Why Email Marketing is a Game Changer for Neurodivergent Owners with Helen Lindop

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're gonna be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi, and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, and I'm also known as the Geeky Girl. I have a very special guest with me today, and her name is Helen. Helen was actually a speaker at our most recent Neurodivergent Business Summit, and I'm excited that you came to join us today, Helen. Helen Lindup is a mentor for neurodivergent solo and independent business owners. With a background across IT training, education, and small business, she brings decades of experience in supporting people from all walks of life. Over the past 10 years, she has taught employability courses for adults, mentored autistic university students, and run her own email marketing business. Combining her roots in training and with a passion of mentoring, Helen now helps neurodivergent small business owners gain clarity, confidence, and to develop their skills so that they and their businesses can thrive. Thank you so much for being with us, Ellen.

Oh, thank you for asking me. It's great to be here.

I love the fact that you have IT training because of course I also have IT training and it's fun to kind of play and have conversations with people who have that sort of geeky background together.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's geek out.

We promise we won't go too hardcore geek if you're not kind of on the geeky world, but we will have a little fun with it.

Yeah, we won't go the full geek, just semi-geek. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, just, just enough so we can play. So you have done a lot of really incredible things. And we talked about, of course, in your bio of, you know, the different roles that you've played in your life and, and such. What led you to helping neurodivergent business owners?

Well, a lot of what I've done has been training. So training is the thing that's kind of flowed through all of that. And I've trained on various different things. And I Ended up the last sort of 5 years or so working in adult education in a local college alongside my email marketing that I was doing. And it turned out that quite a lot of the people there were neurodivergent. And I didn't intend to start working with neurodivergent people. It just happened that a lot of people in adult education are kind of filling in for things they didn't get at school. And a lot of the time they weren't getting it at school was because they were like dyslexic and they hadn't been diagnosed. And then they, you know, got to 40 and and they realized that, you know what, this is why I found education a real struggle all my life. And it might be suddenly they had the opportunity to get a diagnosis, or it might be their kids got a diagnosis, and then they thought, hang on, this is me. This is what's been going on. And then they were coming back and they were, you know, working on their English, or they were just learning skills that they hadn't had access to at school because just they could not access the curriculum in the way that they should have been able to back then. They should have had the support back then. And it was just, it kept going like that. Really. And then we had people, you know, with autism and dyscalculia. And I just found it really interesting. It was great to be able to help people in a way that they'd not had before. Like, it was good to see the things slotting into place when they'd had a terrible experience at school a lot of the time, and they'd been really negative about education because of that. But I just like working with people that think in different ways, you know, and it just— I just found it really fascinating. And then I found that with my email marketing, I was People were saying to me, look, I really like the way you explain stuff. I understand it in a way that other people can explain, and it's too fast, or it's too much information, or it's just not honest. You know, it's strategies that just work for corporates and don't work for me. So, the two kind of grew in together over a period of time. And I just thought, well, hey, this is a bit of a message that I probably should be doing something a little bit different. So, I changed Changed my path a little bit.

I love how you allowed yourself to evolve. I think that's one of the things that we struggle against is the, the concept of, well, nobody else is doing this, so I shouldn't do it, or this isn't how other people do it, so I should just keep a lid on it. But instead you allowed it to go, oh, here's something that, that people are looking for, and I actually have some answers that can help them. And you allowed that evolution in, you know, what you presented in, and in, in this business model. I think that's really cool.

Oh, great. Thank you. It just keeps life interesting, doesn't it? I mean, you know, it's, you kind of got to run with what life gives you sometimes. And if it gives you a new path, that's, that's interesting. Just, just run with it and just see what happens.

No kidding. So tell us a little bit about your email marketing business. What is it that drew you to do that?

Well, it's, it's kind of going back to the IT training a bit. So a lot of what I did in the early days of my career, I'm talking the '90s, was IT training, kind of, kind of pre- YouTube pre— I mean, the internet was there, but it was all text. There was no video. So, it was a different world entirely. So, I'd always been a bit of a geek and liked showing people how to use technology. And then I hit a point where I had 2 small kids, and I was kind of stuck at home, and I just wanted to build a business I could run from home. So, I just looked at how I— and I've always had a bit of a passion for small business as well. So, I just thought, well, how can I best help small businesses in a flexible way around my kids? using the skills that I've got. And that's when I got into all the stuff that I'm sure all of us are really familiar with, like the social media, did a bit of SEO, I learned a bit of graphic design, learned the marketing, all those skills that you need in small business. And then initially, when we were talking about 2010, 2012, something like that, it was possible to just know a bit of all of it. But then it just kind of exploded. And it was just like, I can't be a social media expert, I need to be like a YouTube expert or a Facebook And it was just too much, just too much. And I thought, well, I need to kind of pick something that I can do and I can do well. And then I saw that a lot of— for a lot of small businesses, the piece that would have the biggest impact and they were not seeing was the email marketing, because it underpinned everything else. And so, I was seeing lots of small businesses who were spending a lot of time on social media, and then they would lose their reach, or then they would get shut down, or they would get locked out or whatever, and they had nothing. And I was I was saying, well, if you, if you have that system behind you, if you've captured your leads in email marketing, you've got that asset there that you can use. And it doesn't matter, you know, if you get booted off YouTube, or if Facebook drops your reach again, or any of that stuff, you've got that data there, you've got those contacts that you can do things with. So I just thought that was where I could make the biggest difference. And that People found that really difficult because there's a lot of data, there's a lot of strategy, there's— it feels complicated and overwhelming. So that's what I picked really, that was the thing I thought I could help with the most.

I think that's awesome. Your journey and my journey are quite a lot aligned actually, because I mean, I was doing the IT stuff in the '90s too. Like, that was where I was. And when I came into business, my first part of my business was actually helping people, small businesses, fixing their computers, running cables, the things I did corporately, right? And then I evolved into email or into social media marketing because everybody was like, well, how are you doing it? So you ended up, right, you end up sort of just showing them because the love of sharing. And then I love the way you said that you realized that as social media was changing, you had to figure out a specialty because it became— I mean, social media became complicated because for, for the, for those who are running businesses now who weren't running them back in the early 2010s-ish, I mean, they They probably don't realize how base it was in social media. Like it wasn't as, it wasn't as complicated and crazy as it is now. So I love the way you said that, oh, I realized I needed a specialty. So that was a really cool sort of aha for you.

Yeah. I mean, looking back 15 years, I guess we're talking, aren't we? There was Facebook and Twitter and that was pretty much it. I mean, people didn't think YouTube was social media. It was just somewhere you stuck videos, wasn't it? You know, it wasn't social social. So, and then you've got, you know, Pinterest and all these other platforms came on and video became much bigger and video is a skill in its own right, isn't it? You know, it's—

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I became, I mean, there obviously are some marketing experts, digital marketing experts who can help you with all of that, but the good ones are the ones that are doing strategy and then pulling in an expert for the piece of the strategy that you want to use. That's, that's what I see. I don't see anybody doing all of that. At all levels well, because it's just too big.

It is, it is massive now. And like you said, you know, things change. I've always been a PC in terms of like, you know, if you're listening to this in audio, I just did the air quotes. But literally, I like to be in control of my data. The reason why I don't use Apple products is because it's far too proprietary, and I can't peel it apart and do what I want with it. I'm Android, PC, I like to rip those things apart and be able to And that comes from the geeky side of me as well. But like you said, not owning your audience, which is why I always thought from the very beginning, I was like, it's really important that I have my own website because I need to be in control of people being able to find me even if I lose platforms. Having an email list, because like you said, if you lose a platform, at least you still have your email contacts. So I've always bought into that theory too.

Yeah. And I think for a long time, email marketing looked kind of old-fashioned. Because social media was just so new and exciting and shiny, and email's boring, isn't it? Why would anybody open an email? And then obviously social media, the darker side of it came out, and I think people went back to email a bit. But still, I think it's because it's, you know, in digital terms, it's really old. You know, it's been around a long time. Sometimes people don't think it's that exciting, but I think the fact it stood the test of time is really important. And we're still opening emails. I mean, I know our inboxes are pretty overwhelming these days, but I'm sure most of us open our emails inbox, you know, a few times a day as a minimum, because you just get everything in there, don't you? So, the challenge now is not so much— well, the challenge is really getting noticed and getting opened, really, isn't it? That's the challenge. And a lot of that is not shiny tactics and clever so much clever copywriting. It's just people knowing that you've got something of value that they want to read. You know, that's, that's what's more important these days. So even though email's been around, I guess, 30 years or something like that, what we do with it is different, and how you approach it needs to be a bit different these days.

100%. And I know that we could overcomplicate email to the ends of the earth. I mean, you could, you know, totally— I mean, I'm a stats girl, I love my stats, and you could totally dig into all of the stats from all of the places. But if you're overwhelmed by that? Like, let's say you have somebody listening right now and they're like, oh, email's far too overwhelming because I have to worry about open rates and these rates and those rates and deliverability and blah blah blah blah blah, and you're in that crazy spiral. What advice would you give them to say, hey, hold on a second, like, just start here?

I think I would always say start with your strategy. And that sounds a bit scary, but your strategy can be really, really simple, particularly if you're a small business. It's like, what do you want this to do for you? And when I've said that before, sometimes people say, well, I just want to send emails. You know, how hard can— why do you not get this? But I mean, beyond that, I mean, how does it fit into your overall marketing strategy? So some people want to send emails because they want to sell directly from the email itself. And that can be the case for a lot of product businesses. You know, you've got this product range and you've got this offer on XYZ this week. You know, here's a discount, click here, buy, you know, end of story. And then you can have some businesses that are more kind of knowledge-based. Where it's a long educational process. So you're educating and building trust over a period of time. So you're going to be much more around content and then maybe sending people to events or webinars or podcasts or all that stuff. So the strategy you want to use can— doesn't have to be complicated, but it can be quite different from one business to another. And you need to make sure that you, you know why you're doing it before you even start. And then the data becomes much easier because you're looking at your data and thinking, well, does this support my strategy? You know, if I want to get people reading my articles, are they reading my articles? You don't have to look at absolutely every number that comes in and just try and interpret it. You know, it's just the stuff you need to know that you're going to be looking at.

And I think it's interesting to say that you don't need to look at all the numbers because we hear a lot of talk about the numbers. Like everybody's like, oh, deliverability rates of this and open rates and da da da da. And I know that can be It can be overwhelming for people who don't like those kinds of data, but it could also be overwhelming for people like me who love the data because like I could squirrel on that stuff and totally hyperfocus on that and not actually write the articles. So, you know, there's that balance you need to find.

Yeah, that's right. And I think, I mean, a lot of people don't ever look at the data. A lot of small businesses don't, which is, is the other extreme to what you've been talking about. And they don't ever know if what they're sending out is actually working. So you kind of got to hit it somewhere in the middle. So, you know, your data can't be your sole focus, because ultimately you've got to get some content out there that people want to read and engage with. That's really what's got to happen for this to work. But on the subject of data, you've got to be a little careful with it as well, because open rates in particular aren't very accurate now. So what you're looking at with open rates is not, oh look, it's 50% or something like that. It's— you're looking at trends. So, you know, the real— you won't ever know what the real number is because you'll have various bits of software in between that are messing up your data and you can't really avoid that. But what you can do is you can look and think, okay, well, my open rate stayed roughly the same over 3 months. Therefore people are opening it and reading it, and I must be doing something right. If you have a sudden dip down, you're like, okay, they didn't like that. That's a problem. Or if it just goes down on a slope, sorry, I'm using my hands to explain this. If it just slopes downwards over time, then you've got less people opening over a long period of time. So that's something you need to look into. So you need to be a little cautious with open rates and also click rates are They're more reliable than open rates, but even those are not— you can't take them as 100% the truth anymore. So it pays not to get too hung up on them. Yeah, yeah.

And more to that concept of open rates, people might be thinking, well, how could open rates not work? And so for the non-techies, I will tell you that, you know, one of the things that I love to do is automations. I mean, I live and breathe and love automations. And so one of the automations we have locally at Geeky Girl, and a lot of our clients have as well, is it literally takes the emails that come into the inbox and shuffles them across and then puts them into a software called ClickUp, which is our project management software. Well, when that happens and they're marked as read on one side, it will mess with the open rates that the person's looking for on their side. I may never read that email, but it's gone to my project management system and it's been marked as read, so the software is going to tell the person that I read it. So that's what you're talking about with the pieces of software in between that can mess with those things.

Yeah, absolutely. And I saw this on a client's— we were using MailerLite and I was just looking through his data to just see if people were reading his stuff, basically. And I saw that a good proportion of his emails were being opened within seconds of them being sent. So that was just—

Yes.

It's worth looking at that. If you just look at your data, you could probably see that, I don't know, maybe 10% or something like that of emails are opened immediately as it's sent, which is not possible because some people, people are not going to be looking at their emails and opening them the second that they arrive in their inboxes, are they? It's just not going to happen. Or maybe one person, maybe a few, but not that many. And then, and then if you look at the opens within the next sort of 12 hours, a load of them were opened again. So you could see the machine opened it within seconds and then the human opened it, you know, 6 hours later when they got around to doing it. So you can see it in your data if you have a look.

Yes. Well, and ultimately at the end, in my, in my opinion, my humble opinion, even if you don't have a strategy in mind, It's still valuable to start collecting email addresses, even if you don't know what you want to do with them yet, but you're in that, like, I'm going to need them and I'm going to need to build a strategy around it. It's never too soon to start collecting.

Yeah, absolutely. Because there'll come a day when you think, yeah, well, I want to promote my book, or I've got a webinar I want to invite people to, or, or anything like that. And you'll think, right, wish I'd set up a list a year ago. I would have had something to promote it to. So yeah, I mean, even if you're just sending just blog posts posts or links to blog posts or just really informal stuff. It's a good idea to just do that. And it also gets you into a rhythm of sending emails consistently because emailing consistently is really important, both for deliverability, because it shows that you are basically the opposite of a spammer who just sends very infrequently and sends out to loads of people. So consistency is good. And also people get used to hearing from you and they start to look forward to the stuff you send and they They, they start to look out for it in their inboxes, which is great too.

Well, then you probably noticed this yourself, and, you know, those of you who are listening, you probably noticed that when you're going through emails, you're like, oh, I remember that name, I, I signed up for their thing a while ago, or, oh geez, that name pops up, how do I know them? And you open their email just to read and go, oh yeah, I remember how, you know, just seeing their names over and over again on a repetitive basis is important. What can you tell people about being worried about being a spammer, right? Like, so So let's say, for example, we used to send emails 3 times a week. People really didn't— we had some pushback on it. And then we thought, okay, we'll change it to 2. Of course, since my concussion, we've really dropped off a lot of the emails lately. But when you're thinking about from a business owner's perspective, some people are like, oh, I don't want to send too many emails. Like, how do I know when I'm sending too many or not enough?

Yeah, so I think I would start with how many quality emails can you send? Do you realistically have time to produce? So you want to make sure that what you send is good quality and people are going to read it. And if you only have the time to send an email every 2 weeks, but it's a good one, then that's okay. I mean, you're probably going to get more benefits from sending more frequently than that, but only if it's good. So I would start with, you know, you, what time have you got, and work from that. And then I would also say that there are some experts out there that say, send an email every day, you must do, you won't get the results otherwise.

Right.

And I would say that some audiences can tolerate that and others will hate you. And I think a lot won't tolerate that. So I would say don't feel under pressure to send loads and loads of emails either. And I would say have a, have a guess at what you think would be appropriate for your audience. So if you are working, if you've got like a product-based business, and most product-based businesses in your general area, they're sending 3 times a week and people are expect that and that's okay, you know, start with that. If you're maybe a coach that you're, you know, the people in your area and your just business area are more likely to send a really good solid email once a week or once a month or something like that, and people are going to really hate it if you send it 3 times a week, do it once a month and then ramp it up over time if you want to do that. So just be sensitive to your audience, be sensitive to the time you've got to produce something good, and then, you know, watch those trends in your data. So if you think, well, I'm going to send another email a week and see what happens, and your open rate just tanks, there's your answer, isn't it? There's your answer. Or if you get complaints or if you get a load of people unsubscribing in a short space of time, there's your answer. So you do your best guess and then just watch it because it's, you know, you've got the data there that you can interpret, even if you can't read it directly.

Well, and I think that's really important to mention. I know it's difficult because, you know, there's all the feels around this. But when it comes to unsubscribes, they can be valuable data if you see a chunk of them. But if you're getting one unsubscribe here, 2 there, one there, whatever, it's simply— the faster, I think, the faster you can get to a point where you go like, that's all right, I'm clearly not for them. Or, you know, they clearly forgot why they signed up or something. Try not to take it so personally. I think that that's difficult for some people is to see the people— why did they unsubscribe?

Yeah, and it's gonna happen. And in some ways it's a good thing because it means people are actually reading your stuff, you know. So that's, that's good. And, and, you know, I think we, you know, we all have so much email now, don't we? And it's just a natural thing that people are gonna go through and prune who they subscribe to every so often. It's just gonna happen. You've got to kind of detach a little bit from, from that. Yeah, yeah, totally fine. So if it's a load of subscribes in response to, to one particular email, then yeah, you, you need to pay attention to that. But, you know, a few here and there, it's just, it's gonna happen if you've got a reasonably sized list. Yeah, you know, you can't avoid it.

Well, and you have to remember too, like, like you said, people are receiving a lot of emails Sometimes they're receiving email not just from people they've subscribed to, but also software programs that they've signed up for, maybe even trials of software programs that continue to send them emails. Like sometimes it can be really overwhelming. And there's this, there's this inbox zero garbage also out there, right? Where it's not, it's not the right plan for everybody.

Yeah.

And so, you know, some people are just like, oh, I, you know, I need to Marie Kondo my emails and they just like unsubscribing from all of the things. It could be, especially if it's just the onesies-twosies, it's probably not you. But like you said, if you send out an email and it's like, you know, 20% or whatever, like a whole bunch of people just like unsubscribe, then you can go, hmm, clearly I struck a nerve that didn't work.

Shouldn't have done that. Yeah. I won't do that again. Yeah. And also, I think if you're, you know, you're a business, you're selling things, sometimes customers have a natural lifecycle as well, don't they? So, I mean, the obvious example is like a wedding photographer. You know, when people are married, they're probably not going to need— you hope they're not going to need you soon. So, it actually benefits you if they go because they're not— I mean, okay, they might, I guess they could refer you to a friend maybe, but if people are not going to buy from you, then maybe you don't particularly want them on the list anyway. You know, it's okay. You know, you can't get too stressed about these things.

Yeah. And I know that, like, you know, there are so many ups and downs with email and things change, right? having the subject line, but now we've got the header that goes with it. Like, of course that came in years ago, but like the importance of it now is people just scanning their emails and they need that little extra bit of, should I open this, right? All these little hooks and things that are in place, and there's lots of strategy around even just what to send and how to send it.

Yeah, there is. But I think because if you've got a small business, the nice thing is that you are just so much closer to your audience. So, so many of these tricks are used by like corporates to kind of give themselves some personality, but actually as a small business, you've already got loads of personality, you know, and you've got that close relationship. And in some ways, you just need to just allow that to come across. You don't need so many tricks and tips and that sort of thing. And a lot of the really clever copywriting will come in with a huge list It's not so important. What's more important with a smaller, more personal list is to sort of be yourself. I know that sounds terrible, doesn't it? I always hate the be yourself, you know, but you know what I mean? Just allow your— yeah, allow that relationship to kind of do the work rather than trying to fake it by— with some cute copywriting.

Well, and I know why you cringed on the whole be yourself bit, but really it's all about embracing your own stories, right? And sharing your own bits and pieces. Right?

That's better than be yourself.

Get to know you, right?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

But I mean, it's, it's the same. You're saying the same thing. You just say it a little different. It's the nuance, right? Because, yeah, and I think that's— some can be difficult for people to think, oh, I'm boring, people don't want to hear my stories. Like, nobody wants to know about how my dog went to surgery last week or whatever. But really, they do, because think about the things that you're watching and listening When, let's say you tune into TikTok or something, and somebody's telling you about their stories, you're there for it, right? If you read emails from certain people, and they're telling you about their life, you're there for it. Your life is just as boring as theirs.

Yeah, yeah. And I think sometimes you don't have to tell personal stories about you, you can tell stories about clients you've helped. And again, that doesn't have to be that personal about them, you can kind of merge a bunch of clients into one and just tell a story that's not personal to anyone in particular. But it's just that the story just works well for people, doesn't it? They can get a much better sense of what's going on from a story than a load of facts. I think having a training background, my natural tendency is to go to the facts because I want to show you how it works. I want to make it work better, you know. So, I have to think to get the stories in because I'm coming from a— You know, a very kind of logical training, this is how you do it background rather than a creative writing background. But yeah, it really does work.

I'm similar to that. I have almost like— so with my ADHD, of course, people with ADHD, we have this thing called object permanence. It shows up weirdly for some of us, me in particular, in my way. Like the stories have object— I have object permanence with the stories. I like work with somebody, I help them, I'm you know they're satisfied. I'm satisfied, and then I put it in a box and it's gone. And then I go and do the next thing and do the next thing, and it's gone. And and so like I actually have people in my corner who are like, "Okay, Angela, tell me the story about," and I'll be like, "Um yeah, we fixed their thing." They're like, "No no no, hold on a second. We need to get how did you fix the thing? What was their problem?" Because I'm I'm like you. I'm like, "Oh okay, well we built the scenario, and here's how we did it." And did it? It's like, "No no no no no." How were they feeling about that?

And it's like, I don't care. It worked. What more do you want?

They were happy. I was happy.

Isn't that what everybody needs to know? Give me another problem to solve. I love solving problems. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. And I think that can be difficult because as a problem solver, the stories aren't— like the stories of the problem solving aren't there for me. I can tell you anecdotes or I can tell you funny stories about other things or whatever. But it takes me a lot of work to get those out. Like, it's, it's like, it's not easy for me.

Yeah, yeah, no, I get that. I get that. And I think also because you're, you're reading it rather than speaking to somebody face to face, sometimes you've got to— the communication is a little bit harder, isn't it? And that little bit harder for us in some ways is getting a story in, but it's, it's worth the effort. I think it does help you connect with people or help people connect with you better.

Well, and one of the things that works for me in my business is I actually will actually record myself speaking what I want to say. And then if I was alone in my business, I could, I could then just have that transcribed and then I could use that as the fodder for what I was trying to do. I'm grateful I have a team so that they can actually write those things out of what I say, which also helps to make sure they're using my voice as well. Right. But for me to be like you said, if you're just writing it, It doesn't quite flow the same way as just sort of speaking through it.

Yeah. And I mean, I do that now. I switch on dictate in Microsoft Word. Obviously, other tools are available, but I find that really good. And I just do a kind of brain dump of everything that's in my head and drop it into Word, and then I can format it and move it around, and then it turns into a piece of writing. That feels more personal because I've spoken it rather than I've sat down and written it out in a structured, logical way. So I'm finding that works quite well for me at the minute.

And one another tool that's sometimes ignored, um, is ChatGPT. You could use it like, let's say you don't have somebody to bounce these ideas off of and you feel, you feel alone in this. Um, you can actually go to ChatGPT and say, I want to write an email that tells a story about blah. Could you please ask me questions Here's the key, one at a time, to get enough information that you could help me write an outline for this. And then it's asking you questions as you're answering them, and you could do it audio or you can type it out. But it sometimes, it can help to have something or someone ask you questions one at a time and then get some ideas out of you. So if you're alone, ChatGPT can be really good for that.

That is fantastic actually, because that's one thing I, I do with clients. If they, they say to me, look, I've got a load of information in my head. Actually, no, they don't often say that. I say to them, you've got so much knowledge in your head, you know, and you cannot get that down in writing at the minute for whatever reason. And sometimes that's ADHD, and sometimes that's dyslexia or a mixture. And I do, I prompt them with questions, and then they record their answers or get their answers dictated into Word or whatever they want to use. But yeah, if you don't have anybody sitting there to prompt you, ChatGPT could do that really well. Yeah, I hadn't actually thought of using ChatGPT in that way. So, that's a really, really good tip. Yeah, I mean, I do use ChatGPT. I do things like, you know, I want to write about this, what am I missing?

Yeah.

Because we've all got those blind spots and you write from your own experience and you forget a couple of things, a couple of bullet points out of 7, you know, you think, I hadn't thought of that. So, it's really good for plugging my gaps in things I want to write. And then, I mean, another thing I've been doing recently is I can do the writing, no problem, but then I just, my brain freezes up when I need to do a shortened version of it for, say, a LinkedIn post. And I don't post exactly what ChatGPT says, but it just gives me the structure and it's much quicker than me going through and summarizing it myself. So, if you wanted to take a blog post and then summarize it into an article for an email article, you know, ChatGPT could do that quite well for you as well.

Yeah, we do that quite a bit here. But, you know, I think the other thing is, like, the, the thing is, is that, you know, people, they're excited about ChatGPT or AI in general, but they're also really afraid of it. And a lot of people are just kind of like using it sort of on, you know, like just a surface level. And you talked about this, I think this is— we— I do this often. I'll be like, I want to talk on this topic, can you give me 3 bullet points about this topic. And it'll give me bullet points. And I'll be like, either, oh, geez, those resonate with me, or those are kind of bollocks. And I'll say like, well, could you give me like 6 more, you know, and then I can look at them and say, okay, well, if I was to talk about these 3 now, so I grabbed what out of, you know, those 9 that I've asked it for. So if I was to talk about these, you know, what do you think an outline of that would look like? And then it would spit the outline out. And like you said, don't use what it gives you, like copy paste, basically. But it will give you some things and you're like, I never thought about that angle. Or yeah, that totally makes sense. And I have thought to say that, even though I always talk about that.

Yeah. And it gives me some tips and some outline points. And then I'll go, actually, no, do that for a smaller business, or do that for— give it a different audience, and it'll tailor it to a slightly different audience. And so, yeah, yeah, don't take it at its word, you know, just keep asking the question. No, do that for someone else. Do that for someone else. Make it shorter, make it longer, make it more conversational. And then it just— it's like a bit of a thinking partner or an assistant rather than you giving your, your work over to it, really.

And one of the key tips, I think, for like, if you're using ChatGPT to like take a blog post to make a newsletter, or to take a blog post and making content or whatever, is when you give the blog post to ChatGPT, say, I'm going to give you a blog post, air quotes again, don't make anything up, only use what I've written in here, don't use the internet to find anything else, only use what's written here to create blah, blah, Because ChatGPT has this like habit of like making shit up. And sometimes it'll go out and like grab stuff and you're like, I know I didn't write that. Where'd you get that from? And I'll actually say that. I didn't write that. Where the hell did you get that from? And they'd be like, oh, you're right.

Nice catch.

I didn't actually read that. So I've now started to tell it, don't make anything up. Only use what I give you.

That's a good idea as well. Yeah, because I've, I, yeah, I was thinking about it. I've been editing that out. And I didn't think to ask it to take it out. So yeah, yeah, so many great little tips that make such a difference.

We've been really enjoying using— and I, you know, people, like I said, people are scared because they don't want to come off sounding like a robot. But like you said, I think that we can use ChatGPT to give us some ideas, some direction. And certainly the other piece to this, from a statistics perspective, if you don't like stats and you're overwhelmed by them, you can actually ask ChatGPT to help you with that. So you can say, I would like to look at the statistics of my email marketing. Can you please ask me questions one at a time? Again, don't get— always tell it to do one at a time. Otherwise, it'll give you all its questions at once. That to me is overwhelming. But say, ask me questions one at a time to help me go through the statistics and tell me where to find the information so that you can then give me a report of it after. And then it feels less daunting because now You're just like, oh, I need to go find out what their, you know, open rate was.

And you—

it's there. Okay, I'll go find it. And you put— plug the number in. And then at the end, then ChatGPT will go, here's your summary, you know. And so it kind of makes it easier for you to know even what to look for.

Yeah, that's— it's great for breaking things down. And if it's not broken down enough, just tell it, no, make it simpler, or make it shorter, or— yeah, yeah. I think you forget, you kind of— it's almost like you're to Google or a search engine and you have to kind of take what you're given. You kind of have to get into the habit of going, no, just give me something slightly different. Can you change that a bit? Can you make it easier? You know? Yeah. But yeah, so many, so many ways of making your life easier with AI and without, like you say, talking like a robot, because that's really important to keep that relationship. One thing I was just going to suggest about why email marketing is particularly good for neurodivergent folk is that I hear, I can't, I'm no good at marketing because I can't do networking. I can't talk to people. I can't do presentations, that sort of thing. Because that, I mean, obviously some people are absolutely fine. I know some neurodivergent people who are amazing on stage. So it's not everyone by any stretch, but some people really, really struggle with it, really feel overwhelmed. And the nice thing about email marketing is that you can do it kind of on your laptop, at home, at any time of day. You can do a load of scheduling. You can do a load of automation. You can do all your writing in a batch when you've got the time and the energy to do it, and then set it up to go out over the month. So, that's another reason why I like it. It's very flexible in terms of your time and your energy, compared to going out to events, or compared to just, you know, social media being so immediate sometimes, where you have to sit there and just watch these comments come in. You don't have to do that with the email.

I think that's brilliant too. It does solve that problem, or at least it gives the buffer between you and your audience that, that can be very helpful.

So I think that's one really good reason to give it a try if you haven't already, and that any of that resonates with you. Because I think there's so many people that are kind of holding back from doing the marketing because they, they feel marketing is kind of a very extrovert thing and they, they feel overwhelmed by that kind of contact with people, and it doesn't have to be that way.

100%.

I love it.

And I love the fact that you, when you, when you were talking about the, the marketing strategy, so to speak, it wasn't just here's how you sell things, but it was like, here's how you educate people. Like, there's, there's different reasons why you want to create these emails as well. Like, it wasn't just here's how we hard sell, because that's sometimes people think, oh, I don't want to go into email marketing because I don't want to be this salesy kind of marketeur that we typically see when we're looking for advice on how to market through email, right?

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, like I said, there are some, some areas, some types of business where that is still normal and expected, particularly, you know, product-based e-commerce type businesses. And, you know, don't be shy about, about that if that is your business. But yeah, it doesn't, doesn't have to be. It can be— it's got to be tailored to your audience, hasn't it? Otherwise people are just just not going to open the emails. And, you know, you can't do anything unless people are reading your emails. So, you know, step one has to be, you know, send something that people actually want to read. Awesome.

So, tell people where they can find you after listening to this podcast.

So, my website is helenalindopp.com, probably the best sort of place to find out what I do. I have stripped right back on my social media because As you could have guessed, the last few years, I've just found it really overwhelming. I found I wasn't putting out the quality that I wanted to. So, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn actually these days. I may expand to other platforms, but— and I'm trying to get my YouTube up and running again, so I will definitely link to this. I'm a very sporadic YouTuber. I go through periods of posting quite a bit, and then I disappear for a while, which I know you shouldn't do, but we'll see. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, best to go to my website really.

Perfect. And we'll have the links below in the show notes so that people can quickly click on them and get to you. And, you know, as always, I mean, I hope that you stop shitting on yourself. You're doing the best you can in YouTube. And it, you know, it is what it is, right? I mean, you're showing up when you can. And that's the best you can do.

Yeah. And I think YouTube is, is quite a lot of effort, isn't it, to produce a video that is of a quality that you feel comfortable with? I mean, I know it doesn't have to be Yeah, I know that done is better than perfect and I'm not expecting perfection, but, you know, it just, it takes longer than just typing a post in text. There's no doubt about that. So, yeah, I think you're right. You've just, with all of this, you've got to be realistic about the time and the energy that you've got. And, you know, we're not corporates, are we? And that's part of our appeal, you know.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with me today. I really appreciate it.

No, thank you very much. It's been great to talk to you.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode or you enjoy the podcast in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group.