#196 - Ask Kate Anything

Hey guys, it is Kate here from hello Funnels and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I've got a special episode where I'm going to be diving in and answering all of your questions, big and small about the magical world of email marketing. So let's dive right on in.

Okay guys, as I mentioned, this is a special Q and A episode and I'm going to be going through some of the most common questions I get and also a couple of the questions I think people should be asking because when you don't know what you don't know, you can end up making some really big mistakes. So let's dive right into that now. Of course you have any other questions about email marketing, guys, Feel free to DM us over at HelloFunnels on Instagram. Leave a question below if you're watching the video version of this podcast and we will hopefully do a follow up episode to capture any of those extra questions. But let's dive into the main ones first. So very first question, and this is one I know a lot of people kind of. There's multiple sides to this. One is how often should you email your email list? Now again with this, there seems to be two really common trains of thought. One is just once a month. You don't want to bother people. The other is you should email them pretty much every day. Personally, I land somewhere in between, I think the good old days of sending the once weekly email newsletter to it's kind of outdated. I think the world moves a lot quicker now. I think people want more content from the people they want content from. And I think if you're only jumping into the email inbox once a week, it's quite easy for you to get forgotten, for you to move down to the bottom of their list of people that they follow, people that they want to hear from. I mean, you think about it, even with podcasting, for example, I know that, you know, I've got my favorite podcast I listen to every week and when an episode finishes I'm like, oh, I want the next one. So if you're able to give value, good connection, all that good stuff inside your emails, if people are loving your emails, I think once a week just isn't enough because you are going to sort of fall off their memory to do list, I guess. And that way when you do also start to have periods of promotion, it's going to be a bit of a shock. Like people kind of get used to the cadence if they're used to sort of only hearing from you very Little. And all of a sudden they're hearing from you a lot. It's a much bigger shock versus if you're in their inbox a couple of times a week and always bringing the value when you're there. Then when you're doing promotions and you maybe email them a couple of extra times a week, it's not a big of a jump. I mean, again, it all comes down to what is going to work for you, what is doable for you. If you can only do once a week, then do once a week. But just make it count. You want to make sure that you create an email marketing plan you can stick to. So if once a week is all you can do, that's fine, just do it once a week. But as soon as you are able to, I would strongly recommend looking at twice, if not three times a week. And it doesn't all have to be brand new content guys. Like one of those could maybe be whatever your pillar piece of content is for the week. So whether you do podcasts or videos, a blog post, whatever other content marketing creating per week, maybe one is just to highlight that and then your other two, like one might be re highlighting something you've done previously, like an older but related episode. And the other one might be a little bit more of a personal high from you or so much stuff you could put in there. We've kind of got a bit of a framework for it, we take our clients through. But I'd say one is your minimum, two better, three good. Some people like to do daily. And if you can do daily and you're not getting a crazy number of unsubscribes, then do daily. But I think somewhere in between. That's where I would say two to three a week is usually a happy spot. Just make sure that it's good value, that you know you're bringing the value with those emails. The other thing which is good news is back in the olden days of Internet marketing when you would do that one email a week, that one email used to almost be like 10 emails in an email. Like it'd be this huge long novel with multiple different sections and things. Now what you could actually do is take that big long email, chunk it down and send three or four or two or three or whatever the number is going to be for you. Smaller emails that just focus on each of those little things instead. People want snackable content these days, the long form emails. No one's got time to read that. But that doesn't mean that they don't Want to get the value, they don't want to hear from you. So more frequent, but shorter tends to win out over less frequent massive long novels. But as with everything, test it out. It's your audience, it's your business, it's your rules. If you are doing a once a week email and it is crushing it, then do not break that, my friend. But if you're like, oh you, you know, I don't get great open rates, I don't feel like I'm getting a lot of engagement. Have a test out of sending shorter, more frequent emails and see what happens. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Okay, second question, which is a nice follow on from the first question is how often should I promote to my list? Now in my books there are two different types of promotions. There's what you would call like your full on open cart sequence and that normally is seven to ten days of very frequent emails. Like within that time you probably got 10 emails going out, right? So that's, that's pretty intense. But then there's also smaller promotions which are less intense. So for example, maybe you're going to do a webinar and so you send three to four emails over a week and a half promoting and inviting people to come to your webinar where they're going to get great value and it's on a topic that's really exciting and interesting to them, that is far less in your face than a full on open cart. Sometimes we combine the two. We go invite to a webinar and then you have open cart behind it. But my rule of thumb is that you want to be doing some kind of promotion to your list about once a month, depends on the size of your list and if you can segment and all that kind of stuff. But you know, usually once a month you need to be doing something that is either creating a chance for connection, creating a chance to give deeper value, and also of course, obviously giving a chance to show offers to people who are interested. Then I would say roughly every 60 to 90 days you want to do that big more intense launch sequence, which is a more direct call to action. So to answer the question of how often should you be promoting? I would say if you're going to have one of those smaller, lighter style of promotions, like you know, come to my webinar or check out this new free little me masterclass I've recorded or hey, I'm doing three days of special videos if you want to come and watch them, where you're leading with value and people Kind of get to re opt in to that. And yes, there'll probably be a follow up sequence for people who have opted in with an offer, but your whole list isn't going to see it. Your whole list is only going to see those initial invitations for value. And if they're not interested, if it's not a topic that excites them, then they won't see the rest. So I would recommend doing one of those small invitations roughly every 30 days and then sprinkling throughout that, doing your bigger full open cut to your whole list as every third one of those roughly. So another rule of thumb if that sequence doesn't kind of work for you is that out of every four emails you send in a month, one can be promotional and three should be value so they don't have to go value, value, value, promo. It can be three weeks of value, one week of promo, if that again makes it easier. But when people say promotional emails or launch emails, I do think it's important to know there's, there are those two different sort of. And I think the full on level should be done a bit more sparsely. But you still want to make sure you're having, you're giving your list, you're giving those people who are interested, who want to take that next step an option to dive in, to connect with you more, to get more value and to find out about your offers without it being something that goes out and gets blasted to your whole list. So we would call those more of a secret launch versus a open cart launch. And so our sort of recommend frequency is probably two secret launches a month apart and then on that third month a bigger open cart style sequence. Okay, next question. We're going to dive into some stats and numbers and figures now. So the question is, what is a good open rate? People ask me that all the time. And again it depends. It depends on a few things. So standard across most industries is Basically you want 15% and over as your minimum. Anything under 15% for your regular newsletters, I would be worried, I'd be concerned that you've either got a really old list or that something's happening with your deliverability. And you might want to go talk to your email service about that, then it's sort of 20% over is like range I would say is, you know, pretty standard, pretty good, 30% over, really good. So that's kind of your base range. Where you start to get those variations is around age of list, size of list, how often you are doing any kind of list hygiene. If you Want to actually find out more about list hygiene and maybe re engaging what an old list? We've got an email list CPR system which we talk about and go through all in episode 156. So go back a couple of weeks. Episode 156 called how to Revive a Dead List, and we'll walk you through that. So if your open rates are sort of traditionally on the lower side of things, the other thing I would say is another really good health check of your list and your delivery. So it's a way of figuring out, okay, is it actually my email system set up, like, is this thing technical that's going wrong, or is it the content that I'm sharing, the subject lines that I'm using? That kind of thing is to have a look at the first three emails that people receive. So hopefully you guys have got some kind of welcome sequence set up. If not, come chat to us. We can help you with it. And those first three emails, you want to have an open rate of well over 40%. The higher the better. In fact, your first email should be well over 50%. But those first three are quite telling, particularly if they are a day or so apart, because that means that as long as it's hitting those rates, then you don't have a deliverability issue. Because those people, they're getting something free from you, usually some kind of cool value, something they're really excited about. You're sort of like the new kid on the block for them. They're at their highest level of likelihood to open an email from you because, well, I won't dive into that. But usually they've got a problem, they're looking for a way to solve it. They think you might be able to help them. They've opted into your list, and so far all you've done is give them great value. So they're really excited to hear from you. That will progressively go down through an email sequence and, you know, then obviously onto your recurring emails. But if that is below that and substantially below that, then it sounds like you've got a deliverability issue. I would go speak to your email service provider. They're the ones who, who can probably look into that and give you some suggestions. If those numbers are looking really healthy. But it's the rest of your list that's got some issues, then definitely go listen to episode 156. It's got some good nuggets in there for you. All right, next question. We're sticking with the numbers theme is what size email list do you need to launch a product, to start selling products to. So my very, very bare minimum would be 500. And that is if that 500, they've come together, you've got them onto your list in the last couple of months, if you've been nurturing them and sending them regular content. So they are a warm and new list. If it's a list of 500 and you've built over five or six years, there's a lot of people who've been on there for a long time, they haven't heard from you forever, then 500 is not going to be enough. And I probably recommend you go out and get a whole new 500 to launch, too. That's my bare minimum. I think a thousand is much better. Better. And the reason for that is that you're going to put a lot of time and effort and resources into creating whatever your offer is, and you want to make sure you get as much return as possible. Now, that's not to say that I recommend waiting years and years to build your list up to a thousand. There's got to be sort of a happy medium there. You've got to be able to start taking action quickly. And there's strategies you can use that allow you to grow your list while you sell to it. But if you're using that as a barometer for, okay, now's time to start creating offers and start selling my offers. Yeah, 500, that's warm and engaged as a minimum, preferably a thousand. And again, it just comes down to what your expectations are and how many sort of sales you're hoping to get. And that brings us to the next question, which is what percentage of your email list should I expect to buy? Now, again, this is something that will vary a lot. The good old rule of thumb used to be around about 1% of your list. So even if you're only. If you've got that 500 and you hit that really good benchmark of 1%, that's five sales. So just make sure that you've always got, you know, your expectations are sort of set with things. I know some people, they get that 500 list and they think they're going to get a hundred sales and they're going to be extremely disappointed by their results. Now, of course, a new list, a niche list, one that's been well nurtured, can, particularly when it's small and new, can outperform that number massively. An older list, a larger list, will traditionally perform at a much lower rate. So this number of what percentage of my List convert at is actually no longer the most accurate number. And I feel like it just sets up a lot of people up either for their expectations to either be way too high or way too low. I prefer, and this is what we do inside our programs is we break it down by like, okay, what type of promotion are you looking to do? How many people do you need to get to engage with that type of promotions? Like, are you doing a webinar? Are you doing a challenge? Are you doing just a straight email sequence? And depending on the type of launch or promotion you choose, there's different benchmarks for each. And then you can reverse engineer your goals and you'd be like, okay, well if I know a webinar needs to convert at 10% of people who watch it and I'm going to have this percentage of people actually watch it who registered. Therefore I need to have this number of people register. And if my list is this number, then this is the percentage of people from my list I need to get to register or I need to go out and, you know, get my offer and get my webinar registration in front of new eyeballs. Like that's the process I really like to do versus going, oh, I've got my email list to this rate, therefore I should make X sales. Because it just, it's generally not that simple a calculation. Okay, unlucky last question. While we're here in the world of email marketing at all the numbers is what size list do I need to have to start to create a funnel? My favorite answer for this is it can be zero. Seriously. So the thing with funnels is, unlike launches is that a funnel is actually for your new subscribers. So usually I say to people, you're ready to have a funnel when you have something to sell. So if you're setting up a funnel and it doesn't have to be the full three step process that we do inside Ecourse Empire, it can be something quite simple as you're getting started, but you can do that right from the start and your goal will be, okay, I want to set up some kind of sequence that is going to give my new subscribers the best possible experience. They're going to get amazing value, they're going to learn all the stuff they need to know about me, they're going to be walked through the ideal content that I would love every new person who comes into my world to know and have access to so that when they go into my normal email list, they're really warm, they're really well educated on what you do and how you can help them. And you know, they've gone from being a stranger to a fan. Like that should be the purpose of any funnel. And then of course obviously to convert along the way. So when you think of that, that as the objective of a funnel and that the people going through it are going to be brand new people who maybe they've stumbled across you on Instagram or maybe, you know, a friend's recommended you, maybe you did some ads, maybe you've been pinning stuff on Pinterest, maybe you've started doing a podcast or you've been guesting on other people's. Like lots of people are going to come into your world, get onto your email list from all kind of different sources. Those new people are the people who go through your funnel. So if you're going to be going out there doing list building of any kind, I think it's really, really beneficial to have some kind of nurture sequence or funnel set up to be making sure that you are capturing, that you are nurturing and that you're converting those new people coming through. And it really does not matter at all what your existing list size while you do that, because this is for new subscribers, funnels are for new subscribers. So I hope that has answered some of your email marketing questions, guys. As I said, if you've got any others, if you want us to dive into anything a bit deeper, feel free to DM us over at hellofunnels or just leave a comment below the video if you're watching this on YouTube and we will do a follow up episode really soon. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope you got some great ahas, some great value bombs. I hope this is going to help you with your own email marketing and I will see you all next week. It.