Welcome to episode 359 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
I’m really excited to talk about e-mail marketing today because inside of Hit the Mic Backstage right now, you’ll find a full version of best practices, tips, tools, all of that stuff to grow your e-mail list and to actually use your e-mail list. Because as we’re gonna talk about, it’s not just about growth, it’s about using it. And so you can check that out at HittheMicBackstage.com. Let’s jump in on today.
So, we’re gonna talk about four things today. The first being goals, and the reason we’re gonna talk about goals is because literally everything else we’re gonna talk about … In fact, growing your e-mail list at all doesn’t matter if you’re not clear on this part. I want you to really think about why you need an e-mail list, and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but really, like what is the purpose of your e-mail list?
Now, I don’t want you to tell me or yourself or whoever you’re talking to about this because quote the money’s in the list. Yes, you can monetize your list, but you still need to know how and who and why and with what and all of that stuff, and so you need to know your goals. My e-mail list absolutely has multiple goals. Ultimately, it’s about getting clients, but it’s not about getting one kind of client, and so … And we’re gonna talk about this a little bit later, then we have to look at things like segmentation, but that comes down to, again, knowing my goals.
I am building new e-mail funnels all the time. Great, those only work if I know the goal. Think about what the purpose of your e-mail list is, it may have multiple purposes, it probably does as far as selling different things, but you have to know what those are. I had a client recently, and we talked about this a couple weeks ago, but I had a client recently and we were having this conversation and she was talking about just growing her list, and I was like, “Great. Why?” You know, maybe you want to run a live event. Okay, and obviously you want to have people to sell that live event to, but you need to know the timeline. There’s your goal. Okay, so I know I want to have this event in January and it’s June right now, it’s gonna be July in just a few days, I want to build the list to increase interest in that.
Awesome, now we have a goal and a timeline. We can absolutely start funneling an e-mail list towards that goal ultimately because we’re providing them value. However, if it’s, “I want to build an e-mail list because some day I want to do a group mastermind, a small group, high dollar, super VIP mastermind someday.” Awesome, start building your list, keep building your list, and keep building your list, but now the people who joined your list let’s say a year ago aren’t necessarily in the same space. First of all, a lot of them might not still be in your list, but you’re just building for the sake of building, and that’s really where we get to our second point, which is the idea of quality over quantity.
We talked about this in probably every scenario, in fact I know for a fact we’ve talked about it about this, a list of 10,000 people is only valuable if they’re 10,000 people who give a crap about what you’re talking about. This is why we don’t buy e-mail lists, this is why we don’t trick people into being on our list, this is why we don’t break spam laws, this is why we deliver value and we keep engaging them because we want them to be quality leads. I would hands down rather have 1,000 quality leads or 100 quality leads than 10,000 names and e-mail addresses that mean nothing, that do nothing, to send an e-mail address and get no response, to send an e-mail broadcast and nobody even opens it much less clicks it.
What is the purpose of that? That is not longer a business investment, it is now a business expense and that’s not giving you any value and it’s not allowing you to give anybody value. So, this is why we go back to point number one and we have goals. We know why we’re building our list. It’s also why moving to our third thing, this is why we get specific. We do things like segmentation and using our lists or tags or however your system is set up or groups, I think is what they are called in mail chimp, to be identifying the exact needs of people on our list.
Not everyone on my list, for example, is created equal. We have people who are in sales funnels geared towards Hit the Mic Backstage, we have people who are in Hit the Mic Backstage who I can … Who maybe interested in something like Bam or one on one calls. I also have people on my list who have signed up after seeing me speak or having met me at an event and who want to know more about what I know because they’re looking at hiring us for strategy or consulting or hiring our team for management or hiring me for one on one coaching or their team training for their own social media teams or digital marketing teams or whatever the case may be, so we use segmentation to target content to each of them specifically.
Now, I will be absolutely, completely transparent with you, this is not something I do a good enough job at right now. Hands down, absolutely, I wish this is something I would have started doing much freaking sooner than I did it because for a long time I had one big list and that list was just that, it was a list, and it had zero segmentation, and so as the list has grown and as we have learned, we do have some segmentation, but there is absolutely so much valuable information about the people who are on my list that I straight up don’t have because I waited too long to start segmenting them. I waited too long to start using things like tags to identify what people were clicking on, how people were engaging, the people that read every single e-mail and click on every single podcast, and the people who haven’t looked at anything in months ’cause guess what guys? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing this or how amazing you are, there will be people that fit into both categories.
Absolutely I wish I would have started doing that so much freaking sooner, but it’s absolutely one of the best things I’ve started doing in the last … Let’s see, I started really doing it probably 18 months ago. I started really taking it seriously this year, but something I wish I would have done like four years ago. Seriously. Take that step now. The sooner you can do it, the further ahead you’re gonna be, and even if it feel like it’s way too late and you already have 1,000 or 5,000 people on your e-mail list and you’re like “Oh, there’s no way.” Start segmenting the new people. Start segmenting based on how people are clicking so you can get that data, get that information. Absolutely. Okay?
And all of that of course leads us to our fourth thing, which is consistency really does matter. Not just in, “Okay, I’m sending them a weekly or a bi-weekly or a monthly e-mail update about what’s going on in the website.” But in that initial sequence, so they signed up for something, don’t just send them a welcome e-mail and the next e-mail they get is whatever your frequency of standard newsletters goes out. No, have some e-mails in that follow up sequence. Have some content, some additional value, a sales message, whatever it needs to be for you where you’re at in your business.
It’s one of the reasons I do like challenges and things like that, and if you’ve signed up for either of the funnels we have going right at the moment you know how we structure this, but basically people sign up for a multi day training series where they in the initial e-mail actually get a webinar that has all the same information, and then they get a follow up sequence with the training series so they can work through it. And then they get a follow up e-mail with the sales message and on that webinar there’s a sales message, there’s the opportunity to get a trial backstage, and then guess what? Then they go into our regular sequence of e-mails.
Instead of just going, “Okay, here you go.” And then, “Here’s jumping into the middle of the book. Here’s our regular e-mails.” No, we take that time to get people starting and moving and going with us for a little while. We give them that value. We connect. We work through the thing they initially had a frustration around, and then we through them into the e-mail pool. Okay? And again, you can be using that segmentation to be sending them e-mails that are really specific to what their needs are.
Now, my general newsletter, I’ll be totally honest, it’s the same for everybody. I don’t segment that very much right now. That may change going into the third quarter of this year, I’m really thinking about testing specific e-mail copy to specific segments of my audience. I have done that around sales opportunities or affiliate stuff, but I think we’re gonna actually test in probably August segmenting the actual newsletter and seeing how that affects open rates, and it’s gonna start with just testing different headlines. But I can do that because I put that segmentation into place. Because I’ve been consistent already, I have a ground level amount of data. Because I focus on quality over quantity, I have a gaged e-mail list who wants to hear from me and who is actually engaging. So again, I will have some data to work with, and I have all of those things and I’m able to test these things because I have very specific goals.
I know exactly what kind of result we’re getting to so I can tell if these things work or don’t work. Do you see how all of that really comes into being able to test these things? All right. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got for you today. I want you do take action on this stuff and let me know how this goes because, again, this stuff is killer. If you want to take this a step further, be sure to join us Hit the Mic Backstage, that’s where you will find the extended version of this training. The full training where we’re talking about more tips, more tools, more tactical how tos on growing your list, and like I said tools, my favorites, my preferences, and a lot more. Cool?
In addition to that, pay attention because next week … Next Tuesday, actually, so the next time you hear from me live in the training library of Hit the Mic Backstage will be a full messenger training using Facebook messenger, bots, running ads to your basic messenger, this is gonna be a really powerful thing to sit alongside your e-mail list. A lot of people are calling it the e-mail list killer, I prefer not to call things the killers of other things, it’s just me. We’ll look and see how it goes. The prize is gonna go to those people who use it correctly and use it authentically, so I know it’s gonna be you. Check out that training HittheMicBackstage.com. I’ll see you there.
