114: Snooze, Don't Lose: Revolutionizing Email Campaigns

I know that you know how much of a fan I am of growing your email list and so I hope that you've been focused on growing your email list last year and I hope that it's one of your biggest focuses for this year as well. I truly believe that an email list is the most powerful tool you can have in your business.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite.

I'm a mama living in a tiny,

tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky

Mountains, running a multi seven figure business,

doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today.

I'm not only licensing my artwork all

all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Something that we don't talk very often about though is unsubscribes. Unsubscribes, especially to a newer email list grower, can be really painful. And so first of all, there are a couple of just mindset issues around that that we should talk about. First of all, as painful as it is to have people opt out of your world, it is okay and it is just part of growing an email list. So the first that I would beg of you to do is stop watching the unsubscribes. Definitely don't get notified when someone leaves your email list and certainly don't get too wrapped up in it, even though it is an important metric to watch. Because if your unsubscribe rates are going way up, then you need to figure out what's going on. But today I want to share just a 10 minute tactic with you on how I keep more of my email list subscribers. So once you have someone on your email list, you want to keep them there for as long as you can. And so in my world, most of my unsubscribes will come during a time where I'm heavily promoting something or I'm talking a lot about something in a short span of time. So our general emails, they don't get a lot of unsubscribes, but when we go into a promotion, we certainly are getting, you know, a reasonable but a seemingly large amount of unsubscribes, which is just a little painful. There's something that I started doing a couple of years ago that helps combat this and I thought I would share

it with you today.

So anytime that I go into a promotion, let's say that I am launching a course or opening my membership or talking about a coaching program or going into talking about Immersion Live, our conference. Or maybe I'm talking about someone else's course that I'm recommending. Anytime. It's going to be a couple of emails in a short span of time, let's say under a week or two, then I always give the subscriber the option to snooze at the bottom. Now I coined this name snooze. You could also call it pause or opt out, but basically I just say like hey, if you are not interested in hearing more about xyz, no worries. Click here to snooze all information about this, but stay on our email list for regular updates. Okay. And then I don't email them anymore about that. So it's really putting the control back into your subscribers hands. Otherwise really the only two options that you've given them is to be annoyed and delete the emails as they come in or unsubscribe from your list forever. So I love this middle option. Like you don't have to leave, but if you're not interested in this particular campaign or what I'm talking about, and I'm going to be talking about it a couple of times, then just let me know because I don't want want to send you any emails that you don't actually want. That's just annoying, right?

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This workshop is truly transformational. We hear every year that through the free workshop people have completely transitioned and transformed their lives. So come join us. All of the sessions are self paced so you can go through it on your own time. But I am also including live Q

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So the way that I do this from a technical perspective Now I use ConvertKit and I love ConvertKit. I'm a huge Convertkit fan. They are an incredible company that is for the creator in all aspects. And so if you're looking for an email service provider, I highly them. But no matter what you use, most email service providers will let you do something similar to this. So the way that I do it in ConvertKit is in the email. I say something somewhere in the email. Sometimes it's in the P.S. hey, if you're not interested in hearing more about XYZ, click here to snooze any more information about it. Because I only want to send you emails that you want to get. So on the back end, what that looks like is it's a link. And that link sends them to a page that just says we got it. Updated your preferences, we got it. And typically I put some other things that they might be interested in. Like you can hop into our blog or our podcast or go back to our website here, but it's just a link that goes to a page. But when they click that link, my system is adding a tag to them and so I create the tag and I typically call it XYZ Snooze 2024. And so then moving forward, anytime that I email about that particular thing, I send it to everyone except the people who have clicked the snooze button or the snooze link, if you will. So you can do that before you send an email. You can say send it to people with this tag or without this tag or whatever. So all it is is a link when they click the link they get tagged. When I go to send the next email I send it to everyone except those who have the tag. So it's pretty simple but it is just a way of putting more control into your subscribers hands and giving them the opportunity to stay on your list but kind of pick and choose what they hear about you. So I love it as a subscriber I love it when I get that option and I also love giving it to my subscribers. Now if you're not on my email list I'd love to have you there. You can sign up over@bonniecristine.com we'll also put the link in the Show Notes for today as well as a link to Convertkit if you want to check them out. And I'd love to know if you're able to implement this pause or opt out or snooze feature in an upcoming campaign and retain more of your subscribers long term.

My friends, create the beauty that you

want to see come alive in the world and remember there's room for you.