Stop Ignoring Your Email List - The CEO Teacher Podcast

Summary

Podcast Summary: The CEO Teacher Podcast – "Stop Ignoring Your Email List"

Episode Details:

Title: Stop Ignoring Your Email List
Host: Kayse Morris
Release Date: January 22, 2025

Introduction and Personal Insights

In the latest episode of The CEO Teacher Podcast, host Kayse Morris kicks off with a personal recount of her vibrant birthday weekend. Sharing snippets from her Instagram, Kayse connects with her audience by highlighting her relatable experiences, including running a half marathon, attending a concert, and enjoying a game of Topgolf. This warm introduction sets the tone for a personable and engaging discussion ahead.

The Critical Importance of Email Lists

Kayse dives straight into the episode’s core theme: the often-overlooked potential of email lists for teacher entrepreneurs. She emphasizes that "your email list belongs to you. Social media does not" ([04:15]). This statement underscores the vulnerability associated with relying solely on social media platforms, which can change algorithms or vanish overnight, leaving businesses stranded.

Resilience Against Social Media Fluctuations

Highlighting recent events like the TikTok ban, Kayse illustrates the precariousness of depending entirely on social media. She shares a real-world example from her mastermind group, mentioning a member who "had an email list but hadn't sent an email in like a year" ([08:30]). This emphasizes the necessity of not only building but also actively maintaining an email list to ensure continuous engagement and stability.

Advantages of Email Marketing Over Social Media

Kayse presents compelling statistics to advocate for email marketing:

Return on Investment (ROI): For every $1 spent, email marketing yields a $36 to $40 return ([12:20]).
Effectiveness: Email strategies are 40 times more effective than social media in generating sales ([16:45]).
User Engagement: 99% of email users check their inbox daily, and 62% prefer email as their top communication channel with small businesses ([19:10]).

She contrasts these numbers with social media's lower ROI, highlighting that "email is a form of direct marketing which allows you to create valuable personal touches at scale" ([10:05]).

Building a Sustainable Business Foundation

Addressing the question, "Why can't I just keep selling my resources on TPT, Etsy, Amazon, social media and call it a day?", Kayse responds by advocating for owning one’s marketing channels. She states, "I always encourage you to build your future on some land that you actually own" ([22:00]). This metaphor reinforces the idea of creating a stable and controllable foundation through email lists.

The CEO Teacher Connection Marketing Framework

Kayse outlines her proprietary CEO Teacher Connection Marketing framework, which comprises four key strategies:

Build Your List
Nurture Your List
Connect with Your List
Sell to Your List

This cyclical process ensures continuous growth and engagement, fostering long-term relationships with subscribers. She elaborates that "connection marketing is the way that you relate to your people through the power of your story, who you are as a person" ([25:30]).

Emphasizing Authenticity and Relationship Building

Authenticity is a cornerstone of Kayse’s approach. She shares her personal journey, including the challenges of being a single parent and navigating relationships post-divorce. "Being vulnerable and sharing about my divorce has been one of the best strategies in my social media to date" ([30:45]). Kayse advocates for genuine interactions, stating that "connection before content" is essential for building trust and loyalty.

Practical Benefits of an Email Strategy

Kayse details the multifaceted benefits of maintaining an active email strategy:

Direct Communication: Enables direct dialogue with audience members.
Flexibility in Tone: Can adapt to formal announcements or informal chats.
Reliability: Serves as a consistent communication channel irrespective of social media issues.

She asserts, "with email, you create relationships with your subscribers and you own those relationships" ([35:20]), highlighting the enduring value of email as a marketing tool.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Kayse wraps up the episode by reiterating the importance of building and nurturing an email list. She teases an upcoming ebook, "Start or Expand Your Online Teacher Business in 2025," available to listeners who join her email list. Encouraging listeners to "start your list today and nurture it in an authentic way," she assures them that this strategy will pave the way to creating their dream businesses.

Final Quote: "Remember, word of mouth marketing is just as powerful, if not more so than paid ads. Start your list today and nurture it authentically." ([42:10])

Key Takeaways:

Ownership and Control: Email lists provide a stable and owned channel for communication, unlike social media.
High ROI and Engagement: Email marketing offers significantly higher returns and better engagement rates.
Relationship Building: Authentic and consistent communication fosters trust and loyalty.
Strategic Framework: Implementing a structured email marketing strategy can transform and sustain teacher-led businesses.

Action Steps for Listeners:

Start Building Your Email List: Utilize tools and strategies to gather subscriber information.
Consistently Nurture Your Subscribers: Regularly send valuable and authentic content.
Engage and Connect: Share personal stories and build relationships beyond just selling products.
Leverage Your List for Sales: Use your established relationships to promote your offerings effectively.

By following Kayse Morris’s insights and strategies, teacher entrepreneurs can harness the full potential of email marketing to secure and grow their businesses sustainably.

Join the CEO Teacher® Movement: To dive deeper into these strategies and access personalized frameworks, visit kaysemorris.com and take the two-minute quiz to discover your custom CEO Teacher® Fast Track plan.

Stay Tuned: Don’t miss next week’s episode where Kayse will unveil the new ebook designed to help you start or expand your online teacher business in 2025. As Kayse beautifully puts it, "Your best is yet to come."

Transcript

A (0:00)

Hello hello CEO teachers. Welcome back to the show. Man. I am coming off of one of the my favorite birthdays I've ever had. I had a birthday weekend celebration really started on Friday. I ran a half marathon on Sunday and then I got to go to a concert Sunday night and then play topgolf. I had a fabulous weekend. You have to check it out all on Instagram. I'd hope to see you back over there. Today we're going to be talking about all of you. Yes, you that ignore your email list. It's time to stop ignoring your email list and get back to growing your list so that you can feel safe if things like social media decide to go away. Even if it is only for a couple hours. So stick around. You don't wanna miss it. Remember sitting in class stressed out about the pop quiz that the teacher was going to give? Well, this is nothing like this, friends. We've been working on this for so long. I love a good quiz that's gonna tell me about myself and help me be a better version of me. And that's exactly what this quiz is all about. It's just for teachers. And in case you're tired of grading papers until midnight or feeling undervalued and underp, or tired of sacrificing your work life balance, we get it. If you are looking to not lose time in the rabbit hole of googling and looking for answers to just sell your lesson plans or start your teacher business online, let's flip the script right here. Today I got a personalized path that will help you figure out exactly what you deserve based on who you are and what you do best, which is teaching. Would you finally feel confident enough to go all in to dream bigger and regain your passion for education in a brand new. If so, let's take the two minute quiz together to reveal and discover your custom step by step CEO Teacher Fast track to starting or creating and selling your offers online as a teacher. It starts@casey morris.com quiz. It'll only take you about two minutes and the results will come flying into your inbox. And remember, it's not one size fits all. This is your year to shine. Casey morris.com quiz is your customized lesson plan for business building teacher style. Head on over to K-A-Y-S E M O R R I S.com quiz to get your hands on this brand spanking new personalized syllabus. Quick Start today so the team and I were just talking about the recent mini TikTok ban and how scared some creators were because they didn't have anything like a website or an email list. And I just want this to be your little reminder that your email list belongs to you. Social media does not. And although TikTok is back, it could be temporary. So I want you, if you haven't already, to start growing an email list and if you already have one, it's time to stop ignoring it. Someone in our mastermind said, I've had an email list, here's how many people are on it. And I'll be honest, I haven't sent an email in like a year. And I was like, okay, we gotta work on that. David Newman said, email has an ability many channels don't, creating valuable personal touches at stake scale. And then there is no formula for the perfect email. Authentic and honest messaging works and we are going back to that. If you're not already on our email list, we'll have an opportunity for you to join us next week as we share our brand new ebook Start or expand your online teacher business in 2025. And we are getting back to that authentic self of just talking about life now that I'm not afraid to share about my life anymore and just getting back to what life looks like as a single parent with four kids. And if you're interested in learning more about of course building your business y but also just about the authentic side of life, we would love to have you on our list. More on that next week. So for every $1 you spend as a business owner on email marketing, the average return is 36 to $40. That is huge compared to other ROIs when it comes to different types of ads. And although this is lower than it has been in the past, it is still largely more profitable than your ROI on social media, which comes in every dollar spent about $5 on average for monetized social accounts. That is not the people that are making money without ads. An email strategy is about 40 times more effective than any social media strategy when it comes to making sales. And 99% of email users check their email at least once per day. 62% of consumers ranked email as their top preferred communication channel with small businesses. And 59% of people said marketing emails influenced their decisions to buy. You know, email marketing is a form of direct marketing which is directly to your consumer that you can chat with them and you can do things like talk about life, which I highly recommend but also sell things like offers products, give them discounts and it just helps you really build a stronger connection and of course brand awareness. This is not New technology, it's not fancy, it's not the latest trends, and it's not what everyone wants to hear about. But email was the first form of digital communication all the way back to 1971, and at 50 plus years old, it is still one of the most used things. With 4.5 billion people using it, it's still the king of marketing friends. And because subscribers choose they have to actually go in and give you their email address, it is much more likely that you can get them to join your social channels or just to buy into who you are as a person. With most other marketing platforms like social media, you don't own the platform, and I know you've heard me say that a lot. But there is an internal algorithm that has nothing to do with you on how your content gets shown to your audience, which is part of like this crazy dopamine hit that we go through of. That video just went viral. That video just got a thousand more views. Views in my last video. Let me do more of that, only to realize that that new video isn't going to perform as well. However, with email, you create relationships with your subscribers and you own those relationships. It's your own personal algorithm. More often than not, email is the go to channel for all important messages when it comes to a company or a business. If there's a glitch on your website, shipping delays, an outage with systems or softwares updating your contacts, it is the quickest way to maintain communication with your people. And with social media, if it goes dark, which we have seen many, many times in the past year, or it glitches, you still have a way to connect with your audience. Email is secure, instant and can match the formal tone of the most important announcements in the informal tone of everyday chats. This all sounds fantastic and you might be wondering why you have been ghosting your list and haven't started building it. So let me help you with the question of the hour. Why can't I just keep selling my resources on tpt, Etsy, Amazon Social Media and call it a day? And the answer is sure you can. But I'm always going to encourage you to build your future on some land that you actually own. Everything about online marketing is moving to authentic relationship building and that is where our framework of the CEO Teacher Connection marketing comes in. Our first strategy, build your list. Second, nurture your list. Third, connect with your list. Fourth, sell to your list. And then the beautiful evergreen cycle starts all over again. Building, nurturing, connecting and selling. Connection marketing is the way that you relate to your people through the power of your story, who you are as a person. Focus your efforts on connection rather than money, always to create loyal fans for life. This is not a transaction. There's got to be transformation in your relationship with other people. How will your offer make people feel? What are you helping them with and how will their teaching practice evolve after joining your world? I know it seems so simple when you say community over competition and connection before content. People say it and they think they know exactly what it means. When we get down to the bottom of it, this is what it means. It's hard. It requires you to get uncomfortable. It requires you to trust and have faith in sharing, supporting and cheering for others as well as yourself, knowing that it's not going to lead to your demise. Being vulnerable and sharing about my divorce has been one of the best strategies in my social media to date. And it was not even a strategy. I just wanted to be able to talk about my life freely. I am happy now and I want to be able to share that. And being able to talk about my boyfriend and my life now feels easy. You know, even though I don't know what the future holds for me, I know that in this moment, right here, right now, the present, I am a happy single mother per se and I'm in a happy relationship and I want to share that with the world. Whether that comes back one day, it is what it is. But being my authentic self makes me feel better about sharing my life. Keeping up with a regular email strategy, one that also shares your authentic life. It helps create a better customer experience, but it helps you build that authenticity thing that you've been working towards. Your credibility. It allows people to see your reputation and see if they can trust you. And remember, the know, like and trust factor is what it's all about. When your audience trusts you, you will consistently meet their expectations and deliver on your promises or over deliver. We like to do that around here and they are much more likely to return to you again and again or recommend you to a friend. Remember, word of mouth marketing is just as powerful, if not more so than paid ads. And by starting your list today and making sure that you nurture it and continue to grow it in an authentic way, you'll be well on your way to creating the business of your dreams. Thanks so much for listening to today's show. Can't wait to share with you our brand new ebook next week to help you start or expand your online teacher business in 2025. As always, remember your best is yet to come and I'll see you soon. It.