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I was only in the emergency room for a few hours, so it's fine. No, I don't know how many of you have gotten sick over the past winter and early spring. Over a year ago, I deleted all my business social media accounts. Instagram, gone. Facebook, gone. And it has not negatively impacted the growth of my agency at all. In fact, I'm now getting leads, good leads, sent to me through AI. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Kate Show. It has been a hot minute since I recorded a podcast episode. Life kind of threw me a few little curves, nothing too serious. I was only in the emergency room for a few hours, so it's fine. No, I don't know how many of you have gotten sick over the past winter and early spring, but whether it was some sort of coronavirus or influenza A or B, like, good grief. I am so glad that spring is here and everyone can just start feeling better because pretty sure I had influenza B and it went through my whole family. I ended up getting the sickest because I am the most sleep deprived and immune compromised because of it. So I learned the hard way that, you know what, sometimes rest is more important than work. But as a quick little life update, things have been pretty crazy over here. Not only did we lose our childcare very abruptly, but we are not able to get any other child care until like June. So our nanny is starting in June. You'll probably see me looking a little bit more lively throughout the summer in these episodes because I will not feel as stretched so thin and that'll be good. I'll be able to think really clearly. That said, things are still just chugging right along here in the agency. It's going so well. I'm, I'm very grateful for it. We are tremendously blessed to be working with so many of you and helping you get the results you need for your businesses. So today I am going to be talking all about what to do when email marketing doesn't work. Because of course I have some people who reach out to me for marketing help and they're like, but wait a minute, you want me to do email marketing? I already tried that. It's just, it didn't work for me. So then we kind of break apart what they did because all industry data shows that email marketing works phenomenally well for high trust, relationship driven businesses, which is exactly what you guys have. So today we're just going to break apart what to do if it hasn't been working and how you can know if it's working and how to do it. Better. So let's just get into it. I'm going to start with a few popular email marketing myths. And the biggest one, of course, is that email is dead, or that you need a big contact list in order for email marketing to be successful, or the idea that social media replaces email. And also the personal holdup that some people have saying, well, I get a lot of emails and I don't like them or I don't open them. So I really don't think other people would open emails that I send and I don't want to bother them. I hear that every now and then. And the, the thing is, the ROI tells a different story. Just because you are annoyed because you get too many emails that are not targeted to you and that feel irrelevant or don't really matter, or you're just too busy because you run a business, doesn't mean that your clients or contacts feel the same way. And in fact, what I see across the clients that we've worked with, over 900 at this point is that the open rates my clients are getting is way higher than normal, way higher than they're, quote, unquote, supposed to be. So let's get into some of the stats for home industry email marketing. Because we can't just make marketing decisions based on vibes, based on how we feel about it. We have to actually look at data. So in the real estate, design and construction industries, the average open rate is about 19%.9%, but our clients are seeing at least 35% open rates, often much higher. Some of my clients have thousands of contacts on their list and some have dozens. So very, very wide range there. But the good thing is the only one who knows the size of your contact list is you and us, if you're working with us. And that's no excuse not to do something with it. There's a lot of untapped revenue in your contact list. Email remains a really great way to market your business because for every $1 you spend, you earn 36 to $45. That's a huge ROI. And like I said earlier, that for your type of business, it's cost effective for repeat and referrals compared to things like paid ads, which a paid ad by itself doesn't do anything. You still have to have a sales funnel to support it. And we've all been duped into running social media ads for our services. Yeah, we have. It's fine, it's okay. And therefore we know what they don't work. They don't work for a lot of reasons. And I'll get into that a little bit later. But did you know that 81% of small businesses are relying on email as their primary way to get new clients? And just as many also use it for retention. So in your contact list you may have a bunch of people who've already worked with you and you think, well, what's the point of emailing them? Aha. Referrals. Okay? I have had this happen so many times with clients where they send out an email to their teeny tiny list and someone on that contact list forwards the email to a third person. Third person comes back, ends up hiring the designer. Okay? Because email marketing puts word of mouth on steroids. And I really can't emphasize that enough. You're selling yourself short. You're selling your business short. If you are just pushing off email marketing now, about 53%. So over half of small business owners in the US and UK and Canada and Australia have said that email marketing is their most frequent strategy for finding new customers and then of course, retaining the repeat ones. So we're just seeing more of the same. Like this is being used widely. And interestingly enough, sending one to two emails per month performs best for engagement and roi because over sending will annoy the heck out of people. In fact, over half of us consumers will unsubscribe if you send them four emails in a month. So if you're sending weekly emails right now and it's not working, maybe just scale it back to 2 or even 1. I personally feel that it can vary. You know, some months I'm sending out two, some I'm sending out one. It all depends on what's going on in your business. And because what you sell, a service is considered a high consideration service with a longer sales cycle. Email really does excel at nurturing this and that is why we use it. Now, I want to give you guys a little recap of the whole email versus social media conversation. As some of you might know, over a year ago I deleted all my business social media accounts. So Instagram gone, Facebook gone. And you might be curious to know what has happened since then. Well, I can tell you that it has not negatively impacted the growth of my agency at all. In fact, I'm now getting leads, good leads, sent to me through AI so Grok, Chat, GPT and through the SEO of my own website and the SEO of my site. Now obviously I do SEO, so my site is very optimized. But I'm also blogging more than I was before because now I actually have the bandwidth to do that because I'm no longer running on the hamster wheel called social media. Now, if you like social media and you want to use it or you want to just post every now and then as proof of life, go for it. It's fine. It's not wrong. You just shouldn't look at it as an actual way to acquire customers or clients because it's. It's just not proven to be that. It's in fact proven to be the opposite. Now, if you're trying to build a lifestyle brand, or you're trying to sell products, or you just want to connect with vendors, then social media can be a great place to do all of those things. But if your primary goal is just to sell your services and, you know, provide for your family and not live in Instagram and you don't actually have to be there. I wanted to do this experiment publicly because, well, I shouldn't ask you guys to do something I'm not willing to do myself. And you guys have a huge advantage over me. You actually get real in person facetime with your potential clients. I don't. My speaking engagements that are in person are years and years apart. In fact, in 12 years, I've only done two in person speaking engagements. And that's fine. I've done a lot of virtual ones. I have a fully online business, so one would think that social media would be absolutely essential to it turns out it's not. In fact, over the past few months, I have been approached by different partner potential partners and brand deals that I never thought I would get. And not once has anyone ever asked me, well, let me see your social media following. Not once has anyone ever said, oh, you don't have social media, that can't be right. No. In fact, more people are attracted to my agency because I have pushed back on the social media narrative. And a lot of people feel really free knowing that they don't have to do it. It's nice knowing that things are optional, right? All right, so let's get into the common email marketing mistakes that you might be making that result in you saying, email marketing doesn't work for me. Number one, buying a list of contacts. So if your contacts are not high quality, if they aren't leads, who contacted you, if they aren't people that you've already worked with, or your own friends or your own family or your own colleagues, it's not a good quality list. If they don't already know who you are in some fashion, or if they have not opted themselves in, then they shouldn't be on your list. Also, the issue of buying contacts puts you in such big legal risk because let's say you buy an email list of a thousand people and they the peers sending them to you, claims, oh, yeah, this is targeted to the area where you want to get more projects. These are all high income earners, blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. Well, you email them, people get annoyed, they don't know who you are, so they mark your email as spam. And that happens enough. Your whole domain gets blacklisted and taken off the Internet. That's a major problem. So just don't buy contact lists. I mean, not only would you get blacklisted, but you can also end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in fines. So not worth it. The other issue that I see is people sending too many emails all at once. So, you know, four times a month, a little too much. One or two is great. Or too infrequently, like once a quarter. Like, what does that even do? Do you remember an email you got three months ago? Because I don't. Don't do that. All right. The other thing is including too many images or too many different sections or too many different topics in an email. If your email newsletter looks like a charcuterie board of stuff, it's not going to be effective because you're telling people to do too many things. Go read this blog post. Go check out my Instagram. Go check out what I did last week. Go run around in circles five times and then jump up and down, like, what? They are not going to take any action unless you tell them to do just one thing. And the smaller the ask, the better. So it could just be an offer to book a discovery call with you. Now, I have had plenty of clients say, ooh, I've been sending people back to my website to read a blog post. Is that wrong? Technically, it's not wrong, but if that is the only action you want them to take, then okay. It doesn't make much sense though, because the whole purpose of blogging is to increase your SEO landscape. Get people who don't already know about you to find you, read the blog post, sign up for your lead magnet, and get in the email list. So it doesn't make much sense to then send them from your email list back to a blog post. Catch my drift? All right, now the next issue is the too many images. Okay, I have had some clients try to put 20 images in an email newsletter. Not only does it make the newsletter undeliverable, but if it is deliverable it will show up with tons of broken image links and that just looks really tacky. Also, you need to just be concise and curated and you can do that with just a handful of images. The other issue I see is that using a misleading subject line or one that is vague or uninteresting means your email is probably never going to get opened. And then you'll have the correct assumption that, oh, this isn't working. The other issue is a lack of value first content. So sending out an email about products that you offer is not value first. That should not be the only email that you're sending out. And a value first email should not always be a sales pitch. It could be a gentle offer to help, placed at the end of every newsletter. But the newsletter itself should be engaging, entertaining, educational, inspirational, one or all of those. So let's talk then about the structure of a successful email. First of all, word count, it should be 300 to 400 words. That's really all you need. And a maximum of five images and that includes a headshot or team photo. Also, you should have a mini company bio or just your own bio if you're the primary face of the company. And you should have a clear main heading that is the topic of the newsletter and three subheadings that support that main topic. You can, you can have an image with the main heading and an image with the subheadings. And then at the very end you should have a call to action that tells the reader what to do next. The smaller the ask, the better. Please don't send them to your Instagram. Please don't send them to your blog post. Do something that gets them closer to booking a project with you, such as booking a discovery call. All right, so let's go over then, some best practices when it comes to email marketing. You should be sending at least one or two emails a month, approximately two weeks apart if you're doing the two a month. Otherwise, one a month is literally one a month. Every four weeks. You should have only one topic per email and the topic should relate to your services but be presented as a how we do it, not a how to do this yourself. Or it could be presented as did you know? There's a lot of other ways to prompt that, but that's where you should start. Never put together a newsletter that reads like a DIY blog post. Your job is not to teach your potential client how to do something on their own. Your job is to teach them why they need you to do it for them and explain how they're going to feel about that, how it's going to be so wonderful, how their life will be transformed by working with you. Now, how will you know if this email marketing is working? Well, first, for some context, email is the final step in the sales funnel. So when people think email marketing works faster than blogging, that doesn't make any logical sense. Because blogging or your SEO is a first step when it comes to organic digital marketing. You need people to find you that didn't already know your business name. They didn't already know that you existed, but they were searching for something and you came up because your website is optimized, because you're blogging at least once a month. And that's how they got to your site. From there they learned more about you. Maybe they contacted you directly right away, or maybe they signed up for your lead magnet. If they signed up for your lead magnet, they got into your mailing list and because you're emailing them every two to four weeks, you were able to nurture them into someone who actually wanted to hit book a discovery call at the end of your newsletter or just hit reply to say something else to you. That is great. You will know if your email marketing is working, if your open rate is over 30% or if you get replies, even if those replies are just compliments. Okay, any reply is good. Click rate doesn't really matter. But if it matters to you, just know that a 2% click through rate is considered good. So don't be like, oh, it's only a 3% click rate. It's not working. No, it's like what are you really trying to get them to do? Well, hit reply is fine. They don't have to actually click on something. They could hit reply and request a consultation that way because they don't want to book online. Who knows? Okay, so you have to give yourself a little bit of grace there. Now the big question is, what exactly do you say in an email newsletter? Well, all my clients know. So I'm going to tell the rest of you who have networked with us what you should say. I'm going to break it down by category. So interior designers, please listen up because I'm going to go through your category first. I'm reading off these topics directly from our Vault of over 500 different Email Newsletter and blog posts that we create for clients. So a different A few different ideas include talking about how you can incorporate custom wood accents into the home. This is great for if you want to focus on whole home renovation, but you don't necessarily want to talk just about renovation in every newsletter, because that would be boring. Or you could talk about evolving family spaces. You know, as a family changes and grows, how can you help their home support them? You can also talk about different design philosophies or the different ways that you approach design, such as what is cohesive design? Like, what does that mean? So that's more of an educational piece. You can talk about interior design trends if you so choose. A lot of you stay away from trends, and I don't blame you. You could talk about doing a seasonal refresh. You could Talk about Wallpaper 101 or how a design budget is allocated. You could talk about the power of trim work and millwork and custom cabinetry. You could talk about hardwood versus engineer versus lvp. So again, flooring, like breaking down the elements of a renovation or a full service design project and talking just about that one thing. So going further statement, light fixtures. What does that mean? What kind of light fixture can you put in each room and make a statement with? What are your favorite products for that? You could also talk about designer laundry rooms or tile patterns. You could talk about aging in place. Or you could talk about different design aesthetics, like, what is transitional? What is new heritage? What is maximalism? Really? The. It goes on and on. Okay, so right now in the Vault, we have 135 different newsletters that are already written and ready for you to customize or for us to customize for you so that you don't have to come up with your own topics or content, whatever. But I want to show now the window treatment people what they should be talking about. So you could talk about everything from common drapery mistakes to something that's more vendor specific, such as Hunter Douglas designer window treatments or door covering options. Or you can talk about timeless window treatments, or you can explore the world of Roman shades. You can talk about how drapery adds drama. You could talk about the subtle sophistication that having each window dressed in a way that is both functional and beautiful can help. Window cord safety. October is window safety month. You can talk about what homeowners should expect when working with a custom workroom. You could talk about layering window treatments and how that's done. You could talk about architectural window coverings and custom furniture and upholstery and summer window treatments or winter window treatments for outdoor living spaces. I mean, there's so much to choose from and you don't have to write any of it. But if you do feel like writing some of it consider this to be some inspiration. So rewind, slow my voice down if you want, and write down those ideas because I guarantee that at least a few of them will make sense for your business. All right, switching over to home staging. So you home stagers mostly market yourselves to Realtors. There of course are developers and builders in there as well. So the topics that you cover will be a little less emotional, a little less feelings based and more data based. So we do focus more on the data when we are creating home staging newsletters. You can talk about the seven second rule. As a Realtor, you've got seven seconds to impress someone when they walk into a house for a showing. Is the listing delivering that? If not, here's how home staging can help. You know something like that. You can talk about staging for different Personas. You can talk about how staging helps realtors land offers above asking price and how it accelerates sales overall. And you can talk about staging luxury homes or how to deal with emotional home sellers, or staging for a specific clientele, especially as you get into higher end listings or the golden rules of home staging or three reasons you should still stage in a hot market. I mean, the list goes on and on. There are so many different angles you can take when email marketing about your staging services that don't have to feel pushy or salesy, but show that you are a helpful, valuable business partner to the real estate agent, the developer, or the builder who needs to move properties and make a profit. All right, so from there we'll hop over to home organizers because you guys, I've noticed, I've noticed this, okay? Home organizers tend to default to talking about how to organize your pantry and that's not helpful because you don't want to attract people who are trying to do it themselves. You need to attract people who are sick of trying to do it themselves and just want you to do it. Or maybe they never attempted to do it themselves and they really just want you to do it so you can address the mental side and the emotional side of clutter versus getting organized and then of course, the hands on services that you provide. So here are some topic ideas which we've already written about and you're welcome to write on your own or use our stuff because everything is easy to customize. All right, so there is Perfection is a myth. How many times has your client felt so embarrassed that she can't seem to fully maintain the beautiful organizing job you and your team did for her? Well, this really breaks down that myth of perfection and also sells your maintenance services. You can talk about collecting versus hoarding and the mindset between that those two things or letting go is hard to do, which is where you explain how you help your clients part with their things. If necessary, you can talk about organizing for guest spaces, organizing the front entry neurodiverse, organizing. You could talk about the psychology of staying organized and curated living, or the return on investment of being organized and how organization evolves as the family's lifestyle changes or as they move from one house to another or as they age. So there are so many things that you can talk about that again, are not pushy, they're not salesy, they're actually just helpful. All right, guys. So I hope that was inspiring. I. I think at this point, if any of you are not email marketing, it's not that it's unattainable because places like Mailchimp will let you have a paid account for like $12 a month. It's super affordable. There's really not much of a barrier to entry. And if you're like, well, I don't really have any contacts to email. I'm new in business, or I've been in business a while, but never took time to put together a contact list. Pull up your CRM, pull up whatever you've got going on and put them in a spreadsheet. Okay? You've got past clients, you've got leads, and if you don't have those because you're new, you've got friends and family, and I bet you have some colleagues in the industry. It is okay to start small. All right, everyone, until next time, keep your marketing simple and your message clear. And if you need help with email marketing, you head over to socialitevault.com thanks and I'll talk to you next time.