Listen Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-business-bestie/id1896530626
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/JQP2vswTHCw
00:00 Okay guys, let's get into it. Today's episode is about how email still prints money, and why brands are still doing it wrong. 00:08 We see so many different things being able to work with so many brands every single day, and so I really wanted to talk about the preconceived ideas about email marketing that don't actually make sense in today's world, and then why it is so important for email, because I hear a lot about, like, oh, 00:28 I don't actually look at emails, so therefore my customers don't, or, I've been doing email marketing, but it's not, like, generating any ROI, or I tried that, I quit, and I just want so badly for you to understand how important email marketing is. 00:42 I don't care if you have a product-based business, a service-based business, a coaching business, if you are a social, influencer, if you're doing social selling, it does not matter. 00:51 If you have an audience, you have to be capitalizing on email. So, a lot of times, people like to say, email's dead, but the data is telling us such a different story. 01:03 For every 36 dollars, or, sorry, for every dollar spent, you are getting 36 dollars. That's the average ROI. On email marketing. 01:11 For every dollar spent. It is the number one channel for owned audience. And honestly, though, like, that's not even saying that much, because, how, what audience is actually owned? 01:21 Outside of your list? Not many, but it is the number one channel for owned audience. And I would even be bold enough to say it is the number one revenue generating channel for owned audience. 01:34 Period. when utilized correctly. Because you can, depending on the size of your list, you could be hitting people one, two, three, four, up to seven times a week. 01:44 Do not do seven times a week unless you've got, like, over 50,000 subscribers and you segment and all the things. 01:49 But, like, you can be hitting them in their inbox consistently generating sales versus chasing an algorithm. Or, you are trying to get them to walk into your store or any of these things, okay? 02:01 So, email is, in fact, not dead. Because, like we know at this point, it is yours and your own channels are everything. 02:13 What I would say instead is not that emails are dead, it's that bad email is. If you have inconsistent sending, if you are not segmenting, if it's not inspired by and like authentic to you, yeah, that's death. 02:26 We don't want that. People can spot a fake a mile away these days and people don't want you to take up their time with bad emails because their inbox is busy. 02:38 That is not something that I want to sugar code or like take lightly. Inboxes are very busy. But the ones that do it correctly are the ones that are going to be able to scale email marketing. 02:51 They're going to be able to capture the interest of their ideal customer or client. They're going to be the ones that get the highest open rates, highest click rates, and most importantly, the highest purchases. 03:01 So what even is bad email, right? Okay, bad email is having a bad strategy. Sending when you remember. Sending when you have time. 03:11 Sending here and there. Not being consistent. You need to show up consistently. Now, that doesn't mean that if, like, you start sending on Wednesdays at 9am, let's say, and then after 3, 4, 5 weeks, you're like, I feel like I've got a really great looking email. 03:30 My call to actions are there. My segmentation is there. Everything is great, but my open rates just aren't trending up. 03:38 I'm not saying that you stick to that Wednesday 9am send no matter what. I'm saying that you consistently send each week, okay? 03:46 Because, yeah, there are times when you need to test. You need to test sending days, sending times. You need to do different things. 03:54 Consistency is about you showing up in their inbox the same amount of times on average every 7 days, okay? Because if you are randomly sending, you are not creating consistency for your customer and as a human being, we love consistency. 04:11 We like to pretend that we like spontaneity, but when it comes to marketing specifically, we do not like that. It makes us, it like, freaks out our nervous system. 04:19 It makes us not feel safe with that brand. and we have to make sure that we are being proactive as founders to make sure that we are doing all we can to not create those feelings within our customers, okay? 04:33 Okay, so, why does email still work? It is the channel that everyone underestimates. You're going to always get it to outperform other channels because it's owned. 04:43 Because it's direct, you are landing straight up in those channels. Because it inboxes. And there's no algorithm. You get to pick who gets it, when they get it, how they get it, like all the things, okay? 04:54 as far as deciding who gets what and like making sure that your deliverability is up and all of those things, like, you have the power for that. 05:03 If you have a deliverability score that is low, and because of X, Y, and Z, including Klaviyo will tell you why your deliverability score is low and your deliverability score being low is what keeps you from landing in inboxes, then you have the power to start tweaking things. 05:18 Now, the caveat to that is if you are doing everything right, because we have had cases where we have clients come to us, we know what works, we will do everything right and the client is handling it. 05:32 They're like, you do it, you're the professionals and we do it and what we find is that this is not working and it's typically because the email list that they have generated is not a strong list. 05:45 Now, why would this happen? So some different ways that this can happen. They could have gotten these people from way back in the day, maybe when their products they were offering was different and now it does not align with the people on the list. 06:00 So we call that a, a weak list, okay? And if you are not getting emails to perform and you are doing all the right things, it's your list. 06:09 It's a list problem. So that's when you have to do list cleaning. That's when you have to be really proactive about building in your list for the new version of your brand or like your offer. 06:20 It can happen if you ever were to purchase emails, to get on your list, which I highly, highly recommend never ever doing, it's a great way to waste money and to get a high unsubscribe rate, so, but it, it can make you have a weak list if you've done that in the past. 06:36 So there's a lot of things to factor in there, but you do hold the power because like, if you realize you have a weak list, okay, I'm going to clean the list, I'm going to get rid of the profiles I don't need, even if it knocks out most of my list, and then I'm going to be proactive in getting more subscribers 06:53 that want to see what I see, right? So you're in control of this. The barrier to entry in email marketing is so low. 07:01 So low. Like you, outside of paying for Klaviyo, you can just start sending emails today, you know, at no cost to yourself. 07:11 Would they be perfect? No, it's okay. the standard right now for emails is higher because, again, we are so busy in our lives, our inboxes are so busy, your standard has to be there. 07:21 So, while it's okay to not send a perfect email, it is not okay to send an under-performed email, meaning Thank you watching. 07:30 It is not okay for you to rush through it. It is not okay for it to be messy. It is not okay for it to look like you threw it together. 07:39 It has to be branded. It has to speak to your customer. It has to do its job at a high standard. 07:47 But it does not have to be perfect. It's okay if there's a spelling mistake. It's okay if something is a little wonky. 07:54 But the key is, like, you have to do your best, right? Like, getting an email out there and getting a well-thought-out, well-planned email out there are two totally different things. 08:05 They're going to result in two totally different outcomes. Right now, inboxes are rewarding selective, so segmentation. The relevancy, so making sure that it's something that people want. 08:18 Consistency, inbound providers want to see consistent stuff coming from your domain. And having value-led, so making sure that it is serving your customer or your client in a way that makes them feel valued. 08:32 Okay, so there's three types of emails that make money, and this is how we create a system. So, we know email flows, one way to make money. 08:40 Email flows, they're automated, they work in the background, they are evergreen, you can create custom flows, you can, well, I will say, like, I would never recommend you having flows in place of campaigns, you can have so many flows that you need less campaigns, because your flows are handling a lot 09:02 of the work, and you get there by doing that. Doing more and more custom flows, but flows are the number one way, they're the great, great system, amazing way to create revenue. 09:13 And then you have your campaigns, which are your intentional revenue drivers. These are, like, okay, we have a new arrival, we dropped it on social two days ago, now we're going to retarget within our emails, which is how I love, if you're doing one an email a week. 09:29 I personally would rather see you launch on socials for your new arrivals, and then use your email to, push it again, because we know that people have to see things seven to ten times before they make a purchase, so if you launch it on socials and your email at the same time, you run the risk of not 09:46 being able to retarget them for them to see it again. So, just something to keep in mind. And then, broadly speaking, broadcasts are, like, emails that create trust and create warmth. 09:57 They're more value-driven, they're more, like, from the heart. So, one thing you can do within your campaigns is mix it up. 10:04 Combine your broadcasts with your campaigns, so that you're not creating extra work for yourself. You can include, like, a little blurb, just connecting with them as a human. 10:11 One thing we do with our clients is we create a little bonus section with them. In their emails, it, like, serves the client, builds the rapport with them, so that you're technically only doing flows and campaigns. 10:21 I don't want you to think that, oh, no, I've got to do extra work, because you really don't. You can just combine it. 10:25 your flows are really important ones to have, as we know at this point. I would hope, if you've listened to some of our other episodes and follow us on social media, your welcome series, your abandoned cart, your post-purchase, and your win-buy. 10:36 Those are like the non-negotiables, and then we like to add in some other abandoned things. You can have stuff in there about birthdays. 10:44 You can do all sorts of different ones. the biggest thing to remember is that if you want to do custom flows, like birthday flows or different things like that, you need to make sure you're collecting that data from your customer at sign-up. 10:57 You can't send a birthday flow if you don't have birthdays in the system. You know, so just keeping that in mind as you're building out your pop-up and like you're working to get these leads, think about in the future, like what you might want to do at some point, which is one reason why I say start 11:11 by collecting email and SMS consent, even if you think right now that you're not going to send text messages, like just go ahead and get it because what's the worst case? 11:19 Like you don't ever use it. I would much rather you have it. Same thing with like birthdays. The problem you run into is the more information you try to get from somebody on a pop-up or a lead gen, the higher likelihood you have of people like falling off and not clicking submit, so you have to kind 11:37 of balance the two and kind of figure out from there. You can also do something where you do an email flow from the pop-up, like in the welcome series, where it's like, you say, Hey, if you want to sign up for the birthday list, you can like add that in. 11:52 But again, you want to be very careful not to overcomplicate things. Systems are about simplicity, and I would much rather you have a simple system than one that feels overwhelming, it gets complex, et cetera. 12:06 Like, it's also perfectly fine never to send a birthday email and to only do a sale like on your birthday, you know, or your brand's birthday. 12:13 So, don't think that you have to do something crazy, because you don't. Consistent revenues are going to, consistent revenue is going to come from weekly sending. 12:22 The rhythm that your audience can rely on. They get used to it, they come to expect it, they get excited about it. 12:27 also, making sure that we are managing our promotions and our, like, launches correctly. So, that's it. When you're thinking, like, for a 90 day strategy, or let's go 30 days, because I know a lot of you, like, can't get to 90 days, so let's go 30 days. 12:44 When you're looking at that, you need to look at the collections you'll be releasing, or the promotions you'll be dropping, because then you can start to plan out your emails accordingly. 12:52 You can know when you're ready to build out an email, when you have to hold, when you need to just create an email that's an email isn't about anything in particular, maybe it's not about new arrivals, maybe it's not about a promotion, maybe it's just, like, repurposing the items that you already have 13:07 on your website. You'll know, and you won't be scrambling, and it's, having a content plan like that, like, big picture, like, we talk about funnels for getting eyes on your brand, think about your content as a funnel as well. 13:22 well. You have a your main content plan here with your collections, like, as top of funnel, and then it goes down to the middle of funnel, and then the bottom of funnel being, like, the execution of it, like, the email, the little tiny nuanced pieces of it, but it all funnels down, throughout your content 13:39 planning. Okay, we talked about this, but broadcast are the announcements, the updates, the value content, it's letting them know what's going on, it's like giving them a peek behind the curtains, you know, and you honestly can even just use a quick little call to action within your emails that's like 13:56 , hey, do you want more behind the scenes info, follow along in our VIP group, or follow along in our Instagram stories, just little tiny things within your emails helping your ideal customer or client see you as a human and not just a brand, and letting them know that you see them as a human, not a 14:16 number, it matters so much, you don't have to focus on the quantity of emails, you have to focus on the quality, that being said, minimum is one email a week, like, you have to show up it's like if you didn't show up on socials, you know, like, daily, right, we know that you gain traction by showing 14:39 up consistently every single day, thankfully, emails are not the same way, but it is something you have to commit to doing weekly, it will hurt your list so much more for you to be consistent and stop, be consistent and stop, be consistent and stop, because the inbound person providers stop trusting 14:56 you, because they're like, this, this feels chaotic, and they don't like it, and they're going to tank your deliverability, and you're going to land in spam, okay, so, if your email's not converting, the biggest mistakes that we see brands making, number one, only selling, only emailing when they're 15:15 selling, like a sale, like, it is not okay to only ask for your email list to give you money, that is why, like, for our clients, every email we are sending, yes, it is selling, but every email, we also are trying to give a value content, unless a client tells us they don't want to do that, or, sometimes 15:34 , we will find that somebody's list, like, literally doesn't care about it, and if they're not ever clicking on the value-driven piece, drop it. 15:42 Because there are some lists that you will build, and you'll be like, these people really just want to buy from me. 15:48 Because you're doing a great job showing up on socials or other ways, they, like, get excited to just purchase within the email. 15:56 Another thing, breaking your email is no segmentation. If everyone gets everything, you're going to have a problem. Especially if you have, like, broad categories. 16:05 So if you carry mens and womens and children. If you are sending just emails on womens clothing, the men are going to stop engaging. 16:16 People who come to you for kids clothing are probably going to stop engaging unless they also purchase the womens clothing. 16:21 But, like, you see what I'm saying? You have to be mindful. You also have to be mindful because your deliverability score, open rates, click rates, those things are directly related dependent on your segmentation strategy. 16:32 If you are sending to an all subscriber segment, it has a high potential of tanking your metrics, which tanks your deliverability because not every email is going to be for every person. 16:45 So you have to segment accordingly. If you just have pretty emails but there's no real strategy, we actually see this a lot, particularly early with a good accounts, being managed by people in-house who the graphic design is beautiful, but they don't understand the strategy. 17:01 And so that tanks their accounts, their lists, their deliverability. You have to have your strategy along with the aesthetically pleasing portion of it. 17:12 And then another thing random promos no plan just being like desperate for a sale and just throwing things out there, trying to see if it sticks because you not only train your audience to wait for a sale, but you train them to think that you don't know what the heck you're doing because you just keep 17:28 throwing spaghetti at the wall. Okay? So you want to create that trust within your customers and that comes by creating a content plan by sticking to it by not being reactive. 17:41 Instead of, instead of being proactive and then also having an inconsistency in schedule. We know at this point that having that consistency is so important it, if we don't have consistent sending, there's a strategy gap. 17:55 We've got to address it. Our customers see it. They don't trust us. They don't want to spend their money with people that they don't trust. 18:01 You can have the most stunning emails and it might not be performing. That's so important to remember. I want you to know that when you see emails come through that are really pretty, you don't know their metrics. 18:13 So don't try to copy what they are doing because you could be hurting yourself. Because sometimes like we'll have clients come to us and they'll be like, I love the look of this email. 18:22 And like, okay, cool. but they're using one huge image, one long image from Canva. Link in to one thing, or we'll have people looking at like big brands and what they're doing and try to emulate that for a small business. 18:37 And you cannot do that. If you were to pull the curtain back on what people are doing, who have really strong email marketing channels, driving revenue, you're going to see they have a campaign calendar, which again goes back to that content calendar and it just funneling down. 18:54 They have optimized core flows that we talked about. They have behavior-based segmentation. So the right message goes to the right person at the right time. 19:02 In Klaviyo, this would be done by like past purchase behavior. If you are like talking about a local event, making sure to segment down based on location so that people who live far away from you are not getting emails about a local event that they don't really care about. 19:17 that does involve creating additional emails because like you would need to have an email going out to the other people that don't, you know, have the local stuff. 19:25 So there are like caveats to all of the things. they also have promotional strategies, knowing when they're going to have an incentive and when they're not. 19:34 Because, again, we want less chaos in our marketplace. And then they make data-driven decisions. They don't guess, they look at what's happening, they develop a plan, they pivot appropriately, they're not winging it, they're running systems, and it converts. 19:52 If you're not wanting to actively sell something, there are different pillars of thinking that you can show. You can show value, so tips to solve real problems. 20:03 You can do storytelling, talking about your brand or something that connects them to you. You can educate them, like, how to use what you're selling. 20:15 You can have proof. Social proof is incredible. having testimonials, reviews, wins from clients or, like, UGC content. And then behind-the-scenes access is always another really great thing. 20:29 And again, you can include this in a normal campaign or your email flows. Because it just creates trust, and the more trust you create, the more conversions you have later on. 20:40 Because if you show up when you only want some money from people, your audience will learn from to tune you out. 20:46 Because as human beings, we want to matter to anyone that we are interacting with. So we have to make sure that we understand that in our marketing. 20:56 The email metrics that actually matter. Let's get into this, okay? What matters? Your revenue per recipient, your click rate, your placed order rate. 21:05 You can not pay as much attention to your open rate as a standard. Or vanity metrics, like your list size. 21:12 Okay? Because I have clients that have a thousand people on their list and they make far more money than somebody with 15,000 because they have a strong list. 21:24 Like, it's not, it's the same thing with social media. You can not get tied up to the vanity metrics of how many followers I have. 21:31 Because does it convert to revenue? That's literally all we should care about. Now, the reason that open rate alone is something you should de-prioritize because open rate alone does not equal dollars. 21:42 If you have a lower open rate, but your click rate is super high, your placed order rate is super high, then that tells you something about your email marketing. 21:51 It says, okay, maybe you should test subject lines. Maybe you need to consider broadening your list and, and or cleaning out the profiles that are not opening. 22:03 If you have a high open rate, but low click rate, low revenue, that tells us people want to hear from your brand. 22:10 They want to hear from you. What they're seeing in those emails is not something that they want to purchase. What they're seeing on the website is not something they want to purchase. 22:17 You should consider looking at what you're purchasing and how you are showing it off, what your photography looks like, things like that. 22:25 Email is incredible for the information that it provides. Email is meant to stabilize your business. It's like, it is so important. 22:34 It is not just a supporting element in your business. It is the whole concept of. Stability. And I know that sometimes it feels like I'm driving the same point home, but there are still so many of you listening that aren't utilizing it. 22:51 You're not utilizing email. You're, or maybe you are, but like your list is ready for you to increase sending. And so you are stalling yourself out. 23:00 You have to know when is it time to increase frequency? When is it time to push harder on social media to get signups? 23:07 When is it, like, you have to become obsessed with your marketing channels because otherwise you are just going to keep posting on social media and spinning your wheels and not creating stability. 23:20 It is going to continue to feel like a roller coaster. And I don't want that for you because an email engine will be the thing that drives the revenue. 23:28 It is not meant to fill up your calendar. It is not meant to make you busy. It is meant to create safety. 23:36 And don't we all just want that? Like, don't we all just want to feel so good in our business that we feel stable? 23:42 We feel like we can make plans for our future? Like, that is what email is meant to do for businesses. 23:50 So, ignore this if you're looking at it. If you're looking at our YouTube video, this is not the correct link. 23:55 If you want to connect with us, have us do an audit on your business marketing, you can go to boutiquebestiesolutions.com. 24:02 There is a, there's a link at the top where you can fill out a form and we can do an audit on your business if you're curious about how to work with us, whether a done-for-you strategy or a DIY strategy. 24:13 We would love to talk to you, you can reach us on Instagram at boutiquebestiesolutions. You can, contact us through the website, like I said, like there's, we're here for you. 24:23 We don't want you to feel like you're doing this alone because we love you and we want to be your bestie in business all the time. 24:31 And yeah, so until next week guys, love you, bye!
