Omar Zenhom (0:00)

Hey, today is Free Ride Friday. So make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co or you can win it for free. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that simple. Alright to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Stay tuned for the random draw later in today's episode. Alright, let's get down to business. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show where your business is our business. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business and community online. And in today's lesson I'm gonna share with you some advanced email list marketing optimization. After you've been running email marketing for some time, let's say a year or two or more, what used to work is just not working anymore. You might have noticed your open rates have dropped, people are not clicking on the links anymore in your emails, people are not responding. And soon enough the majority of the people on your email list are just not active. This is a problem because the more people are not opening your email, the more your reputation goes down for your domain. You need to be active to make sure it's healthy. And that's why I want to share with you some of these tips. These are some things that we have done recently in our own business that I want to share with you. Because you know, after being in business for some years, you have to do this. You got to do a bit of cleanup, a bit of optimization and make sure your sender reputation is on the up and up. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Whether you've grown your email list to 5 or 10 or 20 or 50,000 people, not all of them are going to be active. In fact, once people start not opening your email, it's going to affect, like I said, your sender reputation. So you want to make sure that only the people that really benefit from your emails, that like your emails that can't wait for your emails are on your email list. And if you have people that are not opening emails, you have to find out why. You have to re engage them and make sure you're sending them the frequency that they need. Some people don't need an email every other day. In fact, if you have people that are not active on your list, the less emails the better for not only them, but for you and your business and your reputation and your sender reputation, of course. But we're going to start with some low hanging fruit. One of the first things you should do if you have not done this already is make sure that anybody that subscribes to your email list needs to double opt in. That means that they need to confirm they want to be on your email list. Now this does a few things. Number one, when somebody subscribes to your newsletter or for your free course or whatever it is, they are hot. They are really interested in getting what you want to offer them and what they're signing up for. So this is the best time to ask them to do this. So when they sign up, they're going to get an email automatically from your email marketing provider. Whether it's ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or AWeber or Drip, it doesn't matter. They all have this feature, it's called Double Opt. And basically they'll get another email from the service saying, hey, please confirm you want to be on this email list. And they'll open that email, they'll click the button inside the email and then from there they will be on your email list. If they don't do that, if they don't confirm, they will not be on the email list, they will not be confirmed and they will not be on the email list. And therefore they will not get whatever they signed up for, whatever freemium you're giving them right now. What this does is it tells the email marketing provider, hey, not only did this person see my email, open it, they clicked on it. So they're really, really active. So they start off as somebody who's active and it's gonna ensure or it's gonna increase the likelihood of your future emails ending up in their inbox. So even if you don't have this right now, if you have single opt in, start implementing it right now with all your opt ins so that all new subscribers become active subscribers. Number two, you have your email list, a lot of them are gonna be inactive. What you want to do is you want to filter for these cold emails. People that have not opened or engaged with your emails in the last 90 days, these are cold and you want to reactivate them. Basically what you're trying to do here is you're going to find out are you really interested in being on this email list? If not, let me know so I can unsubscribe you. You shouldn't be paying for people that shouldn't be on the list. Again, if they're not opening your emails, they're not going to be opening up any emails, including offers and becoming customers. You don't want people to freeload. So what you're going to do is you're going to do a reactivation campaign. We talked about this. I learned this from Dan Martel, our advisor over at Webinar Ninja. And basically you're sending an email that forces somebody to reply or else, okay, so basically this is a very short email. You're just saying, are you still interested in X? Are you still interested in growing your business with webinars? Are you still interested in getting fit, whatever your genre is? And it's just a one liner where you say, hey, reply to this email and let me know if you're still interested or what's stopping you from getting started. What has stopped you from getting started? I want to know now. This is gonna cause you to reply to a lot of emails, but you can dedicate a few hours, one day out of the week to reply all to those emails. But this is gonna make sure those who are not active become active. Replying is like the best thing anybody can ever do to an email in terms of your sender as your sender reputation. So what you wanna do is make sure that you prompt a reply. By doing this, you're not only gonna be able to close a whole bunch of sales because you can go back and forth and coach them through whoever they're struggling with, but also gonna salvage the people that you have had on your list. Maybe they've been seeing your emails in your inbox, but they haven't opened them or engaged in them. Once you do this reactivation there's gonna be another step. But I just wanna give you another example of reactivation. You can ask them, hey, reply to this email if you wanna get an invite for my next webinar. Reply to this email if you wanna be invited to my next Q and A or ask me anything. They have to take action to get what you're offering. You don't just send out an invite. And if they don't reply then they are considered ice cold. Okay, now what do you do with all these ice cold people that didn't reply to your activation email? Well, what you're gonna do now is now they're in a different pile. They're gonna tag them this way and you're gonna send them an email and say, hey, guys, I've noticed you haven't opened an email or engaged in any of my emails in the last 90 days. This is what we're going to do. If you're uninterested in being a part of this email list, feel free to unsubscribe below. No harm, no foul. We're okay. But if you are interested, I'll be sending you one email a month. Maybe I've been sending you too many emails. Okay, so just say one email a month. Thanks for being on the email. And you can even just send off, say, hey, if you have any feedback or you want to send me some love with an emoji reply again, prompting a reply. So you can get them to reengage and you know, get those cold emails to really make sure that they're warm and actually the emails show up in the inbox. A reply will really make sure emails are going into the inboxes telling people like Gmail people or companies like Gmail that this is a sender they care about because they're replying to them. Basically what we've done and what you should do as well is you just basically curate a monster newsletter once a month where it's just like, it gives them everything they can ever imagine in one email. Great value. The latest blog post, the next events, all that kind of stuff. Sales offers, everything in one email. It's like a monster newsletter. And you just send them that. Now, in my opinion, after you send that email, if people are still not opening those emails, people that are the cold emails that you've sent the monster newsletter to, and they there's gonna be a group of people that still didn't open the email. It's time to clean up. Okay, So I would give 30 days, you're gonna send out that newsletter, that major newsletter, that big one. If they're still not engaging, they're not opening, they're not doing anything with that one email. After 30 days, you can unsubscribe them. Unsubscribe them because they are definitely not engaged because and they are definitely not seeing your emails, it's time for them to get off the list. You've given them a whole bunch of opportunities and you took care of them. But now it's time to cull. And culling is one of the best things you can do. That means your open rates are gonna go Much higher. And the people that care and want to be on your email list are gonna be there. That's really what you wanna do here. Now, as you see, we're not treating everybody the same. The active people on your list, they love your emails, they wanna keep getting your emails or opening them, they're engaging with you. People that are not that active, but may like your content, but just can't open every single email and they're just kind of ignoring. You need one major newsletter. So we're trying to do this in our own businesses, make sure we treat people differently based on their habits. Now, as you can see, this is a bit of work and there's a bunch of stages involved, but this is really gonna help your business, your email marketing, and the longevity of your brand in people's inboxes. And I'm telling you right now, it's a gold rush for email lists right now because people are becoming more and more productive of their inbox. And it's getting really, really hard to reach people on social because it's so crowded right now. So if you have access to somebody's inbox, it's like gold right now. And it's getting harder and harder. So as much as you can get those premium emails of people that want to be on our list, call the list and treat people based on their actions. To wrap up today's lesson, we were sending emails to everybody the same way, no matter if they've been with us for five years, six years, their activity, how many emails they've opened, how many times they've clicked and it just didn't work. Okay, you can't treat everybody the same. Yes, automation helps you kind of do that for you based on their actions. But you also want to make sure your campaigns and your newsletters and all those things that you send out offers are based on their activity as well. You make sure that you're only sending to people that actually need those emails and want those emails. Some people are going to want less frequency, Some people are going to want no frequency, meaning that they're just not interested anymore and they need to get off your list. And some people are just not gonna unsubscribe. They're just not in the habit of doing that. They may feel bad, they may know you personally, but it's time for them to go. And you need to make that decision. You need to prune that list so you make sure that the majority of the people on your list are opening your emails and reading your emails and all that kind of stuff. Now, a majority 51% open rate is pretty insane, right? That's crazy and amazing and a great thing to strive for, but anything between 25, 35% is really the sweet spot. If you're not hitting that right now, you really should think about what I'm talking about today. If you can go 35, 40, 45, 50 now, you are doing amazing with email marketing because you're actually communicating directly with your audience and they're really, really loving it. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the 100 RBA Show. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you never miss a an episode on whatever platform you use. Whether it's Apple, podcasts, Himalaya, Stitcher, Radio, Spotify, we're on every single one of them. Today's episode's not over, though. It's Free Ride Friday, so let's give away a lifetime membership to easy course, our $500 course over at easycourse co. If you want to win, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Every Friday we do this draw. Just listen in to see if you won. It's that simple. And this week's winner is the Simple Home. The Simple Home says great daily podcast, five stars. I love that the $100 RBA is around 10 minutes long and even with the short length is full of valuable content. Great job, Omar. Thank you, the Simple Home for the great, great review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with the lifetime access to Easy course. It's that easy. Guys, if you want to win, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You should do this email cleanup that I just explained. Once a year you need to do an audit. You need to do a review, put it in the calendar, make it a reoccurring event once every year, document the process so that you can then hand it over to somebody else on your team or somebody you hire, you may want to do it the first time, but the second time you can definitely hand it over to somebody else. If you have a standard operating procedure, a documentation that you have written as you're going through that process. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.