Can you use an email marketing waitlist for your next big launch? Maybe you have a membership or a course and want to generate excitement, curiosity, and demand. Can a waitlist help you do that? Also, how do you keep people on your waitlist warm? How long should you run a waitlist for, and how often should you contact people on it? 

We answer all these questions and much more...

Are you ready to get all the good stuff?

Let's go!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:08) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(4:18) Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course?

(11:17) When should you use a waitlist?

(14:08) How do you get people on your waitlist?

(15:22) Where possible, reward people instantly! 

(17:50) How we use waitlists in our business?

(21:18) Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist.

(22:52) How do you keep people on your waitlist warm?

(30:07) What's the dual reality principle?

(32:47) Subject lines of the week.

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Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course? 

Between the two of us, we’ve had experience selling courses and memberships for years, both with our current and previous businesses. And one of the strategies that go with opening the doors to your new product is having a waitlist. Do you absolutely need to have one? Unless your membership or course is capped in terms of the number of people who can join, we don’t think a waitlist is strictly necessary.

A waitlist helps you create demand in advance, which is why we use this strategy as a key component of a couple of the email marketing campaigns we teach. It can be a useful tool to gauge an interest. Is your audience interested in your upcoming product? By joining a waitlist, people make a micro commitment – they're deciding they want to find out more about something you're about to offer.

Plus, if you’re new to the world of online memberships and courses and aren’t sure whether something will sell, a waitlist is a low-barrier entryway to help you figure that out. Once you develop more experience, you’ll develop a level of confidence and awareness of what’s likely to work. But if you’re just starting, you can build this awareness with a waitlist.

Where will you talk about your waitlist?

Should you talk about your launch only to the people on your waitlist? Absolutely not! If you're only marketing to your waitlist and not the rest of your audience, you’re leaving money on the table. Because there will be people on your email list who would never sign up for a waitlist. And yet, they might be interested when they see your sales page. 

You also need to think about what advantage you'll give to the people on your waitlist. Why are they on the waitlist in the first place? Will you give them early access? Does the waitlist serve a real purpose or are you just “dressing something up in marketing”?

A great place to promote your waitlist (and your upcoming launch) is on your social media. If you have a podcast or an active social channel, you can start talking about your membership or course a couple of weeks before you open the doors. Start inviting people to jump on your waitlist - it's a great call to action and a good way of attracting those with a level of intent into your world.

When should you use a waitlist?

We have a waitlist for our Email Engine Accelerator, which is a capped programme. We can only take a small number of people each time we run it (three times a year), and demand is high because people get results. So when we talk about it, our customers want to know when the next intake is. We have a good reason to ask people externally (on our podcast, for example) to join our waitlist to be informed about the next opening.

Before you decide to start a waitlist though, you should think about what you'll do after the launch. Because you can't suddenly take people from your waitlist and start sending them daily emails as part of your email marketing. If you want to do that, you have to frame that transition first. You can even sell them something else if the product they joined the waitlist for isn't available anymore or they didn't buy. But you have to tell them that's what you're going to do - you have to salvage that relationship first. A way to do that is via a welcome sequence. Ours is called the Get to Know You sequence, and it's a 4-part campaign that can act as a bridge for people who transition from a waitlist we created onto our daily emails. 

What is a waitlist good for?

A waitlist can give you an idea of demand and a sense of confidence. When you ask people to join a waitlist to be informed about a product you're about to launch (and they do), it tells you they're interested and that you have a viable product.

Plus, a waitlist gives something importance - it elevates it. It tells others that what you have is important and exclusive. It means you have a bunch of people who've raised their hands and expressed an interest. And the next time you launch something, you can also go back to those same people again.  

How do you get people on your waitlist?

Give people a good reason to join your waitlist

If you want people to join your waitlist, you have to give them a good reason to do so, such as an emotional reason (or a bunch of them). For example, in our Anticipation Action sequence or our Book Launch campaign, we ask people to join a waitlist. If it's a book you're launching, you can offer people some chapters of the book ahead of publication, for example.

If you’re selling a membership, you may offer little samples of the programme or ask people to express their preferences and get involved in specific parts of the creation process, which generates buy-in. Or you could offer a free gift to the first few people who join your waitlist. It could even be a video tour of your membership!

Where possible, reward people instantly!

Although it’s not always possible, try to give people something as soon as they join your waitlist. If you’re launching something live (and your product isn’t going to be available for a while), you could, for example, run a group call for the people on your waitlist and give them a preview or an outline of what’s to come. We do this in the shape of a webinar with an informal ‘behind the scenes’. Or you can give them instant access to the list of live calls.

Whatever you give them doesn’t have to be ‘big’ – it’s just something in return for joining your waitlist so they don’t feel they got nothing for that effort. It provides people with certainty, and it doesn't leave them feeling like they’ve been left alone after they gave you their email address. When you give people something in return, you trigger a sense of satisfaction.

For example, if you’re starting a live programme in a month, but you're giving people on the waitlist the calendar of calls now, they can start figuring out how your membership or course fits into their lives. They sell themselves in advance. Plus, if you’re giving them the information now, you’re answering questions they might have down the line, so you save yourself some time, too. 

How we use waitlists in our business

There are two different ways we use to get people on waiting lists. In a couple of cases, the waitlist is already baked into our email campaigns.

Otherwise, on a subtle level, every once in a while, we’ll send out a pre-framing email that goes out before a sales campaign or just casually. This could be, for example, before our Black Friday campaign. We might send an email ahead of time and ask people to let us know if they want to be told about our Black Friday offer one hour before everyone else, for example. We don’t call it a waitlist, but the application is similar. 

So we have two different circumstances – in one case, we’re asking people to click a link and send them to a dedicated page where they have to enter their name and email address to join a waitlist. Generally speaking, that’s not a great idea because people sometimes click on links by accident or may be using a piece of technology that clicks on links for them.

What you want instead is the extra commitment that someone needs to take with you when they type their name and email address and actively decide to join your waitlist. You could even add a PS at the end of one of your emails and ask people to click on a link so you can let them know an hour before your offer opens. It adds a bit of spice to the campaign. 

Another thing you can do is to give people a bonus (something valuable to them) for joining your waitlist. This way, you build a waitlist full of people who already appreciate the value of your product. You’re pushing the psychology of someone’s commitment a little further because they're joining your list to get a bonus.

Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist!

When creating a waitlist, one of the most important things to do is to wrap it around a genuine reason. Why do you have a waitlist in the first place? Sure, it can create desire and anticipation. But ultimately, you’ll probably tell your whole email list about your product anyway. So it’s important to have a specific reason for the waitlist. An example could be that it's a limited-time offer or that you'll be capping the number of people who can join your programme.

If you don’t have a real reason (perhaps because your programme is evergreen), you can still do an open-and-close launch where you only let a handful of people in. That would give you a legitimate reason for a waitlist because you have limited spaces available.

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How do you keep people on your waitlist warm?

How often should you get in touch with people on your waitlist? The more time passes between someone joining your waitlist and the moment you open the cart, the colder people will be. Over time, they lose the excitement and drive that prompted them to sign up for the waitlist in the first place. Their desire for your product has waned and petered out.

That’s why, when we promote a sales webinar, we only do it 3-4 days in advance. So keep the time on the waitlist as short as you possibly can. Also, rather than spending time telling people that a waitlist is coming, let them know it's available now and build some anticipation.

A great way to do this is to promote your waitlist on your socials closer to the time of the launch by using dynamic content. This is something we do with our sponsorship segments for our podcast. The sponsorship piece of content is dynamically added through our podcast hosting platform, so anyone listening to any episode during the days leading up to a particular offer going live will hear it.

Don't try to keep people's interest - raise it! 

What's also important is how you communicate with your waitlist. You can't keep telling people that your product is coming soon. Instead of focusing on keeping people's interest, try to raise it! You want people to get engaged and involved.

You can do that by asking them to vote on something, for example. That increases their emotional buy-in into what you're doing, so by the time you open the cart, they're interested and involved. Don't just simmer people - raise the heat! 

Does a waitlist work with a cold audience? 

We (Rob in particular) don't particularly believe you can launch your product by simply building a waitlist of cold leads. If you have a small audience or following, and you plan to spend money on ads to create a waitlist and then smash your launch, you might not get the amazing results you're expecting. Over time, we sold a lot of products online in different businesses and niches, and the waitlist strategy can work, but only if you do it by keeping the above principles in mind.  

Of course, if you're an influencer in your niche and have a huge audience with thousands of followers who are ready and waiting to be told when your next product launches, then it's great. But a tiny social following or a completely cold ads-driven audience aren’t going to respond as well.

If this is you, consider selling organically to your audience and creating an evergreen offer instead of following the 'big launch' model. You can switch to that when you get to the point where you have a critical mass of people that you can move at speed (i.e. you drop an email in the morning, and you have lots of takers by the afternoon).

Otherwise, using a big launch + waitlist strategy with a cold audience is expensive, slow, and potentially risky. You may burn through a big budget before you can see results. Because it'll take much longer to get the number of people you need on your waiting list to make your launch work. If you go down this route, you’ll need to have the waitlist open for longer and put a lot of effort in to keep people warm and raise their interest.

What's the dual reality principle? 

When we are in the situation of having a waitlist open and sending emails out to raise people's interest, we use what we call our dual reality principle. This is where we send the same emails to our waitlist and our generic email list but with a different call to action. We do that to build hype, excitement, and anticipation for everyone - not just the people on the waitlist.

And to do this, we use conditional content so some people see one paragraph of text in their emails and others see a different one with another call to action. If people aren’t on your waitlist, you can ask them to join it. And if they are on it already, you can give them a different call to action to take.

If you're using either our Anticipation Action sequence or our Book Launch campaign, the waitlist is baked into them already. If you have real scarcity (with limited spots available), a waiting list works beautifully. But generally speaking, the success of a waitlist strategy will also depend on how long you have it open, how you’re keeping people engaged, and how you’re transitioning them from your waitlist onto your daily email marketing, especially if they come from social media or ads.

If you want immediate access to all the campaigns and strategies we talked about, head over to The Email Hero Blueprint.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Very demanding money”. It works because it generates a lot of compound curiosity. Who’s demanding money? What are they demanding money for? Who are they demanding money from? Is it good? Is it bad?

The email was about how Netflix is now enforcing its multi-household policy on Rob’s account. But you’d have to open up the email to know that. So check it out!  

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Achieve The Most Successful Launch (Ever) And Hit Your Sales Targets – With Melissa Litchfield.

The Most Perfect Way To Launch & Promote Your Business Book With Email Marketing.

Small List Big Launch – With Gemma Bonham-Carter.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to maximise your email marketing waitlist and have a successful launch) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email...

We always say email marketing can help you make more sales, more predictably, and in less time. But you shouldn't just take our word for it - that's why we regularly share email marketing success stories from our amazing students. Our client Lucas Reuterstig is one of them. After joining our programme and implementing just two of our email marketing campaigns, he saved his business, and his calendar got fully booked for 3 weeks!

Want to know how he did that?  

Let's find out! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:15) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(3:32) Who is Lucas Reuterstig?

(6:02) When did Lucas get started with email marketing?

(7:57) What was the first thing Lucas did when he joined our programme?

(10:41) How does Lucas feel about his email marketing now?

(13:01) What's the plan for Lucas's email marketing going forward?

(15:29) What's the one action that made all the difference?

(17:13) Would you like to hear more from Lucas? (And get a special offer?)

(18:44) Subject lines of the week.

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Who is Lucas Reuterstig?

Lucas runs a programme (and a podcast) called Presenter Mastery, which is a communication training program that delivers:

• ​Confidence, so you know what to say and when, and your message becomes clear and engaging. 
• ​Delivery, i.e. the scientific skills that make your audience listen.
• ​And content, so you can learn to use storytelling in your presentation to increase anticipation, excitement, and buy-in.

In their business, Lucas and his team analyse s a person's presentation style and create an individualised plan for development. They also deliver weekly calls, live training, and coaching to their community of students.  

When did Lucas get started with email marketing?

Lucas has worked with David Phillips (a public speaker for 25 years) since 2020. When they launched their first platform for communication training, they didn’t use email marketing at all. However in 2022, with a better understanding of sales funnels, they discovered another way of selling online. This was when they created the Presenter Mastery Programme, and while they knew email marketing would play a part in their business, they didn't yet know what kind of emails to send out. 

At first, they'd only use emails as reminders for any events they had coming up. Then in February 2023, they decided to make a change - they wanted their email marketing to have meaning and to be 'spot on'. This is when Lucas found our podcast and then decided to join our programme. 

What was the first thing Lucas did when he joined our programme?

Lucas joined our programme (The Email Marketing Hero Blueprint) for a specific reason - he wanted access to our email marketing templates. So the first thing he did when he came into our world was to implement our Paparazzi campaign, which is our flash sale campaign.

Immediately, Lucas found that our campaign was producing results, so in May 2023 he also implemented our webinar sequence to bring people to his live events and then offer coaching calls at the back of those.

And do you know what happened? Lucas and his team sold out on all their spots - their coaching calendars were fully booked for 3 weeks! And at that point, Lucas had to do the unthinkable and shut off the rest of the campaign! That's until his team came up with the idea of selling other courses they had. Phew - more sales incoming.  

In a nutshell, the combination of the two email campaigns that Lucas tailored to his business and implemented was so successful that he's been using them ever since. 

How does Lucas feel about his email marketing now?

Lucas and his team had the best month in their business in January 2024. And the difference to how he felt before is night and day, he said. He no longer feels like the stressed-out, hustling entrepreneur. Now, Lucas can plan what’s coming ahead because there’s predictability in the business. And that’s thanks to having email marketing in place.

Lucas and his team are comfortable knowing that email marketing makes everything work. If you already have performing ads that lead to a great webinar (like Lucas had) but don’t remind anyone about it, no one’s going to show up! Email helps reiterate what’s happening and tells people why they should take action. Without email, nothing happens!

Email marketing has become a crucial part of everything Lucas and his team do in the business. And that's no surprise. Because email marketing supports the things you're doing in your business by amplifying what already works and making it more effective.

Lucas and his team now have a system that works, and they want to scale it. In fact, because of how successful the company is, Lucas has hired the services of our agency to bring more momentum to everything they do. And the priority is to build their email engine.

What’s the plan for Lucas's email marketing going forward?

Lucas believes he and his team have been lagging with their daily strategy, as they’ve only been sending emails out once a week. So they plan to ramp regular emails up and be more 'on point'. They also want to align their daily email strategy with their social media effort and overall marketing. 

Lucas’s business is in a position where they’re driving massive sales through email but also creating higher revenue, which gives them the comfort of a safety net. They don't have to think about where the next conversion is going to come from because their sales are consistent and predictable.  

Reflecting on previous Christmas periods, Lucas remembered how stressed he used to feel. But during the Christmas 2023 period, the sales kept rolling in. Coaching calls were booked, and everything was running smoothly without Lucas having to physically do anything. And that's because their email marketing engine is performing.

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What’s the one action that made all the difference?

For Lucas, the ability to focus on email marketing specifically has made all the difference. He zoomed in on email marketing to make it work for their business. That meant setting other things aside and delegating some tasks. But doing this paid off! Because as soon as the campaigns were set up, he could replicate them, and the next part became easier.

You need to invest the time upfront to make it all happen. After all, for most people, email marketing is about revenue generation. And if you dedicate time and commitment to figure it out, it'll give results. 

Would you like to hear more from Lucas? (And get a special offer?)

If you want to find out more about Lucas, he has a podcast show called Presenter Mastery where he and David talk about presentation skills every week. You can also find them on their website. Lucas also kindly created a special offer for all our listeners, which you can find here. This resource is something that's normally sold for 37 euros at the end of a webinar, but it’s free for you!

Did you enjoy one of the many email marketing success stories we share from students of our programme? If you want to get access to all the resources that Lucas and his team have been using to create amazing success in his business with email marketing, check out our programme – The Email Hero Blueprint – and jump in!

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is one that Kennedy wrote, and it's "Off the record (THEIR NAME)” (i.e. the subscriber’s name). The email was about the fact we were doing a bonus behind-the-scenes talk with someone, and we invited people to attend. It was a conversation “off the record”.

Why did the subject line work? First of all, it doesn’t tell people explicitly to go and listen to us having a conversation with someone off the record. The reader doesn’t know what this is all about, so they want to go and find out. But also, putting someone’s name in brackets makes the whole subject line pop a bit more. And it drives a lot of compound curiosity. So check it out!  

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How April McMurtrey Increased Her Revenue By 400% In Just One Year – A Case Study.

How Cheryl Hatch Increased Her Membership Conversion Rate By 84% With Just Two Email Campaigns – A Case Study.

And How Our Client Jeri Anderson Made $27k In Month One Launching A Brand New Business & Starting With Zero Contacts On Her List.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about one of the amazing email marketing success stories of our clients) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

What's a good click-through rate? How can you drive a click-through rate increase in your email marketing? Is it possible? Why does it even matter? 

Let's find out the answers to these questions - and more!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:11) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(4:29) Why is your click-through rate an important metric in your email marketing?

(11:33) What is the average click-through rate in your industry?

(14:30) Click-through rate average and daily emails.

(20:20) Techniques to improve your click-through rate.

(25:06) Segment your audience. 

(27:50) Create a promotional strategy.

(30:14) Aim to trigger different emotions.

(31:59) Create calls to action that stand out.

(35:23) Keep your list clean.

(38:00) Subject lines of the week.

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Why is your click-through rate an important metric in email marketing? 

For several reasons, click-through rates are now more important than they’ve ever been. First of all, when someone clicks on the links in your emails, it gives them the ability to get to a page where they can find out more about how to put money in your pocket. Sure - sometimes you'll send them to a page where they can register for something (rather than buying). But these are the exceptions to the rule. 

The second reason why click-through rates matter is that, as time goes on, engagement shows Gmail and all the other platforms that your emails are important to people. It tells them they're of good quality and relevant. This is why we built a specific re-engagement campaign to keep people engaged - it's called the LOL Revival campaign and is available inside our programme.

Engagement is key. You have to determine whether someone is super engaged or has disengaged with your emails. Clicking on the links in our emails is a clear indicator they are, indeed, engaged. Technically, replying and forwarding your emails are better ways of engaging, but it’s hard to get people to do that regularly. So aiming for clicks is what you should do. 

Click-through rates and segmentation

Another reason why clicks are important is that they allow you to understand what each subscriber is interested in. You'll start to notice that every time you send an email about a certain topic and with a specific angle, some people will click on the links in those emails. But they might never engage with other angles. Why? Because different things work for different people. And monitoring those clicks is great for segmentation.

Be careful with segmentation, though. Don’t get too carried away by adding tags that are too specific. Try not to get too tag-happy, and only allocate tags that you’re going to use. Make sure you use clear links so that when people click on them, you know they're interested in a particular topic. So, for example, if you’re including a link that points to a resource about building your email list, make sure the link is something like “check out my list building course”. It shows a clear interest in that topic.

A great use of segmentation with link clicking is what we call a link pool. We use this in one of our campaigns, where we ask people to vote on what they're more interested in. This allows you to segment your subscribers efficiently because what they click on shows a higher level of intent. 

What is the average click-through rate in your industry? 

Average click-through rates can vary massively. Just like open rates and other kinds of engagement metrics, they are going to change over time and depend on what you're doing. First of all, click-through rates depend on how many opportunities you give someone to click on your links. If you’re only sending one email a week, and you only have one link in there, you're not giving people a lot of chances. But if you email your list 7 days a week, and you have at least one link in your emails (plus a bunch of other ones in your Super Signature), you’re giving someone plenty of opportunities to click on your links.

Also, when someone joins your list, you’re at the top of their consciousness. You can take advantage of the recency bias because you’re the most recent thing they’ve engaged with. Right now, they know your name. And for the first 60 days, you’re going to get the best open and click-through rates of your entire relationship with a subscriber. After that, those rates are going to reduce, especially if you’re continually sending people to the same product, which we call a robot offer. That's why for the first 60 days, we send people to different offers using our SCORE email engine. If by the end of that period, they haven’t bought, we know they had the best opportunity to do so. 

Throughout the various campaigns we send in this time, we talk about the same offer from different perspectives and in different ways. The offer is cloaked behind different bits of content, and our click-through rates are quite high – around 10-15%. They're higher than the industry averages because we present all our links in different ways. We're also continuously refreshing the person’s attention via the different campaigns.

Click-through rate average and daily emails 

After the initial 60 days, our subscribers start receiving our live daily emails, and our click-through rate drops to around 1%, which is completely normal. Why? First of all, in our daily emails, we’re almost always telling people exactly what the links are about. And they're mostly about our programme - The Email Hero Blueprint. By then, people have been around long enough to know what we sell, which is why these emails don't get a huge amount of clicks. 

But if we run a particular promotion for one week, for example, and change the content of our emails (and therefore our links), the click-through rate shoots up again. Typically, it'll be even higher than what we had in the first 60 days. And then we see it drop again when we go back to the daily live emails that talk about our core product. This is fine with us because the people who do click on the links in those emails, do it with a high level of intent. 

On average, our click-through rate is less than 5% - at around 2.62% across the board. This data includes the click-through rate we see in the first 60 days and then the long-term nurture sequence in the shape of our daily emails. We understand this data. And we know the reason for this is that we no longer churn out new campaigns for different products every 6-8 weeks like we used to do and recommend our students to do. If we did that, we’d see our average click-through rate increase significantly. We know that because we used to see this, and our members who use the same strategy have higher click-through rates when they sell different products. But we focus on just one thing, which explains our average click-through rate. 

Click-through rate fluctuations explained

Here are a few more details about what we do in our business. When someone joins our email list, they go through our Welcome sequence - the Getting to Know You sequence. For those 4 days, click-through rates are quite high. In fact, for the first couple of emails, we’re getting 80-90% open rates and high click-through rates. Then people go through our SCORE email engine, which takes up to 60 days for most people, and again, click-through rates are quite high at around 10-15%, depending on which bit of a campaign someone’s in.

If we’re gathering interest and showing people a lot of different things, our click-through rate tends to be a bit lower. But when our subscribers move into the conversion part of these campaigns, the click-through rate increases again because people now have real intent.

When they come out of the engine and continue to receive our daily emails, which 99% of the time talk about The Email Hero Blueprint, people start to become blind to it. They'll only click on the links if they want to find out more. And that means they have a certain level of intrigue or intent. 

On the other hand, when we run limited-time promotions, we tend to get a 90% open rate during the 7 days. And the same happens to click-through rates – they spike up!

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Techniques to improve your average click-through rate

We suggest you try some of these techniques and see what works for you. You might even find that some of them don't work because your audience is used to a different style and approach from you. So carry out some split testing first.

It's also worth pointing out that if you find something that works for you, it might not work forever. For example, if your click-through rate improves because you used an emoji in your subject line, this might be a good technique for now but not forever. Because people might get tired of something or trends could change.

Also, sometimes higher click-through rates could be coincidental if you don’t have huge numbers of data. When we run tests, we will do it by sending something to 30% of our email list. 15% will get one version and the other 15% will get a different one. Once we've identified which one performed better, we then send it out to the remaining 70% of our list. That way, the majority of your list is going to see a slightly higher-performing version of an email. And if anything, it'll be the best one out of the two you put together.

Having said that, we don't think there is one thing that will always increase your click-through rate. Of course, having a link in your emails is always going to improve your click-through rate! But out of other minor strategies, because you can’t remove all bias, coincidence, and circumstances to get definitive data, we recommend you aim to find out what works today, rather than what will always work. 

1. Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience allows you to identify people with a higher level of intent in your products. For example, inside our programme, we have a bunch of different kinds of campaigns (like the Golden Cloak or the Daisy Chain) where we show people lots of different pieces of content. We pre-frame the content so that when someone clicks to watch it, we’re not only giving them value, but we're also measuring their intent around that topic.

So a great way to increase your click-through rate is to find the people who are interested in the angle you’re selling something from. In our world, if we’re using the angle that our SCORE email engine saves you time, we'll send all our conversion emails about the topic of time-saving. And that’s going to drive a much higher click-through rate because we know it’s the angle a certain person resonates with.

Segmentation is only true for now though. Because someone might be interested in saving time but also in simplifyinig things in their email marketing. And that angle may end up generating a higher conversion. So, when you segment your audience, make sure you've identified what they're interested in and don't send them content that's irrelevant to them. Because you won't get any clicks if you do!

2. Create a promotional strategy 

Don't just send emails out for the sake of keeping in touch with people. You want to have a strategy that allows you to sell. If you’re not showing up with something to sell (which means there’s going to be a call to action and a link to click on) then you’re not going to improve your click-through rate! Have a reason to email that has a promotional angle – you need to have a hook. In other words, give people reasons to buy. That’s why you need at least one clickable link in every single email you send.

There are probably only two or three times a year when we don’t send an email with a link. And even then, we still have our Super Signature at the bottom with a bunch of links in there. These emails without a direct link (which are few and far between) are often designed to increase the click-through rate. We use them to tell people that something’s coming the next day, for example. This gets them primed, ready, excited, and ready to click on what’s coming. We do that because we know that will increase our click-through rate. And you can probably see why we don’t do it all the time – because if you do anything too much, it stops working.

3. Aim to trigger different emotions

Not only do you want to include a call to action in every email, but you also want to make sure they’re clear and bold. You need to tap into different emotional motivating factors. Sometimes people will click because they buy into the benefit of what’s on the other side of a link. Other times, a link works because it generates blind curiosity.

We often refer to the first email in our campaigns as the one that plants the seed. If you’re inside our programme, you’ll have seen our SVVC campaign training – that’s what the S stands for (seed). You’re driving curiosity. These emails have the highest click-through rate and lowest intent, but they’re still high converting because these are hyperresponsive action-takers who click and bite faster – they don’t need a lot of seducing or FOMO, which will peak towards the end of a campaign. That’s when you ramp up the urgency and scarcity.

So make sure your calls to action trigger different emotions in your subscribers because not everyone is driven and motivated by the same things. Use a combination of factors – benefits, curiosity, FOMO, urgency, scarcity, etc. And remember that overusing anything is always going to reduce its effectiveness.

4. Create calls to action that stand out

Always make sure your links aren’t invisible! Instead, they need to be dazzling – use a blue old-fashioned underlined bit of text with a call to action that stands out in terms of how it looks and the words you choose.

Put the call to action on a separate line if you have to, or highlight it in a different colour. There are a bunch of ways you can dress up your links, and that’s what we give you in our resource called Click Tricks, which you can have for free. 

In terms of having more than one call to action, we’ll only add more if the email is quite long. And when we do, we'll try and do our links in different ways. 

5. Keep your list clean

Last but not least, a great way of increasing your open rates and click-through rates is to keep your list clean. Inside our programme, we give you the full approach and system to do this so you can clean up your list and get rid of the dud subscribers who have fallen asleep on the job and no longer read your emails. They damage your sender's reputation and stop you from getting your emails delivered to those who want to receive them.

One of the first things we encourage our students to do, especially if they have a low click-through rate as a percentage of their entire list, is to clean up their list so they can send their emails only to the people who are alive and kicking – i.e. those who still engage and are eager to learn from you.

To keep an eye on people who are disengaging, you need the right campaigns and strategies. If you want to use our engagement campaign to clean up your list and get access the exact emails we use to achieve a click-through rate increase, head over to The Email Hero Blueprint and check it out if you’re not already enrolled. It's everything you need to convert more of your subscribers into customers.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Your unsubscribe rate.” It's quite cool because it sounds like you might be talking about the specific unsubscribe rates of the people on your list. And if they’ve been thinking about that topic themselves, this will feel quite timely.

So, whatever industry you’re in, pick something you know your audience is worried about and put ‘your’ in front of it. People will open the email because they want to know what it's all about. It grabs their attention, especially if it’s a topic they’ve been thinking about. And if they haven’t, now they’re aware of it. That means that as soon as they get into the email, they’ll want to read it. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).

What is familiarity exposure? Also referred to as mere exposure, there's a whole stack of theories around how the psychology of familiarity in marketing works and can help you make more sales. 

That's right. Become a 'household brand', and more people will buy from you.

Want to know how it all works?

Let's find out.

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:19) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(3:18) What is familiarity exposure?

(10:45) Refer to things that your audience is familiar with.

(14:45) Always build familiarity with you, your brand, and what you do.

(21:19) How can you apply familiarity in your marketing?

(23:10) Email marketing campaigns that use familiarity.

(24:45) Don't make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!

(27:08) How to start using familiarity in your email marketing right now.

(29:11) Join The Email Hero Blueprint.

(29:45) Subject line of the week.

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What is familiarity exposure?

The idea is quite simple - we all understand it and have experience with it. Psychologically, you can increase the likelihood of people buying from you when something feels familiar to them. So if you feel like you've heard of something before, or know a particular name from somewhere (i.e. you have a feeling of vague familiarity), you’re more likely to buy.

That’s why people tend to buy household famous brands, even when they’re more expensive. For a lot of products, you could buy the cheaper equivalent, and it might taste, work, or be much the same. But we pick the branded product we know (even for a higher price) because we trust that familiarity.

It’s a bit like going to a restaurant and choosing a dish from the menu that you already know you’re going to like because you’ve had it before (either there or elsewhere). We like our home comforts. We like the feeling of something familiar and comfortable. It doesn’t matter how adventure-prone or how excitable you are (or aren't) – we all find it easier to choose something we’re familiar with. Because familiarity is comforting. And that's why familiarity is baked into pretty much everything we do - email marketing and more. 

So how can you apply this concept of familiarity exposure in your marketing? 

Refer to things that your audience is familiar with

One of the things you can do is to use references in your marketing that your audience is familiar with. For example, for a while, everyone was using famous GIFs from Friends or other popular shows. And it worked because people are familiar with that type of content. Using Friends' references is a safe bet with most demographics. Kennedy isn’t a big Friends fan, but if someone sent him an email with a sofa in the subject line and the word “Pivot”, he'd still get the reference. That subject line would come pre-loaded with a lot of content – whether you love Friends or hate it, you’d know what it's referring to. And you'd probably want to know what the email is about.

You won't be sending famous GIFs, memes, or references all the time, but if you email frequently and regularly, you have plenty of opportunities to do so. And when you use things in your marketing that feel familiar, you immediately activate the psychology that sits underneath your words.

Always build familiarity with you, your brand, and what you do

Another way to use this concept of familiarity is to build trust with your audience by exposing them to you and your brand. This is why celebrities can easily branch out into other products, such as perfumes or clothing ranges. Because we’re all familiar with their name and brand in the first place.

It's also why you have to show up regularly in people’s inboxes to build a relationship with your subscribers. It creates that sense of familiarity. When people think of us or what we do, for example, they probably expect it to be quite funny, cheeky, edgy, and a bit sweary, but also practical, and cut-through-the-bullshit. That’s our brand – it's what we’re all about. But if we showed up offering something super formal at a corporate event, that wouldn’t work as well for our brand.

This is why, when we launched our mastermind Level Up, a few years ago, we sold out two intakes without doing any marketing. We simply told people inside our audience that we were launching this mastermind, and it's all it took to sell it. Because the people who already know us and our style and like learning from us, already knew they’d have a great experience. They already trusted our brand and wanted to join in. And we were only able to do that because of this concept of familiarity.

How can you apply familiarity in your marketing?

One way to build this feeling of familiarity is to involve your subscribers in the creation or building process of your products or services. For example, if you're putting together a new programme, you could ask your audience to chip in and help you come up with a name for it. Or maybe they could vote on the logo or artwork for it. We did this for the original cover for our podcast, for example – we gave people a choice of two, so they'd tell us which one they preferred.

This works because when you then launch that product, people feel invested. They’re already familiar with it because they participated in the voting process by giving you their opinion. They've heard of your product, and they had something to do with it - whether it's creating, naming, or branding.

And if you don't want to go that far, you could simply ask your audience about their preferred time for a weekly coaching call, for example. If you can think of any decisions in your business that you wouldn't mind your audience getting involved in, jump on the opportunity and ask them. 

Email marketing campaigns that use familiarity

Inside our programme, we teach email campaigns that use this familiarity principle. One of them is the Encore campaign, based on the idea that you show someone an offer, take it away, and then come back again with the same offer before you close the cart. When people on your list see the offer the second time (even if it’s months down the line), they experience a sense of familiarity that wasn’t there the first time (when it was potentially a cold offer). This time, they're more likely to buy it.

Likewise, in our Open Day campaign, we run a simple survey where we ask people a quick question. When they fill in the survey, they get into the mindset of thinking they quite enjoy the idea of being able to ask us a question so we can help them. And a few days later, we make them an offer to join one of our Q&A calls and ask us some questions. This triggers familiarity because we’ve already discussed this idea of asking us questions. 

We use this concept of familiarity in all our email marketing campaigns. And that’s the beauty of them. We have these psychological principles baked into all our campaigns already so you don’t have to worry about figuring out how to do it yourself - you just follow the instructions. If you want to know more, we do run campaign workshops inside our programme, where we explain how everything works. But you don’t need to understand it to have it working for you – you can just follow the instructions, and implement the campaigns.  

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Don't make the mistake of offering discounts upfront!

A mistake we see a lot of marketers make is to offer discounts upfront. That doesn't work because you first need to legitimise the offer at full price. If you show up with a discount straight away, there's no familiarity. That's why, if you follow our teachings, you'll know that our SCORE email engine takes people through a sales campaign first and then a content-led sales campaign. You can add a bonus or a discount in the content-led campaign, and that tends to work very well. Why? Because you've built familiarity with the offer in the sales campaign just before. 

Your subscribers trust that this is a discount because you just told them a few days earlier how much the full price was. So now they trust you’re truly giving a discount or adding a bonus because they know it wasn’t there before! You've just legitimised the discount or bonus by creating familiarity with your offer. 

Also, remember that the more your audience continues to see your offers consistently, the more chances you have of them buying from you. Familiarity increases sales. And it's a bit like a spice - you can sprinkle it in everything you do and include it in all the communication you send out. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. 

How to start using familiarity in your email marketing right now 

The first thing you can do right now to build familiarity with your audience is to show up consistently. If you’re absent from people's inboxes, they won't remember who you are - there's no familiarity there. We show up every single day – we’re consistent about that and never disappear. The key is for you to come up with an email-sending frequency you can keep up with and be consistent with it. Do whatever works for you, but stick with it. 

The second thing you can do is to share personal stories. At the start of every podcast episode, for example, we share a personal insight. And we do the same in our emails - we're always talking about things that are personal to us. We do this because it breeds familiarity with us and allows us to take up more space in people's minds. We all have the same amount of space in someone’s email inbox – because an email is an email. But we can take up more space in people’s minds and show our subscribers that we’re more ‘real’ than other people. They get to understand us more. And when it comes to buying something that solves the problem you solve, people are more likely to buy from you because you’re the person who’s taken up more space inside of their minds.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

If you’re a member of our programme already, you don’t even have to learn how to put this principle to work. You just need to know that it does work, and it’s already built into almost every single one of our email campaigns. If you want to check it out, it’s called The Email Hero Blueprint - it's everything you need for your email marketing!

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Shy bairns get nowt! (explained)”. This is a North-East colloquialism that means “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”. Rob cleverly put this expression together with the word “explained” in brackets because if you’re not familiar with the phrase, you may not understand what that means.

If that’s the case, you may just see a bunch of interesting words followed by the word “explained”, which suggests you’re going to find out what that’s all about. The words get your attention because you rarely see that sort of expression in what feels like a more ‘formal’ context, i.e. the subject line of an email.

Wherever you’re from, find something local or colloquial in your language and use those words in a subject line. Add the word “explained” (like we did), and see how that works for you. Check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Template For Email Marketing Campaigns.

9 Psychological Things That We Use In All Of Our Campaigns.

How To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about familiarity exposure and how to use it in your marketing to make more sales) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Do you collect testimonials in your business? What's the best way to show customer transformations in your email marketing? Can the success stories and case studies of your customers help you convert more of the people on your email list? 

If you want to learn an easy way to go beyond your regular, commoner-garden testimonial, this is the place to be. 

Let's go get the secret sauce! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:14) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(3:33) What's the big deal about customer transformations?

(5:24) The power of social proof on potential buyers.

(10:19) Show people that something is good.

(13:41) The importance of the before-and-after story.

(17:14) Create a way to capture customer wins.

(20:08) How do you collect great customer stories?

(28:15) Genuinely build you your customers and their stories.

(29:48) Success stories help others buy.

(33:16) Subject lines of the week.

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What's the big deal about customer transformations? 

Everyone in marketing talks about the fact you need to have social proof and testimonials. And it's true - you have to talk about the results you get for people. Of course, never get yourself into any hot water here. Everything you say has to be true, so you have to be careful not to use stories that imply, suggest, or outwardly state that people have had success from working with you if you can’t back that up. Whatever you say, write, or put out there, has to be a true claim that you can prove. Don’t be naughty!

The power of social proof on potential buyers

But why is it so important to share the stories of people who have experienced success with you? You have to tell others (especially potential buyers) about the transformations - about how you took someone from point A to point B and how you got them an outcome. That's powerful. And it's something you don't want to forget in favour of just sharing the facts about your product or service. 

For example, Rob’s parents just bought a car, and the salesman who sold them the car asked for a nice testimonial. Before they wrote the review, Rob and his parents had a look at existing ones already out there. And they all said that the salespeople were lovely, friendly, and helpful. And that’s all great. But none of these testimonials were anything transformative! We don’t think they helped the dealership much.

So what Rob and his parents did instead was to point out how their life was transformed as a result of buying a car from that place. You have to go beyond the testimonial and focus on the transformation. And for a car, that could have to do with the feelings of increased safety, certainty, confidence, or status, for example.

If people read about us that we’re fun to learn from, for example, it's great. But people don’t necessarily buy programmes to have fun while they learn! They primarily want to know they’ll get the results they’re looking for. While having a good experience in the process is important, people care about the outcome. 

Show people that something’s good

Don't just tell people that something’s good - show them. Of course, you want to appeal to the conscious, logical side of people's brains too. So tell them what they're going to get (i.e. the deliverables). But then also show them how what you’re giving them is going to resonate.

The most powerful part of using transformational stories as social proof in your marketing is that they turn facts into emotion. It’s hard for humans to buy from just facts – we have to initially get interested because of an emotion, curiosity, or excitement. As marketers, we need to offer the logic too, but the point is that you can't argue with how someone else feels about something. You can’t say that you believe something works (or doesn’t work) based on another person expressing how they feel. Because you can’t argue with their feelings!

Over the years, we’ve had several students come to our show and share their transformational stories. And it’s a powerful thing to do because you get to hear directly from a person. It’s not just us telling you what’s in our programme. You get to hear what the person was struggling with, and you might identify with their struggle. When you hear the story directly from someone who's gone through it, you can see they've been exactly where you are now (or even in a worse-off position than you). 

The importance of the before-and-after story

This is why the "before" picture is important – and we don’t mean that just in the visual sense. Always tell the "before" story. In the world of email marketing, you might be struggling to get people on your email list for the first time, for example. So when you hear someone else talking about what they tried or why it was so difficult for them, suddenly you can relate. Facts become emotional.

And the more facts you share, the more you give people things they can latch on to, relate to, or identify with. Maybe you also have the problem of not knowing how to convert the subscribers who are opening your emails and clicking on your links. And if you want the same transformation another client had, you start thinking that maybe this same solution will work for you. The more facts you paint as pictures, the more there is for prospective clients to grab onto and relate.

Create a way to capture customer wins

One of the things we recommend is that you have a methodology for identifying the people in your audience who’ve had some sort of success with your solution. Is there somewhere you can collect information about recent successes? Note that you want them to be recent because that makes them more believable and present - they feel more timely.

To find these stories, you need some sort of "listening mechanism" in your business (and we don't mean this literally), where you can capture customer success wins. For example, we have a private members-only Facebook group where we ask our students to share their wins every week. This means we can identify people who’ve had great success with our programme, and we can ask for more information. We might not invite everyone on the podcast for an extensive interview, but we’ll often reach out to the person and ask them if we can have a conversation about their experience and find out more details. 

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How do you collect great customer stories?

When we see someone sharing a win, we screenshot the message and then often have a conversation with the person about what they did. We congratulate them, give them personal significance, and then ask them more questions. You can choose to document what they tell you in various ways. For example, we have a Wall of Wins on our website - it's a huge page full of screenshots of people sharing their wins. 

If you don’t have any wins or success stories for your programme or course, it’s most probably because you don’t have a proactive way of capturing them. Because people are most certainly having results – they’re just not sharing them! That's why inside our programme - The Email Hero Blueprint - we have a couple of email marketing campaigns that are designed to collect testimonials. Somebody buys your product, and you put them through one of those campaigns, which ask for a testimonial. You can do this by sending out the link to a simple form for your customers to fill in, so you can collect your testimonials. 

Let's face it - not everyone’s going to write the world's greatest testimonial. But if you see an excellent one and want to dig under the surface, you can reply, thank the person, and ask them if they’d like to chat with you so you can talk about the before and after. At that point, you can send them a deeper questionnaire or hop on a call and ask them if they’d like to answer a few questions. You'll find that if the experience was transformative enough, or people got incredible results quickly, they’ll want to talk about it!

The power of stories

For a lot of people, receiving a testimonial is the end of the conversation. For us, it’s just the beginning. We want to know what the person did, what they tried, what was happening for them before they started working with us, etc. We want to get the story. Because that’s a lot more powerful than just another testimonial.

Think about the power of stories. We talk about this a lot – we use storytelling in our emails because stories connect with people. They allow you to feel something you wouldn’t normally feel. With a story, you're creating scenarios and triggering emotions. You're painting a picture that allows people to imagine what you’re saying. You can’t imagine a testimonial unless the person tells it as a story. It’s like the difference between reading the synopsis of a film and watching the whole movie! 

Generally speaking, testimonials are easy to collect because people can write them quite fast, especially if you put together an easy process with a form for them to fill in. But once you get those initial testimonials, they’re your foot in the door to get more. If it sounds like there's more there, dig further. Ask questions. When people have put action, commitment, and consistency in doing the work, they’ll be happy to tell you more. And they'll get some significance by hearing from you personally.

Genuinely build up your customers and their stories! 

When you're sharing your customers' success stories, genuinely build those people up. Tell everyone how brilliant, clever, or smart the person is because that puts them in the highest status position. It makes them credible. Plus, it fires off a lot of emotional resonance and positivity.

Others can see that you're talking about a respected person that you think of positively. Whenever you hear us talking about a client, we share from the heart all the things we love about them. And we’re just being honest – we’re using this genuinely and not in a facetious or dodgy way.

Success stories help others buy

If someone’s joined our list, and they’ve gone through our email engine but haven't bought yet, we often find they'll eventually (finally!) buy at the back of a success story we share. Typically, these are the most difficult people for us to sell to. Because they’ve been through a lot of our content, but they're still on the fence about buying.

And oftentimes, it'll be a testimonial we share that makes the penny drop for those kinds of subscribers and gets them to decide to go ahead and buy. The story we share probably resonates, and while they weren't sure our solution would work for them, they've now heard or read something that makes them feel it does. We find that the emails that include success stories and testimonials are often some of the highest-converting emails we send. That's why we often do shout-outs about some of our students. We publicly celebrate their success because it's a lovely thing to do, and these emails do well for us.

If you want to go and check out the two different testimonial campaigns we have inside our programme, you can find them at The Email Hero Blueprint. And as a special bonus when you buy, you’ll get an email asking for a testimonial and a chance for a shout-out. How about that?

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Our 'gateway drug'”, and the email was about when we first got into the world of surveys. We started off wanting to run one survey and suddenly realised the power they had. So we became addicted to them!

This phrase has a completely different connotation, of course - people think of another context when they see that. And they certainly aren’t expecting someone who teaches email marketing to talk about this topic! And that's why it worked, so check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Testimonials – how to write and collect them automatically to bring in more sales with Monica Snyder.

How Our Client Jeri Anderson Made $27k In Month One Launching A Brand New Business & Starting With Zero Contacts On Her List.

How April McMurtrey Increased Her Revenue By 400% In Just One Year – A Case Study.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to show customer transformations in your email marketing) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Want to find out how to immediately supercharge your email marketing copywriting? Then let's find out about the Rule of One. This isn’t just a technique you can use in your email writing. You can use it across any kind of writing you do for your business – sales pages, sales videos… everywhere! And it will massively improve your conversion.

Ready to learn how to apply it? 

Let's go!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:25)  Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(4:21) What is the Rule of One in copywriting?

(7:19) Use the same call to action across a whole email campaign. 

(9:18) Send people to landing pages where they can only make ONE choice.

(11:26) Write your emails to ONE reader.

(12:24) Give people ONE call to action (per email).

(14:25) The benefits of stacking your email marketing campaigns.

(15:54) Tap into the power of storytelling.

(18:07) Your Super Signature is the exception to the rule! 

(21:03) Subject lines of the week.

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What is the Rule of One in copywriting? 

Whenever somebody writes copy for us (yes, we do hire copywriters because we're not professional copywriters ourselves), the one piece of suggestion we always give is to focus on the one idea we're trying to convey. What’s the one thing we want to say? Every time you put out any type of communication (an email, a headline, the opening of a sales video, etc.) you want to talk about one idea.

Equally, when it comes to email marketing, every email you send should talk about one theme. If you're sending an email about risk, the whole email needs to be about that. You don’t want to add social proof to that email – that’s a different theme for another day.

And if you're only talking about one thing, you’re probably also going to use one single story. Unless you have a few stories that demonstrate that one thing you’re talking about. And you do this because otherwise, people’s brains get overwhelmed.

So let's get into the specifics of this...

Use the same call to action across a whole email campaign

The Rule of One applies to individual emails but also to email campaigns. We often pick one call to action and effectively use that across an entire email campaign. If we’re running the Bribe campaign, for example (where we tell people that if they buy one thing they’ll get something else for free), every email we send as part of that sequence is going to have the same call to action. We lead people to that one action by using different hooks, angles, and stories in the individual emails we send as part of that campaign. 

Why do this? Because when you say too many things at once, people get confused and overwhelmed and end up not making decisions. The more directions you send people in, the more confused they’re likely to get.

Send people to landing pages where they can only make ONE choice

When we send someone to a landing page, we want them to only have one thing they can do on there. And that’s to click and buy or click an opt-in. There’s only one call to action on that page.

If you’re sending someone to a landing page to opt in for something, but you also have your blog and other items under the navigation menu, you’re giving people lots of choices and other things they could do. So they’re not going to opt in! Instead, direct people to one thing and one thing only so you don't lose their attention. Because confused brains do nothing! 

You want to create one singular narrative. Your job is to build a belief, which may start with a story that leads to a theme and some kind of lesson. Then you want to tell people the one thing they should go and do. Remember that people are looking for help – they’re not qualified to know what action to take. That’s what they’ve come to you! So you need to help them take action or make a choice. You’re the one who’s qualified to tell them what to do to get the outcome they desire. 

Write your emails to ONE reader

The Rule of One also applies to the way you send your emails. You want to address your emails to one reader rather than a ‘collective’, saying something along the lines of “Hi guys”. Imagine writing to one person and that person only.

When you do that, suddenly your email doesn’t sound like a marketing, corporate one. Instead, it sounds personal - something you'd send to someone you have a deeper relationship with. And when you deepen the relationships with your subscribers, you’re better able to influence them. You get to take them on a journey with you and feel things - experience emotions. And as a result, you get them to take action. 

Give people ONE call to action (per email) 

Always address just one topic (one theme) in your emails and be clear on the one action you want people to take. Don’t give them plenty of choices because they won’t know what decision to make. Instead, tell them about the best action they can take so they can move on to the next step in their journey with you. That’s what each email you send does – it moves people to the next step of the journey.

At the start of an email campaign, you might want to ask people to watch a video that talks about the problem they might be experiencing. As you progress with your sequence, you can let them know about your course or programme and ask people to check it out. Your call to action can change in the space of a campaign. You can start with a softer approach building curiosity and then, towards the end, make your one main promise.

The benefit of stacking your email marketing campaigns

The great thing about using multiple campaigns in your marketing is that each of them can have one main promise. And each promise can be different, even if you're promoting the same product or service. That's because the campaigns stack over each other. And by using this method, you're not overwhelming your audience by telling them everything at once.

At the same time, you're not blowing all your chances by sending everything you have to say in one go. When you do that, things get lost. With too much being said at once, people miss it. Instead, pick every single important thing you want your subscribers to know and put it on a pedestal. Give it space to breathe – give it a whole email of its own or maybe even a whole campaign! Shine a light on it so that people who are attracted to it see it all lit up - standing high and tall about the crowd - and can see it as the promise they need to go ahead and buy the thing they’re looking for.

Tap into the power of storytelling

To differentiate your emails (even if the call to action is the same, and you’re driving people to the same product), you can use storytelling. It allows you to ‘decorate’ the same thing in different ways. So you take the story about whatever happened to you on a particular day and link it to your main point and call to action. We have a whole podcast episode on that, so go and check it out!

In other words, you can choose to send a plethora of emails that include the same call to action but go about it in loads of different ways. But remember the Rule of One - each email has one story, one lesson, and one main call to action.

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Your Super Signature is the exception to the rule!

There’s an exception to the Rule of One though, and that’s your Super Signature. If you’re inside our programme, you can find some training about this - it's called Super Signature Reloaded. What's your Super Signature exactly? It's a list of links at the bottom of your emails that includes everything that someone can do if they want your help.

The way we see it, the Super Signature is not diluting your call to action because it's a separate part of the email. It's further down at the bottom. You can even put a couple of lines above it to physically separate it from your main email.

And its job is to tell people that if they’re ready to take things to the next level, there are a bunch of ways you can help - the Super Signature gives them options. These can include free things like joining our Facebook group or listening to our podcast, but also buying our programme, or hiring our agency to do your email marketing for you.

It acts like a menu of quick resources that people can access if and when they need to. We stick it at the bottom (in the footer) of every email we send - it's a constant for us, and it makes us sales every week because people click on it!

You can make your call to action multiple times

One last thing to point out is that in the main body of the email, you want to make sure you have one call to action, as we said. But you can make that same call to action multiple times. In a daily email, we might just have one. But sometimes when we send emails inside our campaigns, we may have links to the same call to action two or three times.   

Join the Email Hero Blueprint

If you want to know more about the topics we talked about here (including how to wave storytelling into your emails and set up your Super Signature), check out the Email Hero Blueprint. It’s our flagship brand new programme where you can find everything you need to get more sales from your existing subscribers.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “anyone there??” It sounds like the typical subject line you’d use for a re-engagement campaign (such as our Revival campaign), but it had nothing to do with that. It was just a story that Rob told about being left alone somewhere.

It’s interesting because it’s designed to sound like a prompt or a nudge for people who haven’t been paying attention, but it's not. So you’re threading the line between using something attention-grabbing but that doesn’t feel clickbaity. The last thing you want is for people to feel like they've been deceived when they read your email. Also, with two question marks, you’re making a slight exaggeration, and that grabs people’s attention even more. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

The Biggest Mistakes You’re Making With Your Email Marketing Copywriting.

Mindblowing Techniques To Connect More Deeply With Your Email Readers With Rob Marsh & Kira Hug.

Comedian’s Secrets to Storytelling – With Kevin Rogers.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about mastering the email marketing copywriting technique of the Rule of One) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Are you using AI in your business? Can it save you time, make you more efficient, and deliver a better experience to your customers? Depending on what you do and how you use AI, yes. So let's talk about how we are leveraging the power of AI right now in our business.

The ways we use AI might surprise you, and it's probably not what you think. 

Want to get stuck into it? 

Let's go! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:13)  Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!

(4:08) Why and how we use AI in our business.

(11:38) Using the integration between Zoom & Vimeo to upload live training calls.

(16:41) Getting user-friendly summaries of our live Q&A calls (ditched!).

(25:00) Relating to stories to lessons to use inside your emails.

(27:20) Summarising customer interviews.

(29:00) Helping us overcome people's objections.

(30:54) Writing engaging social media posts.

(35:09) Creating a lead magnet.

(38:08) Making your writing more 'punchy'.

(40:10) Helping with formulas and code.

(41:38) Other AI tools we recommend.

(46:65) Subject lines of the week.

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Why and how we use AI in our business 

AI is developing at super rapid speed, and we're testing and implementing (or ditching) different ways of using it to the advantage of our business and our customers. We're going to share a bunch of things we've tried - some of which have been successful and others not so much.

We don’t sell any offers that are led with AI because we don’t find anything created with AI is good enough. And we don't even use AI to write our emails or our subject lines, so we're not going to tell you to do that.

Why? Because we tried to teach AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai our methodology. But so far, we've not been able to make that work successfully. We don't believe that AI can do a better job than a human at writing your emails. Sure, there's something to be said for learning to write great prompts. And believe it or not, professional prompt writers are now a thing! But we're not that. 

Whatever you use AI for, it has to be good! 

Instead, we're going to give you ideas of how AI can save you time or make things easier for you. We're going to share how it can help by giving you new and diverse opinions and insights. The key though, we believe, is that whatever you use AI for, it has to be good!

Can AI write subject lines for your emails? Can it write your emails? Absolutely. Are they going to be good enough? Probably not.

If a subject line or an email (no matter who writes it) doesn't get the person at the receiving end to take action (whatever the action might be), then it's not good enough. If you're currently not doing email marketing and think you're going to use AI to do it for you because sending anything out is better than nothing, we don't think that's the case at all! 

Using the integration between Zoom & Vimeo to upload live training calls

One of the ways we use AI in our business is to upload the recording of our live training calls into our Members' Area to make them available to our students. Inside our programme, the Email Hero Academy, we run at least 3 live Q&A sessions where we answer people's questions and give them help with tech. 

Before we started tapping into the power of AI, we used an assistant based in the Philippines who would download the recording of each Zoom call and then upload it onto Vimeo and into our Member's Area for our students to watch back. It used to take hours for our assistant to do all this!

That's until we found out there’s free integration between Zoom and Vimeo, which allows us to deliver our call through Zoom but also record it straight into Vimeo as well. So our assistant now simply needs to log into Vimeo, grab the embed code, and upload it in the Members’ Area. What used to be a several-hour job a few times a month is now a 10-minute task. Win!

RPA is a form of AI!

And if you’re thinking that integration is not AI, it is - it's a form of RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Even if Zoom and Vimeo hadn’t 'connected' in this way, we could have asked our developer to create a piece of code to do this for us.

We’ve done something similar to integrate Thrive (our shopping cart) and Xero (our accountancy software). This saves money on a bookkeeper because we don’t need to reconcile every single transaction to make sure it’s filed correctly. It’s all done automatically. Having done this at the start of our business, we’re saving thousands on bookkeeping fees a year - and it only cost a few hundred dollars for our developer to do this. 

Getting user-friendly summaries of our live Q&A calls (ditched!)

For the sake of total transparency, this is something we tried for a while but then ditched. The idea was to get AI to take the transcript from our live training calls and summarise it. That way, we could share it as a PDF with our members. We wanted the tool to highlight the individual questions, summarise the answers, and add time stamps. This was so that our members could consume our content in other ways, i.e. by skimming through a document rather than sitting at their laptop watching an entire 60-90 minute video call. We wanted to help people speed up their consumption of our content.

We’ve been doing something similar for our internal meetings, for example. We record them, get a transcript, and then get them summarised with AI and sent back to us with action points. And that seems to be working fine. But when it came to using AI to create effective summaries for our members, it wasn’t good enough! Kennedy tried it a few times, put all the relevant prompts into the tool, and found the process easy enough.

But when he handed this over to a member of staff, they noticed that entire questions were being missed! The AI tool wasn’t able to pick up some of the questions - and that was the exact job we wanted it to do! As the output was unreliable, and we couldn't get the AI tool to deliver on its core function, we decided there was no point in using it. 

Beware of inconsistent outputs and unreliable results! 

Having said that, Kennedy isn’t a prompt engineer. And neither of us has the patience to become better at this. We recognise having this resource would be valuable to our members, but considering the output we received was unreliable, we also admit that right now we don't have the time, energy, effort, creativity, or patience to experiment.

And that’s something we’ve experienced with different AI tools and heard from others too – that AI isn't reliably producing results when it comes to certain deliverables. There still needs to be a level of human understanding and cognizance to check the output and ensure it’s accurate. And if we need a human to check things, then we’re better off hiring someone to go through our calls, manually find the questions, and summarise the answers. So for now, we ditched this AI-supported initiative because the results weren’t reliable or good enough.

Relating stories to lessons to include in your emails

As you know, we’re big fans of using stories and lessons in our emails. And we’ve had some success in using AI to find the lessons inside a particular story and relate them to email marketing. It’s not perfect as the tools don’t know our unique framework. Even if we tried to teach it to AI, it wouldn’t be possible to do it in just one chat thread.

So what we found so far is that the best an AI tool can do is to use generic knowledge about a particular niche. An AI tool can’t know what’s unique about you, so it can’t reference the frameworks you know and use, for example. You’d never be able to teach it everything you’ve ever said anywhere, or every little anecdote or metaphor you’ve ever used.

So while some of the stuff AI comes up with is useful, it can also be quite bland and vague. Still, it's a good springboard to help you link a story to a lesson that relates to your niche. You might want to experiment with asking the tool about a few different options, and then it’s up to you to find something a bit more unique and refine the output. But if you're having a bit of a creative dry spell, AI might help in this way.

Summarising customer interviews

Another aspect of our business where we use AI is during customer interviews. We do these with both prospective and existing customers. We’ll reach out and find out more about them – these are purely research calls (not sales calls). We try to get 'under the skin' of people and understand what problem they’re trying to solve.

In the past, we’d take lots of detailed notes about what people told us during these interviews. But now we simply take the transcripts, put them into an AI tool, and have them summarised. And because it’s one single piece of text, the summaries are quite good.

We can then further analyse the output by looking at people's fears or hopes, and it helps us to write new pieces of marketing or update existing ones (such as email campaigns, sales pages, etc.). You might even develop an entirely new programme based on the needs that the people have, so try this out! 

Helping us overcome people’s objections

Another thing we’ve been using AI for is brainstorming ideas and supporting us with the science behind the copy. In our email campaigns and sales pages we always focus on overcoming people's objections. So, for example, we’ve asked ChatGPT to come up with some objections that someone might have in buying a $2,000 email marketing course. And then we asked for suggestions on how to overcome those objections.

If someone says they can’t afford the cost of the programme right now, the AI tool might suggest we lower the price, for example. And that’s not something we’re prepared to do. But when it suggests that we introduce a payment plan, that’s an option we can consider. Or we may ask the tool to act as a direct response copywriter or a salesperson and help the person realise how valuable our product is and see things through a different perspective.

In a nutshell, we found AI is quite useful in pushing your brain outside of what you’d ordinarily think. It can help you brainstorm things in a better way than you would by sitting down on your own with a piece of paper.

Writing engaging social media posts 

Something Kennedy does regularly is to start a discussion thread inside our Facebook group every Tuesday about the topic of the podcast episode that’s going to be released the day after. He likes to ask simple questions that are engaging and easy to answer. So every week on a Tuesday he takes the transcript of the podcast, feeds it into an AI tool, and requests 10 engaging social media posts that ask a question about the content of the podcast episode.

While Kennedy has never simply copied and pasted the wording of the posts, he takes the sentiment and the idea around it. And if the tool gives him more than one good idea (which it often does), he’ll create several Facebook posts for various days. So doing this has been working great for our business.

Creating a lead magnet

We also used AI to create a lead magnet for us, outlining what we call 'the five different types of buyers' that we have on our email list. These definitions are based on our unique framework, and we've aligned each type of buyer (the Urgent Buyer, the Researcher, etc.) with the elements of our Score Engine. The idea is that different types of buyers buy at the back of different campaigns, depending on what the sequences are based on (objection handling, risk reversal, engagement, etc.).

We already had all that information, but we wanted to create a simple report that describes the psychology of the various types of buyers. So we put the information into an AI tool, described how these customers typically behave and then asked AI to give us a full psychological profile for each type of buyer. In his prompt to the tool, Kennedy asked AI to act as if it was giving a psychic reading. Interesting, right? This was based on the principle that psychics can extrapolate information to work out what a person is like. And this became part of our lead magnet. Just remember that with anything you do with AI, you always have to refine the output as you go. 

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Making your writing more 'punchy' 

Another thing we found AI super useful for is to make our writing punchier, more emotive, and more 'attention-grabbing'. So if you've written anything, you can put it into the tool and ask it to re-write it in a way that a sixth grader would understand. That keeps the language nice and simple.

Or, even better, ask AI to rewrite something in the style of a tabloid. Those are designed for easy consumption and have no fancy words or technical language, so you can experiment with headlines and subject lines. It’s a great tip for writing copy too, so try it out! 

Helping with formulas in Google Sheets

Something else that Rob uses AI for is to correct formulas in Google Sheets. Rather than asking our developer to write little pieces of code or spending hours on YouTube or reading blog posts and consuming tutorials to try and understand how to do something, you can get AI to help with that. It can fix a formula and correct errors for you – saving you time and making you more efficient.

Similarly, you can also use it for help in embedding some code into your website if you find that what you’re doing isn’t quite working.

Other useful AI tools we recommend

Last but not least, there are a few other AI tools we've experimented with. Did you know you can use GPT for split testing? It can predict with 80% accuracy what will win in a split test. So feed it a couple of pieces of Facebook ad copy, and it’ll tell you which one is more likely to be more successful.

ZuBot is another tool we recommend for writing Facebook ads. We tested it out by asking it to create a Facebook ad for our product Countdown Hero. We told the tool it’s a piece of software that drives urgency without using cookies and IP tracking. Plus, we shared who our target market was and that we wanted the style to be fun, high-impact, playful, and inspiring. The tool asked us some further questions about the investment and the visuals and came up with pretty good headlines and copy about our tool. It included emojis, which made the whole thing look cool. And it even told us what the call to action button would need to be and gave us some good guidelines for the visuals. All in all, we were quite impressed with the results!

And the third tool we recommend is the Google Analytics Guru. If you’re not that familiar with Google Analytics, you can link this up with your account, ask it questions, and it’ll tell you what you need to know based on the data in your account.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

If you like what we shared today, know that bringing you the cutting-edge stuff that we do in our business and what works in the world of email marketing is what we teach! So if you want more of that, the best place to get it is inside our programme - The Email Hero Blueprint. It's everything you need to get your email marketing to the point where it makes you sales every day. And that's both through automated emails and through live broadcasts. 

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Subject line of the week

This week's subject line is “Legal quicksand”. In this email, Rob was talking about some funny legal thing with the Ts&Cs we see out there on pretty much everything. The subject line has a lot of curiosity baked into it and gives the idea that someone may be in trouble. You'll open the email because you want to know what’s going on. It's quite an interesting phrase that creates a bit of a visual and tells the reader something’s out of control. It’s evocative, and it works. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

EVERYTHING You Need To Know About AI For Email Marketing.

Write Emails Using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

What’s NEW In Email Marketing? Check Out These Hot Email Marketing Trends For 2024.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to...

Want to know how our friend Natalie Ellis from Boss Babe ran a super successful flash sale Black Friday campaign using a combination of social media chatbots and our email marketing campaigns? 

If right now you're thinking that Black Friday is far away, just know that this strategy can work for any other holiday or promotion you decide to run throughout the year. It’s something you can rinse and repeat for anything that isn’t a big launch in your business. It doesn't require creating any new content, and if Natalie's story is anything to go by, it'll also be quicker and more profitable than anything you've ever done. 

Shall we get into the good stuff? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:09) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(2:43) Did Natalie really sell something to Richard Branson?

(4:08) What did Natalie's Black Friday promotion look like?

(6:55) What was Natalie's strategy with her Black Friday promotion?

(9:11) How did Natalie implement our Black Friday email campaign?

(12:49) When did Natalie start to promote her offer?

(15:06) Why tell people what the offer is about (in advance).

(17:30) How did Natalie keep her audience warm?

(19:21) How to replicate Natalie's success with her flash sale Black Friday campaign.

(27:13) Subject lines of the week.

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What did Natalie’s Black Friday promotion look like?

Natalie’s main focus is her membership. While she has different levels to it, at the moment, you can only join annually for $997. But for her Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion, Natalie opened the doors for people to join monthly at $97. Or, if they were already inside the membership, she offered a 50% off annual upgrade. She also had something for existing annual members, which was the chance to buy an additional bundle.

You can see here that Natalie created a segmented offer with the different types of people in her audience in mind. She put together different things for non-members, monthly members, and annual members that made them all feel seen and supported. It’s also worth pointing out that Natalie didn’t create anything new content for this promotion. Even with the bundle she offered her annual members, she put together existing content.

What we think Natalie did brilliantly here is to target the most profitable segment of her list - her existing customers. We see a lot of people putting together flash sales or promotions and ignoring the people who are already paying them money! So if you’re putting together an offer, what can you sell to your most profitable customers? These are the people who are going to pay you the most per head.

What was Natalie's strategy with her Black Friday promotion?

One of the biggest ways Natalie markets her products in the front end is through social media - mainly with reels on Instagram. She asks people to comment and then puts them through a sequence in their DMs. This is similar to an email sequence, but instead of being via email, it’s through people’s DMs, where the open rate is super high at about 90%.

So what Natalie and her team did for Black Friday was to combine their chatbot strategy with an email marketing strategy. For this promotion, Natalie wanted something that felt easy and fun, so she set out to make Black Friday her biggest and most fun mini-launch of the year. And something she'd never done in the past was to use an email campaign template. For the first time in her business, she decided to grab our Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaign, and (in her own words), she said the result was freaking phenomenal and incredibly successful!

How did Natalie implement our Black Friday email campaign?

A couple of weeks before Black Friday, Natalie started creating some hype through her Instagram reels. She specifically targeted this content to the segments of her audience who were already interested (i.e. warm leads who had an awareness of her offer). This wasn't for the cold audience out there, as, Natalie said, people who don't know you don't pay attention. She created a trailer to tell people that something was coming on Black Friday and asked them to join her waiting list about the offer.

She then popped into their DMs and asked people to share their ‘status’. Were they a member? Were they a monthly or annual member? Or were they not a member? And then Natalie asked for their email address. So inside her mini-chat, she created three different segments. 

In the space of a couple of hours, her team then scheduled the posts that people would get sent on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and she started making sales from the people who were on the waitlist and her email list as a whole. She took our Black Friday email campaign template and plugged in all her copy.

Creating a separate page for the flash sale

Something we suggest in our template is to have a flash sale-specific page with a video explaining what’s coming and what the offer is. This is something Natalie loved and hadn’t done before. She'd normally use longer pages, but for this promotion, she created a specific page. And that, she said, was incredibly successful.

When it came to the Black Friday weekend, Natalie didn’t do much. She spent time with her family for Thanksgiving and said this was the easiest Black Friday promotion she’d ever done! She even made the same amount of money she had made in a previous Black Friday/Cyber Monday launch when she went to town. But this time it was recurring revenue, so it felt like more of a success. And she spent about one-tenth of the amount of time on it. Guess why? Because she used our Black Friday email marketing campaign!

When did Natalie start to promote her offer? 

Natalie started talking about her Black Friday on social media two weeks before Black Friday. At that point, people started engaging with the chatbot and joining the waitlist.

As Natalie explained, this wasn't about educating her audience about what she does. One of the biggest mistakes we see a lot of marketers make is to educate their audience on the noisiest and highest email send day of the year. Black Friday isn’t the time to try and educate anyone on anything! It’s all about encouraging people to grab your offer.

It's not the time for long webinars and getting people to know you and your business. Just focus on the people who are already aware of your world and keep the momentum going. Because that’s key in any flash sale you’ll ever do -  you want people to buy based on reflex reaction.

With that said, if you were to create a new product that people didn’t know about yet, you’d need to start talking about it around two months in advance. You'd first want to make people problem-aware, then solution-aware, and only then present your offer. But this isn’t what Natalie had in mind for this Black Friday – she wanted fun and easy.

Why tell people what your offer is about (in advance)

When Natalie told her audience about her offer, she hinted it had to do with her membership. And she did that for a couple of reasons. First, she wanted people to start doing their research about the membership to decide whether they wanted to be in it. But also, she knew some people would be on the fence about joining, and she didn’t want them to join before the offer and then realise they could have saved some money by waiting for the promotion.

To share her offer, she batch-created a bunch of reels in Canva (5-10 seconds long) and then posted one a day on Instagram on the days leading up to the promotion. She always made sure she picked the audio on the day she uploaded the reel based on what was trending on the day. This is a super easy and effective process that Natalie uses, and it allows her to get her reels out in a timely way even though they're not scheduled in advance. 

Every day, she also showed up on Instagram Stories answering the questions her audience asked about the membership, and in each of them, she'd remind people about joining her waitlist. This is how she created the hype for her offer.  

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How did Natalie keep her audience warm?

To keep people warm in the lead-up to Black Friday, Natalie kept sharing screenshots of testimonials, and sometimes she'd even create a carousel out of them. She wanted to 'sell without selling', by simply showing what happens inside her membership. And that was enough to get people excited.  

The strategy of sharing testimonials works a treat because when people know there’s a deal coming up, they prepare and do their research in advance. They want to decide whether they'll buy when the time comes.

Something else that gets people excited is reminding them about the promotion and effectively warning them not to buy in the days before the flash sale. You don't want them to miss out on the deal, right? By doing this, you may see a small dip in sales in the period leading up to a promotion, but you're getting your engine revved up for when it’s time to take the breaks off on the day of the flash sale.

How to replicate Natalie's success with her flash sale Black Friday campaign

Natalie told us that this promotion did so well that she didn't even close the cart on Cyber Monday - she kept it going for an extra day! She not only found that the offer was converting amazingly well but also, her members were buzzing with the best energy and even consuming more of her content inside the membership. 

Data shows that people who buy from you once are 50% more likely to buy from you again in the future. So, to replicate some of this success, you can use Black Friday (where people typically have their credit cards in their hands and are looking for deals) to get people to buy for the first time. It doesn’t matter how noisy you think this time of year is. That’s not a reason to miss out.

You can also manufacture these types of events and flash sales at any point of the year - it's not just about Black Friday. You can use any holiday or occasion. The key, Natalie says, is to think about how your ideal client is feeling during that time of year and create offers that tap into that. You can create big moments in the summer, for example, especially if you know that sales in your industry can be a bit slow then.

And you don't need to have a huge audience to do this either! Just try and think of ways to differentiate yourself and stand out. That’s how you’ll create an audience of customers who learn to buy from you on these exciting manufactured holidays. And remember that when everyone’s doing a particular thing, you can cut through the noise by doing the opposite of that. Play a 'game of opposites'! 

The key to Natalie's success with her Black Friday promotion

So, to recap, here’s what Natalie did for her Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion.

• She created social posts to build the hype and get into people’s DMs using chatbots.
• She asked her audience simple questions to segment them into what type of customer (or non-customer) they were and presented them with offers that were relevant to them.
• At the same time, she followed up with emails (using our Black Friday email marketing campaign) to the rest of her email list.

Natalie was able to target her audience inside their email Inbox and their social media inbox at one of the busiest times of the year. This proves that even at a time when there’s a lot of noise, you can cut through it to make sure people see your offers. And let's not forget that this promotion took a fraction of the time it normally takes Natalie to run, and instead of working, she got to spend quality time with her family. Isn't that the goal?

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Sending these to your list (10 emails)”. This subject line got a massively high click-through rate - probably around double what we normally get. The reason it worked so well is that the subject line tells people exactly what’s inside the email. It doesn’t say that the email is valuable or that you'll find a link inside it. It tells you what’s in it - and that’s 10 emails. The open rate and click-through rate were amazing, so check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

About Natalie

If you want to connect with Natalie, check out her podcast or you can join her amazing membership and community.  

Related episodes

How To Create An Awesome Holiday Email Campaign That Gets Your Offer To Sell Like Hot Cakes So People Buy Like Crazy.

How To Run A Smashing Flash Sale With One of The Best Email Marketing Campaigns In The World.

What To Send In Your New Year’s Emails To Get Your Clients Excited About Your Business (And Buy From You). 

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to run a super successful flash sale Black Friday campaign) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

What's the latest in the email marketing world? Let's find out about the email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. What can we all do to make our emails work even better for our businesses?

(And yes, we'll talk about AI, but probably in the way you expect us to). 

Ready to go? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:12) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(4:57) Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification.

(7:35) The technical bits that are important for validation. 

(11:11) We need to focus on engagement with our list. 

(13:30) Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers into customers!

(17:02) Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building. 

(20:27) Stand out by humanising your content.

(24:02) Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint.

(26:44) Subject lines of the week.

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Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification

In 2024 and beyond, email deliverability is going to become more ‘problematic’. And verification is going to be more important than ever. These two elements go hand in hand. And we recommend you have all your ducks in a row to make sure your emails get into the inboxes of your subscribers.

Email marketing platforms are tightening their belts around deliverability and engagement monitoring. They're doing this so we're not all building mammoth lists of people and bombarding them with emails whether they're reading them or not.

Kennedy did a little experiment recently. He had a look at the emails he receives in his inbox and was amazed at how many big brand names whose emails he hasn’t opened for ages are still emailing him. These marketers aren't taking their list hygiene and verification as seriously as they should!

The technical bits that are important for validation 

Now more than ever, you need to focus on validation. So make sure you set up your DNS SPF and DKIM records. If you’re not familiar with these, look for some simple tutorials on how to set them up. It’s a one-time job, and yes - it's boring. You can pay someone to do it for you if you want. But get it done because people need to know for sure that the person sending emails is who they say they are. And that’s why these measures are coming into force.

A few years ago, anyone could have opened an account with an email marketing platform and pretended they were an ex-president of the US. No one would have batted an eyelid! But we now live in a world where people are being scammed left right and centre. So these measures exist to protect us all. You’ll have noticed how many scams you receive via text message compared to email. That's because the world of text messaging is still unverified. 

You can't just ignore validation because you know you’re a good, legitimate person who isn’t scamming anyone. So do that piece of work! It's similar to what's happening on social media. You can now pay a monthly fee to receive a blue tick and show you're a verified account. More people are choosing to do this because they’re genuinely finding that others are cloning their profiles!

We need to focus on engagement with our list

If you’re a customer of ours, we give you all the resources when it comes to re-engagement campaigns and processes to make sure the people on your list are those who are paying attention to your emails. Don't end up with subscribers who haven’t looked at your stuff in years!

We might even start tightening up the window of time that we allow people before we consider them disengaged. We'll then put them through our re-engagement campaign, and if they don't engage we remove them from our list. Permanently.

If you’re a member of our programmes, as part of our monthly calls, we’re going to keep you up to date with the latest email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. If things change in the email marketing world, we'll tell you!

For example, when we started a few years ago, we would measure engagement based on open rates. At the time, that worked because they were fairly accurate. But now we measure engagement based on clicks. As always, we develop and respond to what’s working.  

Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers!

The next thing to consider when it comes to email marketing trends for 2024 is the cost of ads. A lot of us are building our lists using paid advertising on various channels. And you’ll notice that the cost of advertising is the highest it’s ever been! This means that the cost of getting new subscribers is going to increase. And the one skill we all need to master is our ability to monetise the subscribers on our email list.

First of all, we need to build the skill of converting subscribers into paying customers for the first time. And then we also need to maximise how much we're able to earn from the subscribers on our list because if we’re paying more for each person we bring in, we have less time to make that money back. The marketers who are going to survive and win the ad game are those who manage to win the customer (not just the subscriber). The same goes for organic reach, as these costs are expected to increase as well.

Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building

We can't talk about email marketing trends for 2024 and not mention AI! If you work with media agencies or pay-per-click advertising, we believe they'll also change the way they work and focus more on the creative. This is because, with billions of dollars invested in Google AI, they'll always do a better job of figuring out what ads to place in front of whom, on what devices, what times, etc.

There are lots of different criteria that you need to get right – it’s a complicated cocktail. But AI is going to be able to do a better job than anyone else because they're collecting data from advertisers that are way bigger than any of us. And then they use that data to optimise the process.

The money in media buying is going to go to people who are good at figuring out creative artwork. And a lot of them are going to use AI to make it more engaging. It all comes down to humans with AI replacing humans without AI (rather than AI replacing humans).

The big opportunity here is in your ability to use AI to analyse which ads are likely to perform best. For example, you can use AI to look at 10 bits of creative, 10 headlines, and 10 bits of body copy and work out which combination will perform the best. It’s all going to be about AI informing the creative!

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Stand out by humanising your content

With more development in AI, we’re going to see a proliferation of content and profiles that are non-human. So humanising your email marketing is the way to go.

One of the greatest opportunities we have with content is to be human. It’s about creating things that AI cannot create, such as personal stories about what's happening in your life and how you feel about them. It’s about expressing your personal opinions - something AI cannot do (yet) because it's not in your head!

AI is a content factory that’s pumping out this bland "How-To" content that might have some personality and may sound like you. It's certainly going to get better over time at understanding your style, but it's never going to know what you experience daily. Not in 2024 anyway!

So when everyone on your email list is receiving so many AI-generated emails, which send people to AI-generated sales pages with AI-generated sales videos to AI-generated products, you have a huge opportunity to stand out by being human. By sharing things that aren't AI-generated. You can be different from all those content factories that create their emails, landing pages, sales videos, and even products at the push of a button.

Maybe there will come a day when even podcasts will be completely AI-generated. We had an idea a while ago to start another podcast that used a combination of text-to-speech to introduce different sections and then grab bits of content that we created elsewhere and put them together. We didn't do it. But just remember that something real is going to stand out among a lot of that type of content.

Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint

Email marketing has been around for a long time and will continue to be in 2024 and beyond because it's the highest return-on-investment marketing activity you can do in your business. The level of engagement you get through email marketing has not been equalled by anything else that anyone’s ever attempted. It enables long-term growth and sustainable scaling.

In 2024, email remains central to everything we’re doing. We believe we all need to double down on building smaller, more engaged audiences. Our job is to deepen the relationship with our subscribers using AI where possible but never at the risk of replacing or butchering those relationships. And this could easily happen if you remove the human from the messaging.

Focus on deliverability and remaining human, continue to tell stories and share personalised content, sell in every email, and increase the frequency of your emails. This is going to be the winning path through email marketing in 2024.

And if you’d like to be kept up to date with the email marketing trends for 2024 (and beyond) and what's working right now, as the email platforms develop a way to respond to this massive uptake in the volume of email and AI becomes even better quality, more realistic, and more human-looking and want to know how to use AI ethically, come and check out our flagship programme, The Email Hero Blueprint.

We take you through how to set up every single element of your email marketing (including the technical bits) to make it work for you so you can turn more subscribers into customers and master the central skill you're going to need in 2024 as ad prices continue to go up, and there's a proliferation of AI-generated bland content.

Check out all the details of why it works, how, and what's included to get the incredible results that our students get. 

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Warning: this is HOT”. It sounds like there might be something in the email that’s considered hot, like a hot recommendation, for example. But the subject line comes from the story in the email that was based on picking up a plate that was too hot (after being warned that the plate was indeed very hot!)

Why does this work? The subject line is a bit cryptic, but not in a way that sounds clickbaity to the point that people feel deceived when they open the email. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

EVERYTHING You Need To Know About AI For Email Marketing.

How To Create THE Most Successful Re-Engagement Email Campaign (And Smash Your Sales Targets).

Stop Landing In The Spam Folder & Immediately Skyrocket Your Email Deliverability – With Brian Minick.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the hot email marketing trends for 2024) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Should you take a break from emailing your subscribers during the festive period? And should you send something different in your New Year's emails?

Whether you have or haven't taken a break from your email marketing over the last few weeks, here are some ideas you can use to get your subscribers excited about your business again (and buy from you).  

Ready? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:13) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(5:30) Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period?

(8:30) Emails aren't just a sales tool.

(12:20) New Year's emails aren't just about New Year's Resolutions!

(15:10) What else can you do with your emails after New Year's?

(17:52) Get people excited about your business.

(20:18) Share your real-time experiences and stories.

(22:27) Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emails.

(24:00) Encourage people to take action and solve their problems.

(26:52) Subject lines of the week.

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Should you take a break from your email marketing during the festive period? 

We believe that your subscribers can choose to take a break from reading their emails over the festive period if they want to. If anyone decides they’re not going to check their emails during the holidays, that’s up to them. But we continue to email them – our email marketing doesn’t stop.

Plus, if your business is B2C or B2b (i.e. business to small business), if people are anything like us, we check our emails on our phones, regardless of whether it’s Christmas Day or New Year’s Day. If you want something, you’ll probably buy it on those days too! So we don’t think it’s unusual for your subscribers to still check their emails during the festive period.

And even if you’re B2B, and your subscribers use their company email address and you get an out-of-office from them, chances are they're still checking their emails from time to time. So we recommend that you don’t take a break. Instead, carry on with your email marketing during the festive period.

Emails aren't just a sales tool

We see two reasons for that. The first one is that when our subscribers first join our list, they go through automated campaigns. And we wouldn't dream of pausing those. There’s no need, anyway. Because those automations are designed to make sales, even during the holiday period.

The second reason is that our thing is to email people every day. If you promise your list you're going to email them every day, then you email them every day! There’s no special condition for Christmas Day or New Year's Day! 

You see, our emails aren’t just a sales tool. They are a way we show up in people's lives to build deep relationships with the people who want to hear from us. We’re building human-to-human connections between us and the person reading our emails. So we want to be able to wish someone a Merry Christmas in real time. That way, we can also talk about the challenges or opportunities that a particular time of year may bring.

If you help people with something, you don’t suddenly stop during the holiday period. There may be additional things you can help with because of the holiday season. You can use this time of year to push people towards reflecting on what it is you do and help them through the new struggles that this time of year brings. Regardless of what market you’re in, there will be something that applies to you and what you do. People still need the knowledge and the inspiration regardless of the time of year.

New Year's emails aren't just about New Year Resolutions!

Also, in the New Year pretty much everyone’s talking about New Year’s resolutions. And we know that the percentage of people following through is very low. That’s often because the reason for starting a new habit is manufactured and not based on someone's personal motivation or need. We all get told it's the time of year when you’re supposed to pull up your socks, get your act together, and stop putting things off. But if that's the only reason why we set those resolutions in the first place, it's no wonder we don't stick to them.  

So by all means, you can use New Year’s resolutions (or anything that’s happening in the New Year) as an anchor for your emails. Any holiday or celebration can act as a great, pre-existing hook for your emails - people are already aware of and familiar with them, and you don’t have to explain anything.

But you don't have to buy into the whole New Year’s Resolutions hype if you don’t want to. You can apply an unusual angle to it and even play opposites while riding the wave of something that already exists.

What else can you do with your emails after New Year’s?

One of our favourite things to do in January is to take a behind-the-scenes tour of our business. People like finding out what’s going on. So you could share a sneak peek of what’s coming up over the next year. And that allows you to do a couple of things. The first is that you can pre-frame people for what to expect, get them excited, and tease them about the cool stuff that’s going to be happening, such as the fact you’re launching something new. We’d recommend you talk about things that are coming fairly soon though because otherwise, the excitement might dwindle.

But you can also use this as a good opportunity to reset the parameters, the beliefs, and the expectations around your relationship with your subscribers. For example, one of the things we talk about in our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) when someone first joins our list is to set the scene and tell them they're going to hear from us every single day. We also tell them they can come to hang out in our free Facebook group, listen to our podcast, or join our main programme - The Email Hero Blueprint.

Even if you haven’t taken a break from emailing your list, you can use this time to reset the parameters and the expectations of what's to come, what you’re working on, and what the New Year means to you as a business and, as a result, what it means to your audience. How does what you do benefit people?  

Plus, if you’re entering a new phase of your business, you don’t want to create a divide between the end of one phase and the start of the next one. Because that almost gives people permission to take a break and switch off, and you don’t want to do that!

Instead, use this time to set people up for what to expect. This is a good opportunity to rebuild relationships with people and remind them that you’re showing up every day (or whatever your email frequency is) with something that’s going to help them move forward. That way, by the end of this year, your audience will have made significant progress with whatever area of business or life you help with.

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Get people excited about your business

Telling people what you have planned and what you’re excited about shows them that you have plans. You're not just chilling out, pumping out the same thing over and over again. Instead, you have new, innovative stuff coming up. And even if you don’t know what it is at this stage, give them some specifics. Don’t just talk about “new developments” or “exciting projects” with no further details. That generates zero excitement. There’s no value or emotional attachment to any of that.

What you can do to generate real excitement is to say, for example, that you’re going to make an announcement the next day, which is soon enough. But also, be specific. Are you launching three new programmes this year? Tell them. If you do more, you can always over-deliver! And if you only manage one in the end, that's okay too because what you're sharing at this stage are your plans for the year.

This is all great stuff because it shows your subscribers that you’re re-energised. You’re reconnecting and putting effort into your communication. Your business is evolving – it’s not just a matter of rinse and repeat.

Share your real-time experiences and stories

You can also talk about your goals or whatever's happened to you over the past few days. You may already be doing that in your emails, but if something fun happened during the festive season, and you have bonkers stories to share, don’t miss the opportunity to tell them in real-time. It humanises you.

We don’t believe you should hold off telling a story because it’s Christmas Day and you’re not ‘allowed’ to send an email! Keep it real - people love hearing the real-time experience of you. And that’s another good reason to be sending at least three emails every single week. So people can follow you on this journey.

If Rob sends an email from a cruise ship, we tell people. Or if Kennedy sends one while he’s in Orlando, we’ll say that. We don’t wait. Sometimes the emails are retrospective, but they don’t have to be. We aren’t the type of people to hold off our fun, interesting, novel stories until the New Year. We tell them in real-time as much as we possibly can. And we think you should, too. That way, people are running in parallel with you. They’re going through the holiday season at the same time, and they see that likeness with you.

Share lessons learnt and predictions in your emails

There’s also a big opportunity to look forwards and backwards. For example, you can share the changes, trends, and predictions about your industry or your niche that you can foresee for the coming year. Talk about how that's going to affect your subscribers and give them advice. Or, reflect on the previous year and how that relates to your customers in the lessons you learnt and things you can do differently, for example.

One thing to note if you're looking backwards, is to be sure not to back reference specific emails. So, for example, we won’t mention we sent an email three weeks ago that talked about X. We don’t do that because someone may have subscribed just yesterday. And they wouldn’t know what we sent three weeks ago! But also, they might have missed that email and not know what we’re talking about. And we don’t want to make someone feel like an outsider. But you can talk about the last year in general and the things that happened or the lessons you learnt.

This type of content tends to work well on social video channels and podcasts. And the same thing applies to emails. It allows you to feel timely and present. Just don't forget to link this content back to how it can help your audience.

Encourage people to take action and solve their problems

Remember that before the New Year (so maybe around November or December) a lot of people may have already been thinking about solving a particular problem they’re experiencing. Maybe they're gearing up to do something about it in the New Year. So tap into that. Encourage people to take action - directly or indirectly, your emails can reignite that desire to get it done.

Of course, it’s also perfectly fine to decide that your emails don’t need to take any particular shift just because of the time of year. But equally, we hope we showed you that there are plenty of opportunities you can leverage because of the New Year. It’s the same as embracing any other holiday or occasion, such as Valentine’s Day or Black Friday. You don’t want to run away from them.

If you want some help with all this, we put together a programme to help people get to a point where they never have to wonder what to send, who to send it to, or when. It allows you to become fluent in email marketing. So if you want to make dramatic changes to your email marketing this year, take a look at our programme here. It’s brand new and we’re super excited about it. It gives you all the tools and resources you need to start making email marketing work for you.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is the eyes emoji followed by the words “Watching you (watching me)”. It vaguely reminds you of the Abba lyrics “Knowing me, knowing you”. Catchy song lyrics are an awesome source for interesting subject lines. So if you were in the relationship niche, for example, you could use “Spice up your wife” or something like that. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Create An Awesome Holiday Email Campaign That Gets Your Offer To Sell Like Hot Cakes So People Buy Like Crazy.

How To Do Your Email Marketing While You’re On Holiday.

Email Showdown! B2B Vs B2C Emails – What Are The Differences And Who Wins The Ultimate Email Marketing Crown?

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Not sick of us yet? If you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn all about our ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days), The Email Hero Blueprint is for you. 

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent flow of sales without having to launch another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or 'better' subject lines. And you can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about what to send in your New Year's emails to see success in your business) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Do you track any email marketing metrics? How can you use your email marketing analytics to improve your email marketing?

If this is a topic you've been avoiding, the great news is that looking at metrics, understanding them, and using them to your advantage isn't as hard as it might sound. Just collect the right data, and you'll be able to spot opportunities for improvement and growth. And yes, that means more money!

So let's get into it. 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:19) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(2:59) Why do email marketing analytics matter?

(4:18) What email marketing metrics should you look at?

(7:59) What can you do if your open rates are low?

(11:55) The truth about your click-through rates.

(13:25) How to increase your click-through rates?

(20:51) What can you do when your conversion rate is low?

(25:12) What can you do when your unsubscribe rate is high?

(30:15) How can you use your email marketing analytics data?

(32:44) Why you should always calculate your EPSPM.

(35:46) Subject lines of the week.

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Why do email marketing analytics matter? 

Email analytics help you figure out where the biggest levers and opportunities for your email marketing are. When you look at the right metrics, you can get more from your emails. Plus, the analytics you need to track and understand aren’t that complicated and can (mostly) be found inside your email marketing platform.

You probably think that one of the biggest metrics we suggest you track is the growth of your email list. And while that’s something you should look at, other metrics will tell you whether you have a well-refined engine that’s working for you. By knowing which email campaigns are doing well, you'll find out where you have room for improvement.

What email marketing metrics should you look at?

Open rates

If you find that one specific email in one of your campaigns has a zero open rate, you’ll want to look at that. As we always say, open rates aren’t reliable, as such. But they’re still a good indicator in comparison to each other.

So if you see a surprisingly low open rate one day or on one specific email, you may want to investigate. Could it be the timing? Or the subject line? This matters because if no one opens an email, it means they haven’t seen the link to your offers. In other words, if no one opens your emails, you won't be able to influence your click-through rate. 

Click-through rate

Click-through rates are shown as the percentage of people who’ve clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the email to.

They used to be shown as a percentage of the people who opened the email, which isn't great and something systems have moved away from. This is because the way open rates are tracked is broken. So it’s best to look at the percentage of people who clicked on your links based on how many people you sent the emails to. Email platforms have switched to this method of tracking, so if you’ve recently seen your click-through rates drop through the floor, that’s probably why - the way they're being tracked has changed. But that's a good thing!

Conversion rate

Another metric you want to track is your conversion rate. How many people took action as a result of you sending an email? When we talk about 'taking action', that could mean buying your product but also registering for a webinar, for example. It's about whatever action you're asking your subscribers to take in that email.

Bounce rate and unsubscribe rate

You'll also want to track your bounce rate, which looks at how many email addresses weren't deliverable.

And finally, you want to track your unsubscribe rate. Every time you send an email, some people will unsubscribe - that's just a fact. That’s the cost of your email marketing but also the reason why there should always be some kind of offer in every email you send. 

Tracking your email marketing analytics

If you’re inside our membership The League, you’ll know we have a piece of training that takes you through how to track your email analytics in great detail. So once you set up any email campaign, you can take a look at the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of each campaign and, overall, at the bounce rate and unsubscribe rate of your email marketing.

This means you then have levers that you can start pulling on to improve your email marketing. So let's look at each metric in more detail.

What can you do if your open rates are low?

If you have a low open rate (10-30%) on one of the emails inside a campaign, it could be that the subject line needs tweaking. Otherwise, you should be looking at your engagement.

A lot of our clients, when they first come into our world, may have massive email lists, but they'll tell us they've never done any engagement management. Once someone subscribes to their list, unless they leave of their own accord, no action is being taken by the list owner to keep an eye on who’s opening the emails, who’s clicking on the links, or who’s doing anything.

Are you implementing good email list hygiene?

Ordinarily, what we see when people join our programme and start implementing our campaigns is that the frequency of their emails increases. And the first thing we advise our clients to look at is who is likely to open those emails.

If you have a list of 10,000 people and 1,000 of them open an email you send, you have a 10% open rate. But if only 5,000 of the people in your list are even using their email addresses (because all the others aren't valid anymore), you’re only really sending your emails to 5,000 people – not 10,000. The others are dead emails, spam traps, or people who no longer engage with you.

This is why it’s important to look at your business and let go of this vanity metric of how many subscribers you have on your list. It only matters if you take the time to regularly try and revive or re-engage the people who aren’t paying attention and then delete them if they don’t re-engage with you. Deleting people might sound painful, but it’s the best possible thing for the hygiene of your list. Once you start doing that, you’ll see your click-through rate go up, and you'll be able to get your list to a point where your subscribers are people who care.

The truth about your click-through rates

What happens if your open rates are good, but people aren’t clicking on the links to your offers? Typically, when you first present an offer, you’re going to see a higher click-through rate compared to the people who've gone through an entire email campaign that talks about your core offer. 

Over time, people will click on different versions of that offer, and the click-through rate will improve. Then in your day-to-day email marketing (i.e. the email you send live each day), you’re going to see a lower click-through rate when talking about that same offer.

That's because the whole point of the longer-term relationship-building you’re doing with your daily emails is about waiting for the right time for people to want to buy your product. If they had an urgent need for it, they would have bought it during the first 60 days of you emailing them through your campaigns. Because that’s what those campaigns are designed to do.

The reason why people haven’t bought from you yet is that it’s not yet the right time for them. So you can expect a lower click-through rate, which, of course, means a lower conversion rate too.

How do you increase your click-through rates?

If you want people to click on the links in your emails, make them really obvious that there's something to click on. Spell out “Click here to do X” – no matter what action you want your subscribers to take. Let people know they can click and make sure that your links look like links (i.e. blue and underlined).

To make them stand out even more, you can even put them on a separate line. If your click-through rate is super low, you could use the most obnoxious-looking link for a few weeks to make sure people see it. You could even temporarily add some chevron arrows in front of it and put it all in capital letters. Once you know people are seeing it and are clicking on it, you can then dial things down again and remove all the extra bits.

We’re literally obsessed with getting people to click on the links in our emails, which is why we put together a resource called Click Tricks, which you can get for FREE. It includes 12 creative ways of drawing attention to the links in your email so people don't scroll past them. We did some testing a couple of years ago, and we found situations where a lower open rate could still lead to a higher click-through rate because of what the links in your emails look like. So we know it works!

Why you want to increase your click-through rate and not your open rate

Think about sales calls. You're better off having fewer calls but with higher-qualified leads than lots of calls with people who aren't necessarily interested. You'll get more people buying that way. Having loads of sales calls with just anyone and everyone isn't as effective because it 'waters down' your sales process. The same thing applies to email marketing - you can get fewer but more qualified people opening your emails, and those will be the people who click on your emails.

The idea that if you have a bigger list you’ll get more opens and more clicks (and therefore more sales) isn’t necessarily true. What you’re looking for is the highest click-through rate, which might not come from having more subscribers or from having a high open rate.

There are lots of things you can do to increase your open rates (including using dodgy subject lines). But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get more sales. Instead, use subject lines that help you optimise the opening of the email and the clicking of the link so that, over time, you get the right pool of people. The more emails you send, the better you'll notice you become at this.  

The impact of subject lines on your click-through rate

Your subject lines can affect your open rate, and, in turn, that can influence your click-through rate. It's worth thinking about the level of intent of the people you’re sending emails to. Most campaigns are going to have subject lines that are suitable for people at the bottom of the funnel, which is the point where you’re telling them your programme is closing soon, for example.

These aren’t the emails where you use obscure subject lines where people need to open the email to find out your offer is closing. You'll want to tell them straight up in the subject line! We call these 'label on the box' subject lines - it tells you what's in it.

There will be times when a subject line needs to help you with an outcome. But then you’ll have other types of subject lines that are more ‘obscure’ – those that use compound curiosity, for example, and say exactly what's inside the email. That way, people need to open and read the email to find out. And those are the subject lines that help you increase the open rates of your emails.

What can you do when your conversion rate is low? 

If you’re doing a good job of optimising open rates and click-through rates, but your conversion isn’t great, it’s probably nothing to do with your emails. Often, this has more to do with your offer. Maybe you have the wrong people on your list. Or maybe your offer isn’t good or is poorly presented. Perhaps it’s not conveying the value and the transformation it can deliver.

If you’ve taken something super bland, put it on sale, and expect email marketing to work wonders for it, it won't happen. If you use your emails hoping to get massive click-through rates for something that’s ultimately rubbish, you won't convert. So you need to go back to the start. Have you got the right people on your list? Are they opening your emails? Are they clicking on your links?

If you do, and the page isn’t converting, you’re probably not sending enough people to it. We recently noticed one of our clients who was offering a $6,000 programme telling us they only had 60 people on their list. While we always say the size of your list doesn't really matter, when you do the maths, even if you had one person on a list of 60 people buying a high-ticket price product, you’d be doing better email marketing than most people! In reality, in that case, you need more people on your list.

You also need to look at your list hygiene. Are the email addresses on your list still active? Because you need a real human behind those email addresses who opens and engages with them. It's all about engagement monitoring and launching re-engagement campaigns when necessary. Don't forget that! If people aren’t engaging with your emails in a period of 60 days, put them through a revival sequence and give them one last chance to engage. If they don’t, unsubscribe them from your list.

What to do when your unsubscribe rate is high? 

Every time you send an email, you'll have some people unsubscribe from your list. That's just going to happen. In our welcome sequence (the Getting to Know You sequence) we tell people we’re going to email them every day with something that’s going to help them with their email marketing. But if that’s not for them, the door is always open, and they can leave (unsubscribe) at any time.

We see a lot of email marketers who are worried about sending emails because they don’t want their subscribers to leave. And massive amounts of unsubscribes all in one go aren’t good for anyone. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for your email marketing platform. We know that. When people join our list, for example, we have the biggest spikes of unsubscribes in the first 5 days. Then the unsubscribe rate remains quite low over time, just to spike up again when we have a big influx of email marketing activity. But that's fine and to be expected. What matters is that the people who choose to say, do so for a long time. 

How are people joining your list?

If your unsubscribe rate is generally high, and a lot of people on your list tend to leave immediately or very quickly, it’s worth looking at where the people are coming from. What’s the intention with which people join your email list? Because we can’t rely on tricking people to join – we can’t promise them something, and then give them something else. We know that some activities for acquiring new people on your email list notoriously drive high unsubscribe rates.

For example, if different businesses get together and put their products into a bundle that’s advertised together, you’ll have people who opt in because they’re interested in one or more of the products. But because they don’t have a relationship with you directly, you might have a high unsubscribe rate when you start emailing them. And this might be okay for you if you know why it’s happening. You’ll expect a big exodus of people during the first few weeks after that event, but as long as you get good sales and a return on investments, you may be fine with that.

Not all methods of bringing people onto your list are created equal. If you’re running cold traffic via ads to your lead magnet and never mention that you’re going to continue emailing people, you’re going to have a high unsubscribe rate. On the other hand, if you do a guest training or run an event, and people join your list because they loved what you delivered and want more of it, you’re going to have a lower unsubscribe rate.

Your unsubscribe rate is going to change depending on the source where people came from. Just monitor the net outcome of each activity. You might be okay with a huge unsubscribe percentage from a certain lead source if you understand why that's happening.

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How can you use your email marketing analytics data? 

Whenever you build and run a new campaign to your email list for the first time, you may be tempted to check your sales. But you can (and should) look at your email marketing analytics too. What were the:

• Open rate. 
• Click-through rate.
• Conversation rate
• And the unsubscribe rate for that campaign?

When you then automate that campaign, you’ll have some initial data to look at. And we suggest you put a process in place to check the data every 90 days and compare it. Did you notice any changes? Is there anything you think you can improve or fix? Maybe you can tweak the hook of an email or the angle of an offer. Most of the time, you won’t have to change anything, but sometimes you'll spot things that no longer work.  

This is also super helpful if your business has changed. It’s always good to check your automated campaigns from time to time in case you’ve changed your offers or the products or services you sell. Your email marketing analytics and metrics help you make your future campaigns better. You’ll have the quantitative data that tells you what needs tweaking. Over time, you’ll also get better at this and will develop a natural hunch as to what’s going to work better.

Why you should always calculate your EPSPM

Finally, the North Star metric that we always use is the EPSPM, which is your Earnings per Subscriber per Month. It tells you how much you're earning from your list every single month. You calculate it by dividing the amount of money you’ve made in that month by the number of subscribers you have on your list in the same period.

Over time, tracking your EPSPM will show you a trend and tell you exactly how your email marketing is doing. When your EPSPM is increasing, it means you’re getting better at putting things in front of your email subscribers. It doesn’t matter how big your list gets because as long as you check this metric, you’re getting consistent data. And that helps you understand how your email marketing is doing. For us, this is the number that puts all the other email marketing metrics together.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “My humiliating webcam mishap.” This is a subject line where people immediately paint a picture in their heads. It takes only seconds for the mind of a grown adult to guess what might have happened. Sure, everyone's version of it will be a little different, but they'll want to open the email to find out what happened. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Advanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.