Episode #22: How to Do Email Successfully in 2024
We talk a lot about mistakes on this podcast. This time, I want to talk about how to do something right.
Instead of our usual interview, I delve into the art and science of effective email marketing following recent deliverability updates from major email providers like Google and Yahoo.
I share to ensure your emails continue to reach your subscribers’ inboxes, and I give you the scoop on list cleaning, making unsubscribing easy, maximising subscriber engagement, nurturing subscribers, and sending targeted, relevant emails.
I did this presentation as a webinar for The Marketing Meetup, a community of 50,000 marketers last month. Hope you love it! 🙂
Wanna work with me so we can power up your email strategy, your launches, and your revenue?
Fill in the enquiry form on this contact page: https://emancopyco.com/contact/
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Eman Ismail: Hello. You're listening to another episode of Mistakes That Made Me, the podcast that asks extraordinary business owners to share their biggest business mistake so you know what not to do on your road to success. Mistakes That Made Me is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
I'm your host, Eman Ismail. I'm an email strategist and copywriter at Eman Copy Co. And you know, it's funny because I've been doing this podcast for, what, over two years now. So nearly two years are over. I don't know, as you can probably hear, I have a bit of a cold, so my brain's not working. But in all that time, I've not spoken about one of the biggest things that I could possibly speak about, which is email, email marketing.
That's what I do day in day out for my clients and yet I haven't spoken about it very much here on this podcast. And it's actually a topic that has been requested time and time again. I know on this podcast, I talk a lot about mistakes and the things that we do wrong and the guests talk about the things that they do wrong, but I thought I could dedicate this episode to the things you could be doing right.
I want to help you do email marketing right this year. And I think that's really important specifically this year because emails changed so much with Google and Yahoo's recent deliverability updates. So email marketing is changing and we're also gonna kind of need to change with it.
I'm going to be honest with you though. Actually, I don't need to change very much because all the stuff that we kind of need to do to be successful in email in 2024 are all things I've been doing for years and that I've been doing for my clients for years. But some of this stuff may be new to you. And so I want to walk you through the steps that I believe you need to be taking in order to do email successfully.
And the reason that's important is because if you don't get these things right, your emails won't land in your subscribers' inboxes. You won't be able to sell your courses, your digital products, your services. People just won't get your emails, which means you won't be able to sell through email anymore. So let's get this right.
I was actually going to re-record an entire webinar that I did on this exact topic, and then I got sick. As you can probably hear in my voice, I got sick, and then I thought, okay, I'm the queen of repurposing. I've already created an amazing webinar on this exact topic. Everything that I want to teach you today, I've already taught to actually hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of business owners. And I did a webinar for an organisation, I guess, a company, a community called The Marketing Meetup.
The Marketing Meetup is a community for positively lovely marketers. There are nearly 50,000 marketers in this community, and the founder or co-founder Joe, he asked me to come in and talk to his people about this. And so I did, and it got such great feedback. I still get messages now, a month later, telling me how great this talk was. So I thought, you know what, instead of re-recording an entire podcast episode saying exactly the same thing, I'm just going to let you listen in to this webinar that I delivered.
So I hope you enjoy it. It's all about how to do email successfully in 2024. It's about how you should be reacting to recent email deliverability changes. But remember, I'm not a deliverability expert, so I'm going to be talking about what all of this actually means in your day-to-day as a business owner who's just trying to get the emails out so that you can sell your stuff.
So I really hope you enjoy this episode. It's about an hour long. Get a notepad because this is one of those episodes where you're going to want to take notes, especially if you take email seriously, especially if it's a big part of your business, especially if it's not a big part of your business and you want to make it a big part of your business.
Is it just me or does it feel like the marketing playbook is always changing? Much like the age-old question, to skinny jean or not to skinny jean, marketing strategies come and go, and then come back again. I cannot keep up. Luckily, HubSpot makes it their job to keep marketers on trend and on track to hit their goals. Their 2024 State of Marketing Report is the all-in-one guide for everything happening this year and how marketers can best approach it all. HubSpot surveyed more than 1,400 marketing pros across the world and curated the top trends they're thinking about. Sure, there's AI, but there's also so much more.
The report covers everything from increasing awareness and engagement to ensuring privacy and boosting efficiency and growth. You'll get all the info you need to shape your strategy for the year and keep on winning into next year. Don't get caught hopping on an old trend. Visit hubspot.com/stateofmarketing to get your free copy of the report.
Hi, everyone. Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much for having me again. So this is my second Marketing Meetup talk. And honestly, the first one that I did was one of my favourites. Everyone that has approached me after that talk from the Marketing Meetup has been so lovely, so I'm always happy to come back to this amazing community.
So, like Joe said, this conversation is going to be about the recent changes in email marketing, but not from a technical perspective, because I am not an email deliverability expert, but I'm an email strategist and copywriter. So I want to translate what these changes mean for us when we're doing our email marketing on a day-to-day basis, what does it actually mean and how should we be responding to these changes so that we can successfully do email in 2024.
So the first thing I want you to do is tell me in the chat how confident are you feeling about your email marketing strategy currently. Give me a scale from 1 to 5. So 1 is not good at all, 3 is all right, 5 is absolutely amazing.
Joe Glover: Lots of 2s and 3s. We've got a 1, bestie. [laughs]
Eman Ismail: Yeah. 0. We've got a 0. I'm here to help. Don't worry. Okay. "We're winging it." Okay. 3, 3, 4, 4, 1, 3. "We don't have a strategy." Okay. Well, hopefully, I can help you get started on one. "1, bestie." Okay, great. It's really helpful to kind of see where you're at right now.
So let me introduce myself. I'm Eman Ismail. I'm an email strategist and copywriter. I work with businesses to basically help them make more money through email. And it's not just about money as well. It's really about strengthening your relationship between your business and your subscribers because your subscribers are really such just a valuable, valuable asset in any business.
So I work with big companies. I've actually worked with a few charities, but I work with a lot of service providers, coaches, course creators, digital product makers, membership makers, and, gosh, everything in between. So my specialism is email, but I kept it open re who I work with because I like to keep things interesting. I'm working with people from all different kinds of industries and businesses in all different kinds of industries, which keeps my job really interesting.
I'm also the host of Mistakes That Made Me, the podcast that asks extraordinary business owners to share their biggest business mistake so you know what not to do on your road to success. As Joe said, it's newly part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. So if you like a good business podcast, do go and listen to that. I'm also a pizza lover and a mama of two. I have two boys who keep me very busy and who really have kind of inspired me to make sure that I have a great email strategy for my business so that I can be making sales when I'm not in my business, which is very helpful for a busy parent.
These are some of the businesses and business owners that I've worked with. Many more as well. Results I've got for myself and my clients—and the reason I'm sharing this is because a lot of you don't know me, and so you might rightly be wondering like, "Who is she to be telling us anything about email?" So these are the kinds of results I've been able to help my clients get. One client, I helped her generate 2.5 million in revenue with a currently 22-month-old evergreen funnel. Another client, helped them with the email strategy and copy that I created for them. Hit $170,000 course launch for my own business as well I launched.
And at the time, for this specific example, at the time, I only launched 422 people, a small segment of my email list, and we're still able to have a $35,000 launch. And I'm talking in dollars, by the way, 'cause a lot of my clients are American, so I naturally just talk in dollars now. And in terms of my own open rates for my emails to the people who are signed up to my newsletter, my average open rate is about 50%. We know the general average for most businesses is around 20%, and that's a good open rate. And so I love my email list. I love the people on my email list, and I've been able to create a great relationship with them and have that high engagement.
I do just want to say, because I mentioned ConvertKit at one point in this presentation, that I'm an official partner for ConvertKit, which means I am part of their influencer program. And so I now have to—this is new to me, so I'm still getting used to this, but I now have to mention that anytime I mention them. So I'm just preparing you for later on when I do mention them.
So we know that email deliverability has changed, but the first thing I just want to confirm and get us all on the same page about is what even is email deliverability. It is simply the ability to deliver emails to subscribers' inboxes. So it's literally just making sure that your emails, the emails you send, are actually reaching your subscribers' inboxes. And obviously, if they're not reaching inboxes, that's a problem because your message is not getting to them.
Google and Yahoo changed or created some new rules around deliverability for mass senders. So anyone bulk sending emails, which means that that applies to most businesses. These changes and updates were made to actually benefit the email user. So the aim is to create a safer, more enjoyable experience for the average Gmail or Yahoo email user. I think for a lot of us business owners, this update felt like a punishment. [laughs] It felt like, "Ugh, they're just making things harder for us again. Do we really have to do this GDPR all over again?"
But actually, just like GDPR, this is for the benefit of users, of email users, and it's actually a good thing. And what it means is that email marketers have to really step it up across the board. And we're really not going to be able to get away with some of the dodgy stuff that the marketing industry has been doing and has been doing for a while now. And it means that we just have to care a bit more, which I think is a great thing for email all around.
So there are three parts of this update. And I did mention that I'm not going to go into the technical details, but I will very briefly just go over what the general changes were. So the first part is that you needed—need if you haven't already. You needed to have authenticated your emails, which basically just confirms that the sender is who they say they are. It's almost like an ID check so that the emails are coming from a safe place. The second part of this is you now need to allow for easy subscription. So it needs to be easy for people to unsubscribe.
Now, actually, the rule that was put into place for this specific update is one that email service providers had to deal with. So that's not really something we have to worry about too much. Although there are some things that we need to consider, which I'll go into in this presentation. And then the third part of this was that we now need to stay under a reported spam threshold. So if you are being reported as spam too much, it will affect your deliverability. And that means your emails won't deliver to the people you're sending them to, which, again, is a problem for us businesses.
So what this presentation is actually going to talk about is what do these changes actually mean for your email strategy in 2024? How do these changes translate or how do they need to be translated into your email strategy on a day-to-day basis in your business? Well, the new goal for all of us is to make sure that the people who want to receive our marketing emails are still able to receive our marketing emails. Because, again, if they don't receive them, then we have lost our link to them. We cannot communicate with them, even if they consented to us sending them emails.
So here are five strategies you need to implement so your emails continue to reach your subscribers in 2024. The first thing you need to do is clean your email list. Google is deleting inactive accounts, and it's Gmail accounts that are two years or older. And the reason for that is to protect those unused accounts from being compromised because unused accounts will have information in there that is sensitive and that is not being taken care of. It's not being looked after. And so to protect email users, Google is actually deleting any account that is older than two years old. And all people need to do to keep those inactive accounts active is literally log in.
But that affects us as business owners who are using email marketing. And that affects us because inactive accounts mean high bounce rates. So if you have lots of inactive accounts as in inactive email addresses on your email list, your emails will go to that email address, but it will just bounce. And so that then creates a high bounce rate, and a high bounce rate creates a bad reputation for you with your mailbox provider.
That means that future emails that you send, not just to those inactive email addresses, but to many of the email addresses on your email list, could actually just start going to spam, which, again, is a problem. So you want to minimise bounces, and the way to minimise bounces and to overcome this issue is to remove inactive email addresses or unengaged subscribers.
So I want to give you an example of what I did. Now you can really take this as far as you want because you could do an entire re-engagement sequence that's multiple emails trying to re-engage those cold subscribers and get them to engage again. And by engage again, I mean just trying to get them to open an email or click in an email. So what I did was I went into my ConvertKit, and ConvertKit very helpfully tells me, it actually gives engagement scores to every subscriber and it's between 1 and 5. So 1 and 2, these people are really cold. 3, they're kind of somewhere in the middle. 4 is engaged and 5 is super engaged.
And so I could have actually just sent this re-engagement email to people who scored a 1 and a 2, which was quite a bad engagement score, a very bad engagement score. But I actually included 3 as well because I have really high standards for my email list. So I really want to make sure those people in the middle as well, I'm either going to get rid of them or you're going to re-engage.
So I rounded up the cold subscribers or even mild subscribers, and it added up to about 400 subscribers. And I sent those 400 subscribers this email. Subject line, "Want to keep getting my emails? Action required." "Hey, Eman. It looks like you haven't opened my emails in a while. I want to make sure you're only getting my emails if you actually want to receive them. So here's what I need you to do. Click here if you want to stay on my email list and keep getting my emails. If you don't click that link, I'll assume you don't want to stay, and I'll remove your email address from my list in seven days. If you know you don't want to stay, do nothing or unsubscribe here. I'd love for you to stick around, but I totally understand if you choose to leave. Wishing you everything good in life and business, Eman. P. S. If you want to switch up the email address I have for you, you can also update your profile."
So basically, I didn't want to do this so that they have to do something different in order to—okay, basically, there's lots of different ways you could do this, but I wanted to do it so that if—they need to opt in again, basically. I wanted to recreate the opt-in experience. You've got to opt in to keep getting these emails. If you don't do anything, if you don't opt in or you just do nothing, then I'm going to delete you in seven days, everyone's going to be deleted in seven days. And so I gave that email seven days. And then after that seven days, I went in and everyone who did not open or click, I deleted them from my email list. And that was about 400 subscribers, probably just over 400 subscribers that I deleted. Was it painful? Yes. But the results, which I'll talk about in a second, were great.
So it went out to 417 cold subscribers with an engagement score of 1 to 3. And what that means is they hadn't engaged with my content in the last six to nine months. And that's a long time. So why would I want these people on my email list when they don't want to get my emails? They're not opening and they're not clicking. And that's a really long time to give someone to engage with the emails, six to nine months.
So again, I could have done a whole re-engagement sequence, but I didn't think it was worth my time because I knew that this audience was pretty cold. And you'll see, I mean, the engagement rate for this email was really bad. It got an open rate of 7.4%, which is abysmal and a 2.9% click rate, which isn't too bad. But, again, the majority of people did not engage. And this is why I didn't do a whole re-engagement sequence and waste a whole bunch of time doing that because this audience was very cold.
But the result was fantastic because now that I've removed those 400 cold subscribers from my list, I have better engagement. The new engagement stats are that 90% of my subscribers have engaged with my email content in the past 30 days. 30 days. That's pretty good if I do say so myself. 8% of my subscribers have engaged with my email content in the past 90 days, and only 2% of my subscribers are in that kind of oldish to mild range where they've engaged with my email content in the past six to nine months.
And the reason better engagement and higher engagement, these opens, these clicks, these replies, the reason that's good for us as email marketers, the reason we need it as business owners is because it sends positive signals to email providers that our emails are not spam, that our subscribers want to receive our emails, and that our emails should be delivered to inboxes. The lower the engagement, the more negative signals that are sent to email providers.
So let's have a look at my new engagement rates. These are some of the emails I sent out recently. 56.2% open rate on this email, 56.6% open rate on the one below. Good click rates, 54.4% open rate, 6.2 click rate, 57% open rate. My engagement rates have skyrocketed because I'm no longer concerned about having a bunch of cold subscribers who aren't engaged with my list anyway on my email list.
So the second part of this is that you need to make it easy to unsubscribe. And, again, I know it can feel difficult because we work really hard to get every single email address on our email list, but for all the reasons I just explained, you really don't want cold subscribers on your email list. They actually cause more harm. It's not that they're just kind of lying around on your email list doing nothing. They're actually actively causing your email deliverability harm. So you want to get rid of them.
Again, this is about minimising spam complaints. If you make it difficult to unsubscribe, people will mark you as spam. And remember, we're trying to keep that spam rate percentage, that spam rate, really low, as low as possible. The senior director of product management at Yahoo said about this topic, "A key mission of Yahoo is to deliver messages that consumers want to receive and filter out the messages they don't." And filter out the messages they don't. And so it's really important that we also have that same mission. I mean, that should be our mission anyway, as business owners. We want to make sure that only the people who want to receive our emails, who are engaging with them, are actually receiving them. There are consequences if people who don't want to receive our emails are receiving them.
So make it as easy as possible for people to get the hell out of your email list because high spam complaints will wreck your email reputation. You don't want to use some of the dodgy tactics that I have seen in a lot of the emails that I'm subscribed to that make it hard for people to unsubscribe. So that's making the font almost invisible when it comes to the unsubscribe link, changing the font colour so that it blends in with the whiteness of the email and so you actually can't see the unsubscribe link. So technically, it's there. So you technically haven't broken any rules, but actually, you've made it impossible, literally impossible, to see, so you're breaking the spirit of the rule, right?
And some people just don't include an unsubscribe link at all. They're just like, "You're just going to stay here and you're just going to stay here forever." And doing anything other than immediately unsubscribing someone when they ask to be unsubscribed, I will never understand why some businesses will respond and say, "Your email address will be removed within two days or within seven days." No, it should be immediate, and it should be automatic as well. You shouldn't have to do anything when someone wants to unsubscribe. It should be completely automatic. The person clicks on a link and then it's done.
So one of the things that email service providers have now had to make possible in order to adhere to this new rule on this update is to provide a one-click unsubscribe. And so I want to show you an example of some of the stuff I've been seeing in my inbox. This is what it looks like for email users now. It's literally just an unsubscribe link at the top of every email, of a lot of emails in your inbox. And so all you have to do is one-click unsubscribe. You don't need to scroll to the bottom of the email anymore to unsubscribe. It's just at the top. And this isn't something you need to do. This is something that email service providers have had to figure out on their side so that the emails that we're sending now offer that. So it's much easier for people to unsubscribe from your email list.
Another way to make it easy for people to basically only get the emails that they want to get, and the way to minimise people reporting you as spam is to, again, just send relevant, wanted emails. And one way to do that is to give your subscribers opt-out options or preference options. So you could give subscribers the option to opt out of particular campaigns or opt out of receiving particular information that isn't important to them or doesn't pertain to them, or you could allow subscribers to pick their own frequency preferences.
So here are two examples. The first one, this one, is from a marketer called Tarzan Kay. At the bottom of every email, she just has this little section that says, "Inbox overloaded? I feel you, [first name]. Set your frequency by clicking any link below." Then you can choose to receive her emails as she writes them 'cause she does send more than one weekly email, and that might be too much for some people. It's not for me 'cause I love her emails. Or you could choose to receive her emails just once a week or to just get a one monthly digest.
And well, I don't do that because personally, I feel like if you don't want my emails, if you don't want all my emails, I'm cool for you to unsubscribe. But this is certainly an option. Minimises spam complaints and also minimises unsubscribes. Like maybe people don't actually want to unsubscribe, but they just don't want to receive as many emails.
Another option, like I said, is to give subscribers the option to opt out of certain campaigns or receiving certain information. So I recently had a launch for my now $11 private membership. And when I was launching it, I was sending a daily email for five days. It was almost daily for five days. And so at the top of every launch email, I had this little section that said, "Want to stop hearing about my now $11 private membership? No problem. You can just mute these launch emails."
And so then people would click "Mute these launch emails", and then it would opt them out of receiving any more launch emails. So they wouldn't hear about this launch anymore. So I'm no longer annoying them with this thing that they don't want to hear about, but they're still on my email list. They didn't have to unsubscribe. They'll still continue to receive emails once this launch ends. I think this is really about just giving a bit more autonomy to your email subscribers and allowing them to decide what is relevant for them.
Another really important aspect is to stop assuming consent. So a lot of the time when someone buys a product or service, when someone signs up for an event, when someone signs up for a lead magnet or opt-in, they're automatically added to your email list or to your newsletter. And then you automatically start sending the marketing emails when they didn't actually consent to receiving your marketing emails. They consented for you to send them the product or service that they purchased, or they consented for you to send them the information for the event that they signed up for, or they consented to you sending them the lead magnet or opt-in that they signed up for, not for you to email them every week with your regular newsletter or whatever else.
You need your subscribers' express consent to send them regular marketing emails. So here's a great example. The Marketing Meetup's signup form for this event and all events asks you to register now your name and all your other details. And then it actually says, at the bottom, "Get sent the recording. After each webinar, we write a roundup email with bite-sized takeaways, the video and podcast recording of the event, and invites to future events. This will subscribe you to the newsletter. Sign me up, Skipper." Or people just ignore it and then they don't sign up.
That is The Marketing Meetup getting consent to email people to send people marketing emails, to add them to their newsletter. It is not assumed that just because somebody has signed up to an event that they then can just send them whatever they want. So when someone signs up to get my lead magnet, which is a free email class called The Email Rules, which I'll link to at the end of this presentation, you enter your name and your email address, and then this comes up, courtesy again of ConvertKit, which is super, super cool and super helpful because it means I don't have to worry about GDPR.
People have to consent to receiving promotional marketing emails or—well, they can choose to or they can choose not to basically here. And so that means that I don't have to worry about this. People have given me their consent to send them my marketing emails, so even when they sign up for lead magnet, so I can do that.
Again, if you don't get this consent and then you start sending people your marketing emails, they'll likely report you as spam. And you'll start getting a lot of unsubscribes, which on both of those things will impact your deliverability and could send your future emails to people's spam.
Third part of this is you want to maximise engagement. So maximising engagement means improving your open rates, click rates, response rates, i.e., direct replies, people actually replying to your marketing emails, and also forwarding rate.
So how can we maximise engagement? You can improve your open rates by sending better emails, quite frankly, as simple as that. Click rate, you can improve by including better calls to action and more relevant calls to action, more strategic calls to action. Response rates and direct replies, you can improve by literally asking for replies, ask for your subscribers to reply to your marketing emails when you want them to reply. And you can improve your forwarding rate by, again, telling your subscriber, by asking them to forward your email.
So this is an example of the replies that I get when I send a newsletter. And I don't have a huge list. But generally, I can expect a lot of replies when I send an email to my marketing list, to my email list. So much so that I have an entire folder dedicated to responses and I can't, I struggle to reply, honestly. And that's one of the things I told myself I was, as in, I struggle to respond to replies. I told myself in 2024, I'm going to do better at replying to people who reply to my newsletters because this is a really great way to encourage that connection, build that trust, build that relationship with these subscribers, right?
And before I just move on to the next one, I do want to say, again, the reason maximising your engagement is important is because it sends those positive signals to your mailbox provider. It tells them every time someone opens your email, every time someone clicks on something in your email, anytime someone replies to your email, anytime someone forwards your email, all of these are positive signals that people want to receive your emails, that your emails are not spam, and that your emails should continue to be delivered to people's inboxes. That's why maximising your engagement is a very important and effective way to make sure that your emails are still reaching people in 2024.
And the fourth part of this is you're going to need to nurture your subscribers better than ever before. And by nurturing your subscribers, I mean that you're going to need to send more nurturing emails that really strengthen the relationship between your business or brand and your subscribers. Nurturing emails is all about connection. It's all about strengthening trust, that relationship, building trust, setting expectations. Nurturing is not about sales and getting sales. It really is about everything that doesn't involve the sale. It's about everything that comes before you can ever get a sale.
One example, one way to nurture your audience really well is to have a welcome sequence. So the welcome sequence, and I'll tell you what that is in a second, but the welcome sequence is actually the most foundational part of any email strategy. And most businesses don't have one. I saw a stat recently that said businesses that have a welcome sequence generate up to 320% more revenue than businesses that do not have a welcome sequence.
And the welcome sequence is not a moneymaker sequence. It is a nurturing sequence where usually the purpose isn't to make money. Usually, the purpose is about, again, improving connection, improving the relationship between business and subscriber and building trust. But the reason it impacts revenue is because you cannot have revenue until you have those things first, and that's what the job of the welcome sequence is.
Now, a welcome sequence is a series of emails that you send to new subscribers immediately after they sign up to your email list. It's usually a series of three plus emails. I recommend more because we all have more that strategically needs to go into a welcome sequence. A lot of the welcome sequences I write are anything between five to seven emails. A welcome sequence is automated. It goes out over a period of time. And, again, it goes out to every new subscriber.
So I join an email list today and I get email 1 today. and then I get email 2 tomorrow. Somebody else joins your email list tomorrow, they get email 1 tomorrow and then email 2 the next day after that. Right? A welcome sequence is your chance to welcome your subscriber, to nurture them, to introduce them to your business and to really build that connection, usually before you ask for any kind of sale or anything like that.
If you take anything from this presentation, it's that you need a welcome sequence and that you should work on putting one into place if you don't already have one. I do also want to say some businesses have a welcome email, which is okay, but a welcome email, sending one welcome email when someone joins your email list is not the same as sending a welcome sequence. It's much less effective. It's better than nothing. That's really all it is. It's better than nothing, but it's not strategically impactful.
So let's talk about what could go in a simple, super simple four-part welcome sequence. Well, the first email is usually delivering the goods. So that is sending whatever you promised you were going to send them in exchange for the subscriber giving you that email address. So for me, it's access to The Email rules, my 35-minute email class. So in email 1, I would share The Email Rules.
I'd also take this opportunity to set expectations because that really takes the friction and almost anxiety of when you sign up to an email list of not knowing what's going to happen next, Are you going to bombard me with emails? What can I expect? So set expectations in that email, let them know that because they're in the welcome sequence, they'll receive an email every day for the next five days, but then after that, they'll just get your weekly email or whatever else your particular frequency or cadence is.
Email 2, this might be where you want them to tell you more about who they are. So this is what I call a self-segment email. Give me a second. I'm so sorry. I have someone looking after my two-year-old. They went out for a walk so I could do this, but they're at the door. So I just need to let them in. Give me a sec.
Joe Glover: I love this. This is reality. And we were speaking about this before we went live on today's session. And I just know [laughs] that our community will be absolutely fine with this, 'cause it happens to us all. We had it a few weeks ago with Billy Jones from Hootsuite and his younger Billy came and joined, and he handled it beautifully. And so has Eman just there. [laughs] A lot of fun.
Eman Ismail: I'm back. Sorry about that. I feel like, yeah, all the parents in the room, you get it. Day care has closed today unexpectedly. So I was like, "Hmm, didn't see that coming." So email 2 is where you want them to tell you more about who they are and you want to figure out who they are so that you can send them relevant emails, the right emails, relevant emails, ones that they're actually going to open, that they're interested in, and that actually relate to them, that apply to them.
And email 3, you want to introduce yourself or your business, your brand, maybe your founder or your mission, your values, your philosophy, something that gives your subscribers more insight into who you are or who your business or your brand is. And that's why you maybe want to share what you do as well. So for me, this email is how to work with me, how to hire me.
And then email 4 could be pure value. So for The Marketing Meetup, email 4 might be, "Here are the links to our most popular talks ever." You're not asking for anything. You don't want anything. You're just providing pure value. For me, email 4 is me linking to one of my most popular pieces of content, which is an email teardown that I did analysing Kylie Cosmetics' email strategy. That went down really well. And it went down so well that I decided to put it in my welcome sequence so that every single subscriber would have access to it and would see it. So, again, that email is just pure value. And again, it's all about building that connection, building that trust, and that is really about painting you or your business as the expert in your field.
Okay. So the fifth part of this and the fifth thing that you'll need to implement in your strategy in 2024, and this is the final one, is you're going to need to send targeted and relevant emails more than ever before. You can't continue to just send general email blasts anymore. You're going to need to focus on, like I said, maximising engagement, maximising conversions, minimising spam complaints, minimising unsubscribed.
How do we do all of that? It's by not sending general email blasts, because generally, when you send in general email blasts, not everything you're sending applies to everyone. And so you're just kind of hoping that the people that it applies to, that it relates to will open the email, enjoy the email, and forget about the rest. If it didn't apply to you, then so what, right?
But now more than ever, we need to send relevant emails. So when you send the right emails to the right people at the right time, and you can do this by using tagging in your email strategy and your email service provider should allow you to do that. You should use segmentation. You should use trigger-based automations and then also behaviour-based campaigns as well.
An example of how to use tagging or segmentation is you might, for example, send an email that is about a small business workshop only to the small business owners on your email list. And let's pretend you have small business owners on your email list and then you have huge enterprises. Well, a workshop for a small business owner doesn't need to go to people at big, huge enterprise. And so you would use tagging and segmentation to ensure that that email only goes to the people that it's relevant for.
Another example is if you are promoting an event, for example, that is happening in the UK, you will send that to your subscribers who are in the UK versus sending it to all your subscribers who are all over the world. Why? Because it's actually really frustrating for subscribers who might get really excited that you're having an event and then open the email, read it, and think, "Oh, it's just for people in the UK."
And then another example is you want to make sure, for example, that you're sending discount emails only to the people who have not already bought that product or service. The worst thing a business can do is to send you a discount code or a coupon code or have a sale on a product that you've just bought or a service that you've just bought. It's really frustrating. It's really demoralising. And it's not even usually that the sale or the discount is happening, because we expect that of businesses, it happens. It's that you haven't even taken the care to just be mindful about not sending me that information. You're actively trying to aggravate me.
So this is why, this is a really great example of how tagging and segmentation can help you send the right emails to the right people at the right time. I want to show you how I use segmentation and tagging as part of my email strategy. So when people sign up for The Email Rules, my 35-minute video crash course on email marketing, they put in their name first, then they put in their email address, then it has a little dropdown that says, "I am..." And I actually get them to tell me who they are, like exactly what their role is because I segment my email list based on roles, I guess, profession.
So are you a copywriter specifically? Are you a service provider or a coach? Are you a product business owner? Or do you just class yourself as an online business owner? Because some people are just like, "I'm just an online business owner." And then based on the option that they choose, they receive a personalised welcome sequence. So the copywriters get one welcome sequence that tells them—and I'll tell you how the content differs.
So the copywriters will receive an intro email about me and I'll tell them about me, my story, all that kind of thing. And then at the bottom, I will link them to podcasts that I've been on that they will know. So The Copywriter Club podcast, for example, which is a big podcast in our industry. They know that. They'll know that's cool. They know that that then establishes my authority in their eyes, my credibility.
But for a non-copywriter, they don't know what The Copywriter Club is. They don't care. They have no clue what it is. So for the people who are not copywriters, they get the the version of the welcome sequence that shares podcast episodes that they will recognise, that are not copywriter-specific. So it's small things like that where you're personalising the experience based on what you know about your subscriber. And it's really small. It can be huge stuff, but it can also be the small details that make a real difference.
An example of how to use behaviour-based emails, so I once sent an email to the non-copywriters on my email list because those are the people who are interested in hiring me for my one-to-one services where I do the email strategy and copy for businesses. And so I'd actually just posted all my prices on my website, whereas I didn't previously for lots of reasons, but I decided I'm going to post my prices on my website and I decided to make a big deal of it and let my email list know, "Hey, I've just done this." And then I linked to the page so they could see my price for an email campaign. And then I set it up in ConvertKit, my email service provider, so that anyone who clicked on that link to go through to my website and check out my prices were tagged as leads. So now I know they're interested in my pricing. Why are you interested in my pricing is the question.
So based on their behaviour, I have now created this email strategy. So I gave it a day, and the next day, I sent another email to only the people who clicked on that link that took them through the prices on my website and I sent them this email. "Hey, [first name]. I noticed you had a sneak peek at the new prices on my website last week, but you haven't got in touch to talk about working with me yet :) Are you still thinking about it? Eman." And literally, it was that short. It was two lines. That's it.
Someone replied. "Hi, Eman. I love that you sent this email. I'm really interested in exploring working with you for custom copy work. But one question I had is," and then she told me what her hesitation was about hiring me. And so I got to tell her, "Oh, it's totally cool. I can totally do that for you." And then she booked me in for a 13.5k project. And so this is how making sure you're sending the right emails to the right people at the right time that you base your email strategy on relevancy, on behaviour, this is how it can really work for you and help you generate revenue in your business and company. And you can do this in so many different ways on so many different scales but here's just a small example of how I did it for my small email list. I think my email list is 2000, maybe just under 2,500 at this point.
So that was an example of behaviour-based emails. Here's an example of trigger-based automation which, again, allows you to send the right emails to the right people at the right time. So when I send emails to the copywriters on my email list, they get this kind of P.S. section in the footer of the email right at the bottom and it tells them about my various courses and digital products, masterclasses that are specifically for copywriters.
So the people who are not copywriters, they get a different version. They get the version that's like "Hire me here. Here's my 2.5 million case study. This is what I can help you do. You can hire me here." That doesn't apply to copywriters. They get links to my courses, my masterclasses that I've created for them. So anytime someone clicks this link here, 12 weeks self-study course, Like A Boss, they're immediately removed from my regular newsletter list and they're added into an evergreen funnel, a funnel that then sells them and is pure sales funnel that sells them my 12-week course.
I've set this up so it's automated. it was a really big job setting up when I first set it up, but now it's passive. And so now, I am able to sell my online course constantly all the time. Like I'll be watching Netflix and someone buys my $1,300 course. It's the most amazing thing. It's the coolest thing. And it just takes a bit of thought and strategy.
And then here's another example, Design Your VIP Days, a 90-minute masterclass. The other day, I woke up to three sales because people had clicked, I'd sent an email, people had scrolled down, clicked on this link, and then they'd been taken into an evergreen funnel that I created for this masterclass. And then three people bought. And there's nothing like waking up to sales.
So to summarise, here are the five things you need to focus on in order to do email successfully in 2024. One, clean your list. Two, make it easy to unsubscribe. Three, maximise engagement. Four, nurture your subscribers. And five, send targeted relevant emails.
So before we get to Q&A, I know we have about 10 minutes, I want to tell you three things. Now, this goes against all my copywriter instincts. I'm only supposed to tell you one thing, but I think you can handle three. So I'm going to let you know that if you would like me to work on your company's email marketing, you can hire me for either a 60-minute email strategy consult, which is the kind of, again, a short consultation where I give you tailored recommendations for your specific email strategy. Or you can hire me to do done for you email strategy and copy. I can do the whole thing. Like if you don't have a welcome sequence and you realise, "Ah, actually probably need a welcome sequence now," you can hire me to come up with a strategy and to write it all for you.
You can also grab my free 35-minute email class, The Email Rules. It teaches you really actionable email marketing tips that you can put into action today. That's totally free. And I'm going to give you a link for that in a second. You'll also be signed up to my email list so you can see how I do email. And then the third thing is if you love a good podcast, listen and subscribe to my multi-award-winning business podcast, Mistakes That Made Me. And I am going to stop sharing and I'm going to put the link to the PDF that has those three links in the chat right now. Hope you enjoyed this presentation. Thanks so much for sticking with me.
Joe Glover: You're an absolute legend. Thank you so much, Eman. I'm just typing a comment in the chat here, which is the very last thing there where you mentioned about your services and the three, fighting your instincts to just do one. In fact, you literally emailed me last night and just said, "Do you mind if I do that?" And I said, "Of course you could because you bloody well earned it," and you bloody well earned it with that session. So thank you very much.
Eman Ismail: Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much. Oh, someone's been typing notes furiously, Kelsey, thank you so much. I hope you all enjoyed it.
Joe Glover: Again, lots of amazing comments. We've got 10 minutes left by my calculation and 38 open questions. So, folks, if you see some questions that you would like answering, make sure to give them a thumbs up in the Q&A feature so that we can prioritise them in these 10 minutes that we've got left.
So the first one comes from Laura. So Laura asked the question, "Do you have any tips for building a subscriber list from scratch, specifically in B2B, and strategy, so the tips for the first year emails?" So I think we've probably covered a bit of the strategy tips with the sequencing. So maybe speaking to building your subscriber list.
Eman Ismail: Building it, growing it. Yeah. So the first thing is to know that it's not easy. I think people make it look easy, and then you get into it and start doing it and you think, "Oh, actually, I'm finding this hard. Is it just me?" No, it's not just you. It is hard to build an email list. I think the place to start is to, firstly, choose an email service provider. As an official ConvertKit partner, I say ConvertKit. I do love ConvertKit. And I'll also add my affiliate link, and it is an affiliate link, in the chat in a minute. But I feel like as the sponsors are Klaviyo, so also maybe Klaviyo.
So choose an email service provider, first and foremost, and then build—No, I would say first figure out what your audience needs from you. How can you provide the most valuable resource for them? Whether you need to survey your ideal audience, that might be one way to start, to actually just find out like, well, what are you struggling with? What do you want? What are your goals? Or you could even interview a select few to really help you figure out, "Well, what lead magnet or opt-in can I create that will actually be super valuable for them?" A resource that they'll find really helpful because it'll only be something valuable that will make them want to give you their email address in exchange for access to this resource, this lead magnet, this opt-in that you're creating. And so I think it's really important to get the opt-in or the lead magnet right.
And then the third thing is actually to figure out, well, what is the best format? Because a lot of people go to ebook, but your audience might not necessarily want an ebook. They might not read an ebook. Maybe they want a video series or maybe you want to do an ebook and then also create a version that's a video series. I have for quite a few of my products, a video series, and then the audio series where they can literally just plug it in like a podcast, subscribe to it as a podcast, and listen to it on their favourite podcast player because some people don't want to sit at a computer and watch videos, but they do want to go on a walk and they'll consume it that way.
How can you actually create this in a way that will ensure they consume your content? So not just sign up for it, but consume it, because once they do, that's when they'll start to understand your value, your expertise, how you can help them.
And then the final thing I'll say is after you've created it, the promo is like a whole different world. There's the creation and then there's promoting what you've created. And it's really about just constant promotion, constant marketing, constantly talking about it, constantly posting about it, and never letting people forget that it exists, giving it pride of place on your website. When you do, I don't know, talks like this, for example, I'm always talking about The Email Rules, my free video series, so that people will join my email list. You've got to incorporate into every part of your marketing.
I feel like the promotion is the promotion part is almost harder than the creation part because once you've created it, it's done. But once you've created it, it's like, okay, now how do I get people to actually sign up for it? So I hope that helps. And I hope that gives you some starting steps.
Joe Glover: Hang on. I love that. Thank you so much. I love how your brain works as well because you've clearly got such a logical flow of like, boom, boom, boom, point, point, point.
Eman Ismail: I'm a to-do list kind of girl. I just joined Asana and my entire life is like a series of to-do lists. There's always that one step, step, step, step, step.
Joe Glover: I love that. I absolutely love that. If I could add a few very, very specific, I love your point there about making it central to everything. We always think about the newsletter as the engine of TMM. And just to add to your point there. The second is the signup form, right? So many people put "Get the latest news and updates straight to your inbox," and it's the most cliche thing to say. And so a very specific, like, here's what you're going to get, to your point about the ebook and stuff like that, here's what you're going to get and here's what you're going to get going forward.
So Harry Dry at Marketing Examples does a great job where he says, "You'll get one newsletter a week or one tip a week," or something like that. And it's very, very clear what people are going to get.
And then the last thing that I've reflected on as well, 'cause you spoke about why people want it, is after folks have signed up, we just have one question which people can go to after they've signed up, which says, "How can we help you with this newsletter?" And so we've got like 2,000 responses now where people have said, "This is what you can do to help me." And so that's what we're now gearing the newsletter to as well. So it sort of becomes that magic circle.
Eman Ismail: I love it. Okay. So, Nathan Barry—I'm going to sound like a ConvertKit nut now, but he's the founder of ConvertKit. He actually talks about flywheels. So it's this idea of creating a system in your business that is—you set it up one time and it's a flywheel and it helps you, it just turns and turns and turns and basically helps you in some other way. So in that case, you one time invited people to reply and tell you how they want you to help them. They do. This is set forever. And so people are filling this in and sending you actual content ideas. And now when you're stuck for content ideas, you just go to the list and you see, "Okay, well, what do they want? Oh, this is what they want. This is what I'll do next." It's amazing. So clever.
Joe Glover: Well, that's from Joanna Wiebe, who's an amazing copywriter. Let's get to the next question 'cause it's 10:29 and I wanna make sure that we get a couple in. So we've got a question from Rebecca who says, "How do I know if I'm under the spam threshold?" Because that was one of your points right at the beginning about spam report.
Eman Ismail: Yes, yes. Let me just see if I can find what the actual percentage is. So you've got to avoid reaching a spam rate of 0.3% or higher. And basically, your email service provider will tell you. So it generally gives you your unsubscribe rate. And so you just have to find it within your email service provider. They'll calculate it for you and tell you.
Joe Glover: And then in HubSpot, we've got a Analyze tab, which gives you that statistic, so.
Eman Ismail: Yes.
Joe Glover: There'll be different versions of it. Eman, do you have time to take two minutes more of questions?
Eman Ismail: Yes. That's fine. I do just want to say someone asked, "Is there a discount for ConvertKit?" There's no discount, but there is a 30-day trial. So I'll put my affiliate link in the chat and you'll get a 30-day trial and then not based on anything that you do, it's not coming from you, but if you sign up through me, I'll get a little bit of a thank you from ConvertKit.
Joe Glover: Love it. So the next question we've got from Simon Webb, who says, "Our CEO insists on sending small newsletters out through our CRM, typically to 30 to 50 people. These have very low open rates and engagement rates, and I'm worried that they're damaging our long-term potential. Based on what you've shown us, I'm now more confident. Do you agree that these small distributions at poor performance is a risk?"
Eman Ismail: Can you say the beginning of that again? Just the beginning. I just want to make sure I understand.
Joe Glover: Yeah, they're sending small newsletters out through the CRM typically at 30 to 50 people which have typically low open and engagement rates.
Eman Ismail: Okay. That's strange to me because in my experience, the smaller the segment, the higher the open rate. When people tell me, "Oh, I got 100% open rate," "Oh, I got 90% open rate," I'm always very skeptical. Like, "Okay, well, how many people did you send the email to? Like 10 people? Okay, great. 10 people opened." And so in my experience, the smaller the segment, the higher the open rate should be.
So the fact that you're sending emails to small segments, that for me isn't a problem at all. The problem is actually the open rate. Why are they not opening? Are they not interested in the content? Are they not interested in what's inside? Is it simply just your subject line? Do you just need a better subject line? For me, the sending an email to a small segment is fine, is good, actually. The bad open rates are what is surprising here and that's what I'd look into.
Joe Glover: Nice. That's perfect. Love that. Thank you. Let's go to Sophie for the last one. What I'm going to do is also capture the questions that have come in, I'll send them through to you so that you've got 36 LinkedIn posts. [laughs]
Eman Ismail: Yes. Love it. Flywheels. Thank you.
Joe Glover: Flywheels. Next question comes from Sophie who says, "Do you have any tips for writing really strong call to actions that improve your engagement rates?"
Eman Ismail: I do. Yes. So be specific, as Joe said. Be specific. Instead of, "Download the ebook," it's "Get the six steps to catapulting your business," I don't know, "Find out how to double your conversions." So be really specific in what the value is of downloading the thing or doing the action that you want them to do. And then also, the thing is, instead of just making it about the action, like "Download now" or "Listen now", you want to do something that Joanna Wiebe terms—I think she coined it, I don't know, a call to value.
So instead of a call to action, it's a call to value. So it's not just about doing the action, "Download the thing," "Listen to this thing," it's calling them to value. "Get the six steps to catapulting your business." "Double your conversions now." So you're promoting the value in taking that step, in making that action, versus just the action of the actual thing.
And then the final thing I will say about—and by the way, I do cover this in The Email Rules, my free email class. It's only 35 minutes long. The final thing I'll say about calls to action is you want to make sure that you are really strategic about your calls to action. And usually, you're only asking people to do one thing at a time. Now, I broke that rule, which is why I said that earlier on, when I told you to do three things. The rule—it's called the rule of one—is that you should only ever ask your audience to do one thing at a time so that you're not distracting them so that you're not making it difficult for them to remember what you want them to do, but instead, you're directing them to do just one thing, one action, and you'll be surprised how much that increases conversion rates.
Joe Glover: I love that. You reminded me as you were speaking there that the word "here," if you type in "here" into Google—this was a few years ago, but you wrote "here" into Google, and I think one of the big software companies came up because every hyperlink that they put into their website was like, "Click here." And so they were literally ranking for the word "here," which, to your point about the call to value, is a really lovely way because you wouldn't be doing that if you were hyperlinking and call-to-actioning in a way which didn't say just "Click here."
Eman Ismail: Yes, exactly. Joe, I know that was the last question, but Emma Louise just asked I think a very good follow-up. Emma Louise says, "We always say call us on XYZ or email us at blah, blah, blah. Is this wrong?" No, it's not wrong. There's a place for call to values and there's a place for being super clear. So if you want people to call you on X number, the call to action is very simply, very plainly, call us on X number. You want to make sure that you're not ever trying to be super clever and making it difficult for people to understand what you actually want them to do.
Joe Glover: So good. I need to cough now, which is really bad timing.
Eman Ismail: I muted a few times.
Joe Glover: [laughs] You're an absolute legend. Thank you for taking the time today.
Eman Ismail: Thank you for having me.
Joe Glover: And thank you to everyone as well for just a wonderful chat once again. This is such a lovely experience and it's great to hear the information you presented today and to get your questions too, as I say, we'll make sure we capture those.
Eman Ismail: That'd be amazing. Thank you.
Joe Glover: Yeah, to keep in the loop. With all that said, we'll be back next week, next Tuesday for a session on technical SEO with the incredible Areej, so we'll see you then. In the meantime, have a lovely week, everyone. Thank you all so much for taking the time. Thank you once again. Yeah.
Eman Ismail: Thank you. Bye.
It's me again, cold-ridden, nasally Eman. I really hope you enjoyed that episode and got a whole load of value from it. I think the audience has some really great questions, so hopefully some of the questions that were swimming around in your mind got answered as well. Now, if you like the sound of The Marketing Meetup, please do go check out this amazing community at themarketingmeetup.com.
Like I said, there are nearly 50,000 members. They offer free talks, free webinars, free presentations, free live events all over the world, and I mean all over the world from everywhere in the UK to Barcelona. So go check out themarketingmeetup.com, sign up to their newsletter, read their podcast, all the good stuff because there's just so much value to gain from Joe and his amazing community.
Also want to say if you listened to this episode and you were like, "Hmm, I think I could do with Eman's help on my emails," get in touch because I would love to talk about working with you. All you have to do is head over to my website emancopyco.com, scroll down the home page, you'll see my list of services, or you can head over to the Contact page and just get in touch with me from there. If you're thinking about potentially working with me, we might be a good fit. And so I would really love to help you figure that out and make this happen. That's it from me. I will see you next time.
Ever wondered what goes into creating this podcast? What my production process looks like? How I came up with the concept for this show? How I choose which guests to invite and how exactly I research them? Well, I'm sharing everything inside my bonus episode, Behind the Scenes: Making the Podcast. For this special episode, the show's podcast producer, Zuri Berry, takes the reins and interviews me so you can find out all the juicy details and behind-the-scenes stories.
I reveal for the first time ever how I landed the HubSpot partnership and what that agreement involves, as well as the key to sending a podcast pitch that'll get my attention, the interview methods that helped me nail my podcast interviews, and the resources and strategies I've used to help make this show a success.
If you want instant access to this bonus episode, click the link in the show notes or head over to emancopyco.com/bts, that's behind the scenes, emancopyco.com/bts, put in your email address, and that's it, it's yours.