A (13:49)

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B (14:21)

So we've talked about building a quality list. We talked about making sure having quality content, valuable content, being somebody of value. What's the third thing I want to share with you is segmenting your list. Now we talked about you're talking to a specific person with specific pains in a niche, in a marketplace, and that's true. But even within your list, you want to personalize your emails and make sure that you're giving everybody what they need. Okay? You want to see this as sort of like onboarding. If you ever started signed up for some software, they walk you through some onboarding, some steps, some orientation basically, and they ask you some questions. Are you going to use the software to do this or that? And the reason why they're asking this question is because they want to segment their users to provide them the value that is specific to them. And you may want to do the same thing with your email list, right? You want to segment your email based on demographics, maybe even or behavior based on what they click on. What I like to do is I like to make sure that I segment people from action takers and non action takers. Okay? So eventually you're going to make an offer on your email and you're going to say, hey, click this link to check out more information about this offer or about this course, about this training, about the Surface. I like to tag in my email list software and segment people if they've clicked, okay? If they click, that means they're interested, right? But if they've never clicked on any of my links to see any offers, I know that they're a little bit colder in terms of getting to the byline and I don't need to keep throwing them offers, right? I need to still build a relationship with them. I still need to warm up to them. We still build some trust, okay? They need something else. They don't need more offers. So those who click though, they are interested and that tells me something, it gives me an indicator that I want to give them other ideas. If they haven't bought yet, maybe I can give them another offer, counter offer, that's maybe a little bit more of an entry level product. These are the ways you can segment your emails by just simply identifying the actions they take with your emails. So that way you can give them the right content, the right type of follow up. Let me give you an example on how we use this with Webinar Ninja. So with Webinar Ninja, when we would launch a new product, a new service, a new offer, maybe even like an accelerator program to help them with their webinars that was paid, we did a lot of different kinds of things to get people into our ecosystem and sign up for Webinar Ninja. But what we did was we would send out free content. We would say, hey, we have this 15 minute video on how to use webinars to grow your podcast, for example. And we would do this to people that were podcasters in our segment or people that had podcasts or were interested in the topic of podcasting in the past. So we'd send that email out and in that email there would be a link to the video. Now there's a 15 minute video on this topic. If they didn't click on the link and watch the video, I will not send them the offer that's related to that type of content. So say, for example, we had a course on how to launch your podcast. That course is not relevant to somebody who's not gonna click on something free. Okay? So it's a great way for you to kind of seek permission to give an offer by saying, hey, here's something free, a valuable piece of content. If you wanna learn how to start a podcast. This is a great video. They click on it, they watch it. If I know they've clicked on it, then I know they're interested in this topic. And then I could say, hey, if you like that video, we have a full course showing you A to Z how to do everything, we walk you by the hand and we even have a service to do it, blah, blah, blah. This is just an example, but the point here is, is that this gives you permission to give them more information and give them an offer where they're willing to pay for a solution because they've shown interest in this topic. Number four, in order for you to build trust with your audience, it's gonna take some time, which means it's gonna take some emails. So you may wanna automate the process. Okay, so you can have newsletter emails, but you can also have automated emails to onboard your customers or your potential customers that are joining your email list. So email automation is your friend. You want to onboard those new subscribers with the best quality content you have on your website. Maybe a popular blog post or a great podcast episode or video that you have on your site. The point here is, is that you want to give them as much high quality stuff on the regular automated. So you can build this out in advance and then just say, anyone who joins my email list, send this sequence in this time, you know, allotment, like every five days, send them a new email or whatever you choose to do. Some people don't like to bombard their email list subscribers with so much email. I think the maximum you should email your list outside of campaigns or launches is twice a week. Once a week is a sweet spot, but that is your newsletter. But then you have automation emails for onboarding and you may want to do a few of those just to give them the best content that you have so that they can feel like they're in the right place and they're getting great value just by being on the list. Then they're gonna get your normal weekly newsletter, for example. And I say normal, but it should be extraordinary. Again, we talked about the high quality content that you want to have that they can't wait to open up this email. And of course the newsletters can be scheduled. So you can write a newsletter and schedule it to go out six months from now, okay? So you can have all six months of your newsletters written in advance so that you don't have to sit there and send an email every single week, you know, hours before it's due. Now what goes hand in hand with automation is tracking your stats, right? You want to see what's going on Every time you send an email out to a group or you send out a newsletter. You want to see what are my open rates, what are my click through rates, how many people are maybe replying to the email, how many people are clicking on a particular link. You want to compare and contrast. You want to see a trend moving up where actually you're getting better and better at this email thing, that more people are reading your emails, more people are engaging with your emails. You don't just want to send out emails that do nothing. If you just do that over and over, you're never going to get better. You want to look at the data and see where you can get better, see what you can do so that you can be able to Have a more engaged email list that loves your content. And sometimes it's just small tweaks like changing your subject line or the preview text or your opening paragraph on your email. You want to see what you can do to optimize a B test. I like to ab test emails all the time, especially with subject lines, to see what gets people to open. Don't be scammy. Do clickbait subject lines that have nothing to do with the email. I hate some of that stuff. It says like, you know, final notice and it feels very urgent when it's not urgent, okay? So make sure that you're ethical, but at the same time being creative with your subject lines so you get them enticed to open up those emails. Lastly, monetizing your emails. How do you promote your products and services with email? I want to step back for a moment and remind you that your job as an entrepreneur, as a business builder, is to sell products and services. That's what you're doing there. This for. This is why you're building the email list in the first place, okay? So don't be too shy not to make an offer, because that's the whole point of the email list. This is not a charity organization where you're just sending out emails for free, right? It's costing you money to have this service, right? Email marketing and have all these emails on your list and to market and all that kind of stuff. So you want to make sure there's an exchange here. But at the same time, you need to understand that not everybody's going to be ready to buy at the same moment, right? Some people are going to buy within days of learning of your existence, and some people are going to buy within months or even years, okay? And that's why segmenting your email list is very important to know who's warm, who's cold, who's clicked on things, who's ready for an offer, all that kind of stuff. And the reason why this is important is because I rather send, you know, say, for example, my email list is 10,000 people and I know that there's maybe about 800 people that are really warm and ready to buy and clicked on my emails and clicked on my free content that's related to the offer that I'm about to send, right? And I send that. I know that my ability to convert those 800 people are going to be much higher. My conversion rate is going to be much higher. I might get from those 800 people 200 people to buy, right? And that's going to be a lot more effective for my conversion rates and my overall understanding of who is buying and who's not, who's ready to buy and who's not buying. Instead of me just sending 10,000 emails to 10,000 different people that are on the different, you know, levels or the different stages in the buying journey. No, you don't want to do that, okay? You got to treat people like people. My personal opinion is the best way to sell is to be transparent. People know what's going on, okay? So what I like to do is I like to give them a chance to learn more. Remember when I talked about how to sell without being salesy, that your job is to educate the customer so they can make a decision. This is where the sales strategy comes in. So I don't just say, hey, everybody, on this email list we have an offer, buy this product. Here's a link. You know, thanks for your money. No, I don't do that because I'm not even giving them a chance to learn more. So it's a no brainer for them. So my first step is I say, hey, we have a product for sale. We have a product that we've created that we just launched. We think you'd be interested in it based on, you know, what we've learned since you've been on the email list. Right now we want to show you a demo of this product. We want to show you what problems it solves, how it can make your life easier, better, more enjoyable, whatever it might do, Right? So join me for my next live webinar where I'll show you all about this product and how to buy it and how to get started. I like doing webinars to sell my products because it gives that step of education. I don't need to sell on the email directly, but the email is going to get me them to the webinar. I invite them to my webinar, I get to give them a full demo and they get to ask questions. I get to show them the answers to those questions and the solutions via my product or service. Now, the reason why I do this is because when I run webinars, I want buyers on my webinar and that's why I phrase it that way in the email and say, hey, we have a product that we are launching or this product that you might be familiar with. If you want to learn more about this product, how it can help you with xyz, I'm running a live webinar and a demo to show you everything about it. I'M going to show you how to get started to show you a special offer. If you want to throw in that as well, join. Here's a link, right? And they sign up for the webinar and that's really cool because now everybody on the webinar is a buyer. They're not there and feeling like okay, this is some sort of workshop and then they get hoodwinked into a sales pitch later on. How many you've been on a webinar like that? Plenty of us, right? So I like to be transparent. Just say, hey, this is a sales webinar, right? You're gonna learn about this product that's for sale and if you like it, you can buy it and there's gonna be a co offer for you. So that's how I like to use email marketing. Now those who actually signed up for the webinar, they know what I'm talking about. They know that this is a product that's for sale. And even if they don't attend the webinar, if they don't buy in the webinar then I send emails, right, telling them how to buy, giving them the reasons why to buy, giving them the benefits of the product or service, showing them the solution, showing them testimonials, show them case studies, that's the follow up email sequences I do and those are the sales emails I do. But only for those who have shown interest. So if you do these five things. Okay, let's recap. Build a quality list, okay? Two, you focus on great quality content and send that quality content to your email list subscribers on the regular number three, you segment your list. You identify people and where they're at in their journey. Not everybody's the same for what's for automations. You email automations onboard your customers, give them a great value, right? I should say onboard your email subscribers. Give them a welcome series, right? And give them your best content so they know that they didn't sign up and it was, you know, a mistake, you know, it was a good investment. By giving their name and email address and your attention or their attention I should say part of the automation is to analyze and optimize. Number five, monetize. Educate your customer on your product or service before you start selling to them. Those who are interested in buying the product or service, give them the sales emails that you want. And if you rinse and repeat this enough, you will see the power of email marketing. I have grown two multi seven figure businesses. This business, the 100 MBA and Webinar Ninja a software company that recently got acquired by Proprofs because it was incredibly valuable to many companies and we were very happy to be acquired by them. But the point here that I'm making is that this works, okay? I was able to grow these, these self funded bootstrapped companies by leveraging the power of email marketing. And by the way, email marketing, this is just relationship building. I'm building relationships one on one with many people through email, through software, through technology. So it's all about building relationships. We build relationships through email. And I like email because it's so intimate and you have access to, to the last sacred place in the digital world. So as you can see, email marketing is a powerful tool. But I want to leave you with some advice as you're going on your journey now to build an incredible machine to help email marketing make you money. Okay? This takes time and you don't want to rush yourself by providing bad quality content. You want to make sure the quality of the content is high and it's better for you to grow an emails with 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, slowly, slowly number of emails and give them quality content. Because if you have a great newsletter, a great sequence of emails that they get, they're going to tell other people, they're going to say this is a great newsletter, you should check it out. I just told you about three other people that I love their newsletters as examples, you know, Tim Ferriss and Mark Manson and Ryan Holiday and all these great newsletters because good quality stuff gets shared and if you keep the quality up and you're patient, you will win eventually. Business is not a sprint, it's a marathon. It's actually a lifelong marathon and you just get better and better and better. Thanks for tuning into the Hundred Dollar MBA show. I hope you found this episode valuable. If you did and you want more valuable lessons, hit subscribe on whatever app you're on. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, we're on them all. And you can go to our website, 100nba.net to check out all our episodes. 2,500 episodes counting. I'll see you in the next episode.