My Simple Principles to Email Marketing | Ep 765

What's up everyone. Welcome back to the game. Today is a tactical-ish video in our continued audio-first series on emailing. Believe it or not, I want to take you back to the Shire, uh, when I started this, this journey. I want to bring this up because it has probably been the biggest deficiency that I have had as an advertiser or marketer in my career. I kind of bring this up as a bit of a cautionary tale, and I'll explain why I think it actually happened. I have been notoriously a bad or non-existent emailer. I never personally wrote emails to my list in any company that I was, you know, the founder of until acquisition.com. So that may sound crazy, but I never did. Even when I had my gyms, I didn't write the emails. With Gym Launch, I didn't write emails. Prestige, I didn't write emails. Now we wrote emails as a business, but I didn't write them. This business with acquisition.com, because I'm so sensitive, uh, because I learned more about branding and whatnot. I'm so sensitive to how things come off and I'm so sensitive to written word. And I'll tell you why, as a little side quest, written word has this really interesting thing compared to everything else. Like YouTube videos get old, you know, anything they put on Instagram or TikTok or whatever is gone in, you know, a week basically just disappears into the ether. But written word remains like books stay relevant for hundreds of years and thousands of years, you know, depending on the book. And on top of that, like even in like the legal world, like if you write it down, it becomes binding. It has power to it. Honestly, maybe I'm ashamed of this. Like I figured it was important and because it was so important, I always put it off, which is literally the opposite of how you should prioritize things. But I was so, I'm so particular about written word in general because I'm an author and because I knew it's such an intimate setting for people to consume content that I was just so afraid that I would, I'm so afraid of wasting your time. And I think the biggest reason, this is kind of crazy, I don't actually I do email myself. If you want to be sure to not contact me, email me. I don't email. I remember hearing this stat like years ago that Bill Clinton didn't have an email. And I was like, that's going to be me. And I've pretty much more or less lived that way, but I don't recommend advertising that way. And so let me give you some following reasons for that. I have recently started a Mosey Money Minute, which is basically 60 seconds of an email that has one very clear tactic that applies to the widest slice of businesses that will make you more money. They're very granular, like little things like, hey, this is a headline change that has worked better. Hey, you know, uh, you know, this kind of speed to contact thing increased sales by X. Very, very tactical. And we've had a crazy response. So like our average CTR, which is click-through rates from emails sent, not open, just sent, is 8.5, 8.5%, which means if we send a million emails, we get 85,000 people clicking, which is just like, from what I understand, good. And so I started emailing and I have had a lot of my business friends are exceptional at email. We weren't even doing it with school either. It's basically, I've carried this mistake with me for a long time and I'm making this podcast to basically hope that you don't make this mistake. When we started just, just simple follow-up email, like not even like not even crazy advanced stuff, just simply following up with people opted in who didn't sign up for school, we got a 40% increase in conversion. So think about this. We're spending millions a month in advertising and we could have basically gotten a free million dollars of advertising per month, just fucking emailing. I try not to cuss as much on this, but I obviously fail constantly. I'm saying it to make the point. The highest ROAS platform that exists today is email. Right now, depending on the source, it's between 35 and 50 to 1 that people get. On email and still most people don't. What I want to do, I'll give you my quick little approach of how I'm thinking about it, maybe to help you get started if you haven't done it. And if you are doing it, just some things that I've found that have worked well for us. I'm by no means an advanced emailer, but from what I understand, the stats we have are pretty good. Number one is I don't commit to a cadence. I don't commit publicly to a cadence. And I do that because I don't like the pressure of feeling like I have to, I have to force something out if I don't think it's good enough. And I think long-term, I think that benefits the brand. So that's number 1. Number 2, in terms of subject heads, because people, you know, obsess about what's the subject head that gets the most opens. From what I understand, tracking because of the Apple update is actually very tough for open in general. And so I wouldn't obsess too much about that, but I would instead obsess about what percentage of emails you send have someone click or take the action. And so that's what we kind of optimize for. Beyond that, the subject heading itself, mine are all called Mosey Money Minute. And I think I plan on keeping it that way because I want Basically, Mosey Money Minute to have its own brand itself. And so my hope is that people basically just don't know when they will come and when they come, they look forward to seeing them. And so the cadence that I have right now is kind of 2-ish a week, um, that I write. If I feel like I have more, I'll send more. If I feel like I have less, I have, I'll send less. And if I don't think I have something that's worth sending, I just won't send it. We don't want to be afraid to advertise, right? Like every day I post content, thousands of people unsubscribe from all my channels. I just have more people who subscribe. The fear of an unsubscribe or an unfollow can't be the reason that you don't choose to advertise to begin with, because then taken to its natural extreme, the only people who have zero unsubscribes are people who have zero followers, right? Or zero people who subscribe to whatever, whatever platform that you create media on. I let this fear guide me for too long. And so because of that, I just basically didn't send email for years and I was really missing out on a tremendous amount of growth. And a lot of people who otherwise found out recently about our scaling workshops division, which we just started. In January, um, a lot of them have come from email, right? And it's because we just started sending them. We're like, I mean, I had somebody come in and be like, dude, you made me $500 grand from your second email that you sent. And I was like, oh, cool. I'm glad to hear that. He's like, yeah, you've literally paid for everything so many times over. And that's kind of like just TL;DR, like my, my hope and my strategy with all the stuff that I put out is I always want to pay for myself before I ask for anything. And I think that's a, a pretty decent strategy. And it's weird because I still, I'll be honest with you, I still to this day when I'm sending tactics that are working for us right now, I still have this little like wince before I send it because I'm like, oh, this is so good. I don't know if I want to share it, but I still end up sharing it anyways. And so I would use that as a good litmus test for what you're choosing to send out. It's like if you wince a little bit, cause you're like, I don't want to like give away this nugget. It's like, that's the stuff you should send. Because the thing is, is everything else everyone already knows. It's gotta be the gritty stuff. It's gotta be like the, hey, we just add, we move this thing over and it crushed. And your fear is like, oh, what if everyone does it? But then everyone's not gonna be you because you're gonna figure out the next thing. The fear comes from a place of scarcity because we believe that we will never find something else again. Right? And that's fundamentally what scarcity is. But if you don't think that you're gonna stop working, you don't think that you don't think you're gonna get better. Like the stuff that I figure out now is way better than the stuff that I figured out 5 years ago. And so it's like, not only am I not gonna stop, I'm only gonna get better. So even though this is, this might be the, the most relevant nugget that I can give to my audience right now today, next week I'll have an even more relevant nugget that I can give them. And so it, it just kind of forces you to always uplevel and be better. And that is the kind of pressure that I like having, cuz it just forces you to keep stepping up. And if you do keep stepping up for a very long period of time, you eventually end up at the top of whatever market or industry you're in. Breaking this down, number one. If you're not sending email, please send them. Number 2, tactically, the thing that got me going for Mosey Money Minute was that I wrote out 24 emails. I did it in one sitting. Um, and it took me like a, you know, a half day or a whole day. I can't remember, but knowing that I just had 24 ready, I was like, okay, well, that can just be my baseline. So, you know, twice a month. Now I don't publicly commit to that, but at least I'm like, I've got this backlog that I, I have as like backup, right? That I know are really good. So if you're not sure, just write 12, write one a month. And I think what happens, and this is, this is how I think I want to encourage you to send one email because what will happen is that you will probably make money from it. And then it will hopefully reinforce you sending more email. I'm now getting like kind of addicted to sending emails. So I, I'm like looking forward to writing them because I love writing and I love business. And it's, it's insane to me that I didn't do this for so long. And so please don't be like me. Please actually send email sooner. Please send email when you have a smaller list. I've told the story about the lady who had a 5,800 person following. And she told me her first sale from her email list came when she had 8 people on her list. And so some of you think, oh, my email list is too small. I think that's a terrible way to think about it. It's a great way. It's practicing when you have very low stakes, right? So for me, the first email I sent was to a list that had like 600,000 people on it. And so I was like terrified to like, to like mess something up. But if you have a smaller list or something, then that's fine. Right? So that's, that's number 2 is just like, just write them out ahead of time. Uh, and then that way you can commit to it. And then as soon as you get that little reinforcement loop, um, it'll probably encourage you to do it faster. The next one is play around with the structure of the emails. You know, write ones that are longer text, write ones that are shorter. And I don't think I would stick to, to one thing. If you're feeling a longer one, shoot out a longer one. In the, in the first book, $100 Million Offers, I think the first page says there are no rules. And I try to live that way. Obviously there's laws, you know, we try very hard not to break, but rules, I prefer to live a life without rules. And I think that marketing very much works that way because Oftentimes the things that become marketing rules are the things that you have to break to become a good marketer. I would encourage you to not live by too many of them. The next one, number 4, is the obsession around unsubscribes. Just ignore, just focus on CTR, just focus on the people who take action. The next one is, uh, PS statements always have the highest click-through rate. So I would always include a PS, even if it's just for fun. I have lots of fun PSs in my emails. I make memes because I think they're fun. And so I put a lot of them in mine. In my PS statements. And again, it's just like, you know, people, people read the newspaper because they start reading the newspaper because they want to find out information, but they keep reading the newspaper because they have the cartoons and the funnies in them. And so I kind of see the newsletter that way too. It's like people, people come for the tactics, but they stay for, for the funnies, right? Or for the feeling that, that feeling of like, oh, he gets that too. Like, oh, he's actually really looking forward to his weekend, not because he has time off, but because no one's going to bother him. Like just those little fun little entrepreneurial moments or whatever it is for your relevant audience. that they'll be like, oh yeah, that's, that's me too. The next one is just stick to the simplest writing possible. And so at least B2B, it's my impression that mostly text-only emails tend to do better. Mostly emails with as little fluff as possible, which is like whenever I see 3 sentences, I'm like, can I do this in 1? And that's kind of like the hammering, like the blacksmith, like you just keep hammering away at it until you get that shape. And so it's harder to write an email that you can fit into 200 words than it is to write an email that you can fit into 600 words. Because realistically, a good 200-word email is one that was 800 and became 200. And so I would encourage you to write multiple drafts to get it down to just the absolute consolidated size of like, what is the thing that matters most? And I think that will translate into more people clicking, more people sharing your emails. The amount of people who screenshot emails from their phone and then post it on their story has baffled me and it's been awesome. because it's been very reinforcing for me. And so I kind of like pick that as like my gold star. It's like, I know when an email is good. I don't even look at the stats per se, like email to email. I just look at like, how many times am I getting tagged where people are screenshotting my emails? I'm like, okay, that's a good, that's a good litmus test. And then overall, I would, I would think about it as a platform. Um, my fear around emailing is very deep-rooted, uh, because I'm so worried about wasting someone's time. I had this kind of epiphany that I'll share with you, which is if you think about email the same way you think about Instagram or you think about TikTok, it's like I post twice a day. I'm not afraid to post. If someone wants to unsubscribe or unfollow, that's okay. And I want to make it easy for them because I don't want to have people who are following me for no— like they don't like, you know, my stuff. Um, I don't want the unfollows or unsubscribes to frighten me from advertising more. I, right now we're emailing about 3 or 4 times a week. Um, we have segmented the list, really just 2 segments. We have kind of the general list and then we have the list of people who are over a certain size. and so they get different, uh, different emails and the responsiveness of those lists are very different as well. If you do have clear avatars, it's worth, in my opinion, adding that little bit of friction on the opt-in where it just adds, ask them to self-identify because again, it's one of those like, why do I want to ask them to self-identify? If you don't want to ask them to self-identify, then you're just going to end up sending them stuff that they don't care about. And I would much rather have fewer people opt in, but have them only get stuff that's, uh, important for them. And so I shared this in the YouTube video that I recently made about email, but HubSpot did a study where 791% increase. So like an 8x increase in, in, in return. So in money made from email came from segmentation. If I decrease my opt-in rate by 10%, but I have an 8x increase in how much money I make because I had that segment, then that makes total sense. It's worth, it's worth the trade. One, don't be afraid of, or I guess I'm more like 0.7. So subsection A, don't be afraid of sending emails for unsubscribes. Two, or B. Don't be afraid of having them self-select or segment early on to tell you more about them so you can send them stuff that's more relevant. And I would personally rather send fewer emails to a more segmented list, which is more total emails. So if I send, let's say I have 4 lists and I send 1 email to each list, I will bet you that that will outperform 4 emails to the entire list. If you are like, man, this is really high return for me. How can I get higher return? The higher return is in the segmentation. And in getting more granular rather than in necessarily sending more emails because you are sending more emails overall as a business, but just fewer per segment. And so that kind of balances both. And so those are just some of the things that I found from emailing. Uh, and it's proven an unbelievably productive and profitable channel. And it's one that I'm going to be continually investing. So you'll probably hear me talk more about email and you probably haven't heard me talk about email almost in general, because I don't talk about stuff that I don't do. And so now that I am doing it, I'll be sharing the stuff that's been working well for me. So that being said, please email your list. And, uh, if this was good, you know, when you get my emails, if you can, by the way, it's acquisition.com/newsletter. And if you opt in anywhere on the site, I would say be honest about where you're at with your business because we'll send you different stuff. So like if you're starting out, don't, you know, opt into the advanced thing because like you're just going to get stuff that you can't use. And obviously if you're advanced, don't opt into the easy stuff, the early, early, early business owner stuff, because you're just going to get starter stuff. With all that, I love you. Keep crushing, make money, stay rich, and I'll see you in the next one.