the message and so yes, I use some automations to help me respond to those quickly and you know, a little canned response so that I can scale the unscalable kind of thing. Right. But it's a really cool measure. To me that's better than seeing open rates is seeing the replies in my inbox every morning and knowing that, hey, it was effective. So I do like most of these sequence emails with a question, another great one, and it's helping in our open rate and our deliverability. You know, we keep talking about not showing up in that promotions tab in my weekly broadcast. One of the things I've started doing is at the very bottom I'll add a trivia question and I'll say something like, hey, by the way, here's a trivia question. Everybody who gets the answer right, I'll put you in a drawing and I'll select one person to win. You know, we just got new stickers in, right. So maybe I'll give a sticker away or give, you know, something right. So yeah, that's a really great way and it rewards your loyal readers because they're reading all the way to the bottom and if you train them, they'll start reading to the bottom every time because they're looking for that trivia question and talking about the signals that we want to send back to Google and Microsoft. An open is great, a click is even better. But a reply is the strongest indicator that they're going to keep you out of the promotions tab. So a trivia question and man, that thing does wonders for your deliverability, practicality.
- [40:05]
A
On how in the world someone manages all this. I would imagine most of the people listening have people that work for them. I would imagine you're going to have to have somebody going through and managing the inbox, which is what we do here at Social Media examiner because we got a massive list. I mean, so that sounds like a pretty big project to manage, but I would imagine, I don't know, it's not everybody who responds.
- [40:25]
B
Right, right, right. You're not going to get, you know, with 100,000 on our list for any given trivia question, it'll be a couple hundred that respond and then two, it's easy to filter out. 25, 30% are going to get it wrong. So those are easy to filter out. So it is going to take some work. But again, this is what's going to separate us and from all the AI content and the overwhelming amount of content there is online right now. Doing these things that other people can't or other people won't is what differentiates us.
- [40:56]
A
Okay, so let's assume we want to do multiple sequences or series, which is kind of the same word. I can imagine this becomes kind of a management nightmare. Right, because they're all on different timelines. Yes. Right.
- [41:10]
B
Yeah.
- [41:10]
A
Some are like seven days, some are 52 weeks. Any tips on like how to manage all that stuff? Because it sounds like something that you could forget to come back to or whatever. Like any tips on. On that?
- [41:21]
B
I wish that kit and some of these other things would have a content calendar. I keep asking them, show me a calendar of like, if I'm this subscriber, show me over the next week what messages they're getting. That would be really great. But until we get something like that, one of the things I like to do is when you build a new sequence, you can go into the settings and tell it what days to send. So I'm reserving no other email goes out on Thursday except for the throwback Thursday. So I know that regardless of whatever series they're on, they're only going to get that one message on Thursday. I also do that. What to expect at your first powwow. So you're not going to get one of our weekly broadcast messages until you've completed that. So I know that they're not going to be on email too and all of a sudden get the weekly broadcast. Right. So those are kind of things you need to plan out ahead of time and think about so that you don't end up with a, with a user getting five emails on one day because everything's stomped on top of each other and it still happens. You know, I've had somebody message me last week and it's like, hey, I got three emails from you today. What in the world happened? So I do have an automated response that kind of says, okay, by the way, here is our schedule of when we send emails. If you're in some of our automations or our series or series sequences, you may get more than one, but that'll be temporary. So I do have something prepared for when people do get that. But that's kind of one way I like to reserve days and then to keep them out of the main broadcast until they completed something.
- [42:47]
A
Yeah, and there's a lot of wisdom in that. Almost every email we use drip. You can just say on your main broadcast and everybody except the people that are in the series, Right?
- [42:56]
B
Exactly.
- [42:56]
A
Or except the people that have this tag, like maybe they're new and you don't want to do any promotion to them for the first X number of days. But that's where you have to like put on your thinking cap and start to think about like what are all the sequences and all the possible scenarios that people are in. And, and if you have a lot of these things, you really do need to think this through or you're going to end up having people that are going to get really confused and frustrated. Yes, Paul, we have just scratched the surface of the idea of building community with email. If folks are interested in learning more about you or checking out your various businesses, number one, where can they connect with you on the socials? And then number two, where do you want to send them if they want to learn more about you?
- [43:35]
B
So first of all, powwows are open to everybody. I'd love for people to come check out more about Native American powwows. I mentioned it before, but powwows.com powwow101 will get you all that. If you're interested in more of what I do as far as building community and building email marketing, My website is paulgowler.com and I do have again, I have to promote my email sequence. Right. If you want to see some of the email tools I use to have built this email list to a hundred thousand and manage it, go to PaulGadder.com.
- [44:01]
A
EmailTools Paul, thank you so much for sharing your insights and wisdom with us today.
- [44:05]
B
Thank you man. I've been looking forward to this. Again. This was the highlight of my day, so thanks for the time.
- [44:09]
A
If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review. Also let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn and or X and do check out my other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. What if you could get year round AI training? That's exactly what's waiting for you with our AI Business Society. To learn more, visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI.