Episode 111: What I Loved About Hosting A Virtual Summit + What I’d Change

Summary

Summary of Episode 111: "What I Loved About Hosting A Virtual Summit + What I’d Change"

The Email Sound Booth with Liz Wilcox
Host: Liz Wilcox
Release Date: March 31, 2025

In Episode 111 of The Email Sound Booth with Liz Wilcox, titled "What I Loved About Hosting A Virtual Summit + What I’d Change," Liz delves into her experiences organizing and executing her first virtual summit since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The episode offers a comprehensive reflection on the successes and areas for improvement, providing valuable insights for online business owners looking to enhance their email marketing strategies.

1. Introduction to the Virtual Summit

Liz begins by setting the stage, acknowledging her fatigue but emphasizing a light-hearted approach to sharing her experiences. She humorously references her stint on "Survivor," illustrating her ability to connect personal anecdotes with professional endeavors. This blend of personal and business insights sets a relatable tone for the episode.

"[00:00] ... we're just having a combo." – Liz Wilcox

2. Embracing the Audio-Only Format

A primary highlight of the summit was Liz's decision to adopt an audio-only format, inspired by the "Mini Micro Audio Summit" method taught by Wendy Breakstone. This approach was strategic, allowing Liz to manage the summit without overextending herself, especially after hosting a demanding video-based event in the RV space.

• Advantages of Audio-Only:
  • Reduced Workload: Transitioning from video to audio significantly lowered the production demands.
  • Ease of Participation: Liz utilized Voxer to communicate with speakers, streamlining the recording process.

"[02:14] ... but I got to use a bass over my voice. But I'm going Fiji." – Liz Wilcox

Liz appreciated the simplicity of the audio format, noting that it facilitated smoother interactions with speakers and reduced technical complications. Despite a few challenges—such as some speakers preferring to send their recordings separately—the overall experience was positive.

3. Generating Abundant Leads

One of the summit's standout successes was the substantial influx of new leads. Over a two-week period, Liz amassed approximately 1,100 sign-ups, surpassing her initial goal of 1,000. This surge was attributed to her strategy of offering valuable content directly to her existing email list without additional sign-up barriers.

• Key Strategies:
  • Direct Communication: Liz informed her email subscribers about the summit, ensuring they received relevant content without needing to register separately.
  • Valuable Content Delivery: By providing three days of enriched email content, Liz reinforced her commitment to her audience's needs.

"[05:35] ... my list literally is about the exact same size." – Liz Wilcox

The result was not only a growth in leads but also a sense of validation and community engagement, as evidenced by over 22,000 downloads from 26 speakers. This metric underscored the summit's wide reach and the high level of interest it generated.

4. Fostering Engaged Communities

Liz emphasized the importance of active engagement, noting how her established Facebook group, The Email Sound Booth, played a pivotal role in maintaining a vibrant community atmosphere throughout the summit.

• Engagement Highlights:
  • Interactive Platforms: Active participation in the Facebook group and live co-working sessions enhanced real-time interactions.
  • Community Validation: New attendees were introduced to Liz's engaged community, reinforcing trust and authority.

"[05:35] ... over 7,000 members now." – Liz Wilcox

This active engagement not only enriched the summit experience but also reinforced Liz's position as a trusted leader in the email marketing space.

5. Re-establishing Authority and Networking

Hosting the summit served as a catalyst for re-establishing Liz's authority in her niche. The event attracted attention from industry peers, leading to opportunities such as speaking engagements at conferences like Epicon.

• Outcome:
  • Increased Authority: The successful execution of the summit highlighted Liz's expertise, attracting invitations to speak at notable events.
  • Networking Opportunities: Connections made during the summit opened doors for future collaborations and growth.

"[05:35] ... she was like, oh yeah, by the way, why don't you come speak at my conference?" – Liz Wilcox

6. Leveraging Metrics for Future Content

A critical takeaway for Liz was the ability to analyze summit metrics to understand audience preferences better. By identifying popular topics, she can tailor future content to meet her audience's interests effectively.

• Data-Driven Decisions:
  • Popular Sessions: Sessions like Chad Allen's on freebie swaps garnered significant attention, indicating areas ripe for further exploration.
  • Future Content Planning: Insights from metrics inform the creation of targeted email series, mini-courses, and collaborative posts.

"[05:35] ... that was super popular." – Liz Wilcox

This approach ensures that future initiatives are aligned with audience demands, fostering continuous engagement and value delivery.

7. Areas for Improvement

While the summit was largely successful, Liz identified key areas for enhancement in future iterations:

a. Mandatory Speaker Promotion

Liz reflected on the lack of required promotion from summit speakers. While she valued giving free content without additional obligations, incorporating a promotional component could amplify the summit's reach and success.

"[05:35] ... there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere." – Liz Wilcox

b. Platform Issues with Hello Audio

Technical challenges with the Hello Audio platform hindered seamless access to summit content. Liz observed that not all attendees could transition smoothly to YouTube Music, suggesting the inclusion of Spotify as an alternative.

"[05:35] ... add Spotify, which we didn't add for some reason." – Liz Wilcox

Addressing these technical issues is essential for ensuring a flawless user experience in future events.

8. Future Plans and Continued Growth

Building on the success of the initial summit, Liz is already planning her next event, the Sales Email Summit scheduled for August 2025. This event aims to focus on high-performing sales emails, featuring 20 speakers and leveraging the learnings from the first summit to enhance content delivery and engagement.

• Anticipated Features:
  • Extended Speaker Lineup: Maintaining a robust roster of speakers to provide diverse insights.
  • Enhanced Content Strategy: Utilizing data from the previous summit to create more targeted and valuable content.

"[05:35] ... already started planning sales email summit for August 2025." – Liz Wilcox

Additionally, Liz is considering strategies to increase her podcast's reach and improve metric tracking to better gauge success and areas for growth.

Conclusion

Episode 111 of The Email Sound Booth with Liz Wilcox offers a thorough examination of the highs and lows of hosting a virtual summit. Liz's candid reflections provide actionable insights for online business owners aiming to optimize their email marketing and community-building efforts. By embracing strategic formats, leveraging engaged communities, and continuously refining based on feedback and metrics, Liz exemplifies effective leadership and innovation in the digital marketing space.

For listeners seeking to delve deeper or engage with Liz, she encourages joining The Email Sound Booth Facebook group and participating in ongoing discussions and future events.

"[00:00] ... That's it. I'll see you on the next episode." – Liz Wilcox

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Notable Quotes:

• "I decided audio only. I loved that." – [02:00] Liz Wilcox
• "This is what you need and I'm gonna give you what you need because that's what a true leader does." – [05:35] Liz Wilcox
• "There's got to be something. I mean, I put in my team, really, my team put in a lot of work." – [05:35] Liz Wilcox

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Resources Mentioned:

• Facebook Group: The Email Sound Booth
• Upcoming Event: Sales Email Summit August 2025
• Previous Summit: List Building Live
• Speaking Engagement: Epicon Conference

Transcript

[A]

What's up? Liz Wilcox here, the fresh princess of email marketing. You are listening to episode 111, what I loved about my virtual summit and what I would change now. Please forgive me. I'm kind of in this weird funk this morning. My brain is. I don't want to say my brain is foggy, but it is tired. I am tired. Are you tired? If you are, thanks for listening. Anyway, I'm gonna keep this light and bright. You know, we'll learn something, but it won't be like a class, right? We're just having a combo. So if you don't know. The beginning of March 2025, I hosted my first digital event since 2020. So since the Pandemic, I don't know why I said it like that. Maybe I just needed to make myself laugh so I could wake up.

[B]

The pandemic.

[A]

Say it with me. Are you walking? Are you doing the dishes? Say it out loud because it might make you laugh.

[B]

The pandemic.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. Side note, before we get into the virtual summit, when I was on Survivor, I was with these two people that loved to sing, and they were, like, professionally trained, right? Tevin and Soda, for those that have watched. And they would say. I mean, they would sang. Okay. And I got real nervous about it. I was like, they're making this connection because they are singers, and how can I get in on. How can I get in on this without it being obvious that I'm, like, the annoying little sister that won't let them play alone? And so I. I cannot sing, but I can go low, right? Like, it's. Honestly, I have a really, like, high nasal voice, so it kind of surprises people, right?

[B]

The Pandemic.

[A]

And so they made up this song about, like, morning time in Fiji. And honestly, you can watch it. I think it's like, episode three or something. They're singing it, and then Tevin says, come in with that bass, Liz, and they cut it. Like, they literally put a bass over my voice. But I'm going Fiji.

[B]

Fiji. Oh.

[A]

Anyway, side note, that's a bonus for listening to the email sound booth podcast. You get weird random stories about Liz's life. So that. That concludes my Survivor story. Is that the first Survivor story I've told in 111 episodes? Oh, it's like a hidden gem. All right, so let's talk about what I loved about hosting a virtual summit and what I would change. So I've just got a few notes here, and again, we're gonna keep it light and bright. Okay. This is for all my nosy peeps who just want to know everything about the biz. I don't normally say that. That's so annoying. When people are like, my biz, it's like, business. Is that really that long of a word, y'all? I am on one today. There goes that singing again. Maybe I got it from Tevin. Anyway, I loved that. I did like the Mini Micro Audio Summit. I think there's a lady named Wendy Breakstone. I believe she kind of teaches this method. I've been noticing it for a couple years now in the online space, and I knew if I was going to host a virtual summit, I knew it was going to be audio only, number one, y'all, I love myself. I just mentioned I'm tired, right? Like, I don't want to do that much work. I used to host a very large digital summit in the RV space, and it was all video. And I would go. I would go live all the time. It was just a lot. And right now, that's not where my capacity. My capacity is much more full. So I couldn't do that. So I loved that. I decided audio only. I loved that I decided, like, hey, we're just gonna get on Voxer. And you know, I. I text every single person or on voxer, right? I text them on voxer, all the speakers. And I was like, hey, you know, here's how to start. Maybe make an outline so you don't, you know, ramble and have to re record. You don't have to send me the outline. Just introduce yourself and what you do and, you know, start with a cool way. I grew. My list was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It worked so well. There were a few people. I won't name names, but if you are an annual passholder, you can go back and listen to list building live and you'll hear, like, who has better sound? But there were some people that refused to record on voxer, not in a negative way. They were just like, girl, this audio is terrible. Terrible. I'm going to record and just send it to you. And that was great. That was fine. And I just. I just love the audio only part of it. I also love. So that's number one. Audio only was definitely the way to go. I loved lots of new leads at once. Just full transparency. I feel like my list has been stagnant for about 12, 13 months. But again, like, I was on Survivor, right? Like it. When I say that, it sounds so pretentious. And I don't mean it that way. I just mean, you Know, that was like a real wild thing that took a lot of my attention away from.

[B]

The biz.

[A]

Away from the business. Right. So that's like a valid excuse to me. And so I wasn't really focused that much on growing my email list. I was just focused on maintaining. That was actually my word of the year in 2024 was maintain. So. And I did. The list literally is about the exact same size as it was a year ago before the event. And that felt fine. So it was awesome to get a lot of leads at once. I, we had, I told everyone on my email list. This was another thing. I loved everyone on my email list. I said, you don't have to sign up for this. You're already on the list. I'm going to send you the content. And y'all, this, this virtual summit was only three days long. I don't feel bad about sending three emails over three days about content that I literally created for my email list. Right. Like you need it if you're on my email list. You want to know more about email marketing? One of your biggest problems is list building. I created this for you. I'm, I'm not gonna. And if you're not watching YouTube, you can't see my face, but I'm like, I'm not gonna not send you that. This is what you need and I'm gonna give you what you need because that's what a true leader does. All right. Anyway, I loved lots of leads at once. It made me feel good. It made me feel validated. Oh yeah. So we had, we had, oh over 1100 people sign up over like a two week period. And of course, you know, it was like four or 500 people. The first, you know, 10 days and then the last four days of signing up it, you know, it doubled, tripled, whatever. I also loved the super fun engagement. I am the type of person that loves interacting with their audience. I love being in the inbox. I love chit chatting in the Facebook group. If you haven't noticed over on watchlist.com that's my YouTube. YouTube channel. I'm doing lives all the time. Like I love it. So, so awesome to have that super fun engagement to get to know people in the live co working and in the Facebook group and to see them actually, you know, watching and listening and you know, talking in the Facebook group about their favorite stuff. That was so, so cool. That was another thing. I didn't start a brand new Facebook group for the event. I already have a very established Facebook group called the Email Sound booth. That's. It's literally this podcast is named after the Facebook group and it already has, you know, over 6, 000 people now. Over 7, 000. And so I loved that the Facebook group was on and popping and I loved that that was able to show new people, like, oh, wow, Liz actually has an engaged community. The people are awesome in here. So I loved that. I also loved that. I feel like it re established some authority in my space, right? So like I said, I last year was all about maintaining, right? I didn't really do any giant things. In fact, I mean, I barely even launched my annual pass last year. I only did it one time at the end of the year. And so I felt like this was me getting back into the swing of things, right? So that was super awesome. And I feel like it's also gotten some attention. Like a lady that was that I asked to be part of my summit. April Franks, she was like, oh yeah, I would love to. And she was like, oh yeah, by the way, why don't you come speak at my conference? So I feel like it got me a, you know, again, re establish that authority and got me that speaking gig. So I'm gonna actually put that in the show notes. It's called Epicon, and I think it's like meetmepic.com but I'll put it in the show notes. I'm speaking May 23rd or something like that. Anyway, I also, I love that I got to know people quickly, right? I talked about that super fun engagement. So I got to know all those new subscribers really quickly and then was able to look at the metrics of the event and see what people were really interested in, right? I could see that. You know, the talk that Chad Allen gave on freebie swaps was super, super popular, right? So maybe that's something that I write a series of emails on. Maybe that's something that, you know, I could create a mini course on and add as a bonus for my annual pass holders. Or, you know, it's like a twenty, thirty dollar thing that I could teach freebie swaps. Or maybe it's something, you know, start a collaboration post on Facebook, right? I'm able to look at those metrics, see what people are searching for and help them accordingly. And side note, that's the key to freaking customers not making shit up in a silo, you know, talking to your customers, doing stuff like this so you can have metrics that say, yep, I know this was my most popular watched thing, so I need to create more content about that. And you can hear me click, click, clicking. I'm actually gonna go look at my stats. How can I look at this, y'all? This is why I shouldn't go off beat, right? I'm going off beat. Yeah. Like this. Working with local groups to host live events had over a thousand downloads, twelve hundred downloads. People watch that. Who. I never would have thought that was going to be a super popular one, but that was super popular. And so maybe I can, you know, find out who watched that and send them more info or connect them with the speaker. Right. And suddenly I'm off to the races with affiliate income. Right. All right. Anyway, what else did I love? Oh, I think that. I think that's it for my. For what I loved. I mean, I just loved it in general, and I loved that we kept it simple. I love that we got. You know, my goal was to get a thousand leads. We got about 1100, so that felt good. And we got over 22, 000 downloads. So there were what, 26. 26 speakers. So let's do the math on that. 22,000, y'all. I really just be doing this off the cuff. So on average, over 800, almost 850 downloads per episode per speech, whatever session, whatever the hell we want to call it. And one thing or one thing that I would change, and honestly, I hate to do this, but I feel like I'm gonna have to, is I didn't require any promotion from any speakers. And I don't know, I. I don't think I would ever require an email, which, of course, email is the most valuable thing a speaker can do for a summit like this, But I think I would require some sort of promotion, whether it's social, email, a PS Doing something with me like an Instagram Live. I did one of those with Roger Coles. That was awesome. There's got to be something. I mean, I put in my team, really, my team put in a lot of work, and I think, you know, it would be an even greater success if more people would have promoted. Now, I don't require promotion because I hate when I'm required to promote. I think it's. It's like I'm the one giving you free content, so why are you asking more of me? And that's why I didn't ask. So there's got to be a middle ground somewhere, though, because I really did put in a lot of work to promote these people, so that maybe that's one thing I would change. I also. We used hello Audio. We had a Terrible time with it. So if you, if you attended the event, you know what I'm talking about. Like people were trying to get it on YouTube music and it just. Half of the people were had no problem and the other half, it just never moved over to YouTube Music. Like people would never got it. So either we don't use hello audio next time or we can add Spotify, which we didn't add for some reason. I think it was because it made it public or something like you can't have private on Spotify. Something like that. I can't remember the exact reason, sorry. But we would probably just add Spotify. I don't care if it's private or public, you know, we can unpublish it later. So yeah, that's probably the two things I would change. Make it mandatory to promote some type of way and then you know, get off of hello Audio or change up how we were doing it on hello Audio. And honestly we've got another summit coming up. Let me look in August called the sales email summit. It's going to be all about the best performing sales emails from probably. We'll probably do about 20 speakers again. You know, five to 10 minute episodes like we did. I think, I think we might even just publish that on Email Sound booth because we had over 22000 downloads. Right? But that does nothing for me. Right. My podcast Email Sound Booth which you're listening to has almost 40000 downloads. But I would have liked those 22 000. And maybe this is just me being vain, but aren't we all when it comes to metrics? You know, I'd have over 60,000 by now if we had put that. And I can unpublish those episodes if I want or I can keep them up forever. I don't plan. Oh, another thing I loved is I didn't sell like an all access pass or the recordings. Right. I did sell the annual pass and you can search through episodes and I'll put, I'll put one in the show notes of what my annual pass is. I'm not going to go into it but I, I sold the annual pass and that was fine. But I liked that we didn't have like an all access pass. Anyway, that's the summation of list building live. Overall I think it went well. I loved it. I can't wait to do it again. I've already started planning sales email summit for August 2025. If you have any follow up questions, go to the Email Sound booth Facebook group. I'm going to link that in the show notes as well. And, you know, ask me any questions about the virtual summit you'd like and let me know if you attended and if you loved it. All right. I'll see you on the next episode.