The Complete Beginner's Guide to Funnels, Email, & AI for Your Business

Email marketing and list building, you guys, this is one of the most important things in your business. I have some incredible information. I did a couple cool things. I did deep, deep research in Gemini. I also ran a Manus report just around getting some facts about email in our specific time. And I know for me, I've been doing marketing for a long time and email has always been such an important part. But it's changed a lot over the past couple years and I was actually really interested to see that it's continued to be the king of how we get new customers. The ROI on email marketing is still incredibly high. And while people may not get back to you as much because they are inundated with emails, people are looking at them. If you can make it into their inbox and not their spam folder and not sound like a sleazy salesperson, then you'll be able to get some new sales through email. Some of these you could read yourself. But I thought that a couple interesting ones was 89% of email users check their inboxes multiple times a day. I know I'm a weirdo and I'm always checking email, but it sounds like most other people are as well. And then 51% of consumers prefer email for brand communication and strong conversion rates. I thought was also interesting that their ROI is greater than $70 per $1 invested. I also thought it was interesting that it says email outperforms social media by 13% and 11% in conversion rates. So this just tells me that email is still super important. Again, here was another one where it said that 3,600% return on investment, which is pretty cool. Go ahead and read this data. But yeah, email marketing does have the best ROI in all of marketing. The other cool thing is you own your list. You may have remembered last year and actually they're threatening it again. TikTok, for example, was threatening to be shut down in the United States by the government. And some people have built their entire business on TikTok. And it's interesting because at the end of the day, these social media influencers and a lot of people build their businesses on third party platforms that are not controlled by them, meaning other companies and the government in some cases can just simply turn it off. With email marketing, you own your own list and you can take it with you no matter where you go. So no matter what system you're using, you could pull it out and bring it to another one. So that gives you some peace of mind as well. The engine of customer loyalty. So acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than keeping an existing one. Existing customers spend 67% more on average than new ones. And for most companies, that's 65% of their total revenue that is generated by an existing customer base. I've seen this again and again in agency life where I worked, and also just in small businesses. So the ability to make a sale on an existing customer is so, so much easier than converting a whole new prospect from understanding who you are and what you do to go through that whole funnel. You know, a lot of times people come into your funnel and it's just not the right timing for them to become a customer or client. But they're still interested in what you do. So keeping them on some sort of list where they can get information from you on a bi weekly basis, just kind of keep them informed of what's going on of your offers, discounts. When that right time comes, you'll already be in their inbox and they'll know who you are, they'll trust you and go ahead and move forward with you. With that comes personalization. 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences. And this is where AI comes into play. So it says. Conversely, 74% of consumers feel frustrated when they receive email content that is not aligned with their interests. That also brings AI into play. I think it's funny, in one of our AI bootcamps, I taught people how to scrape the web and create contact lists to send their top of funnel offer to strangers cold prospects. And one of my students did their file wrong and they ended up sending this email blast to like a thousand people and it had the wrong first name. Just a simple mistake. So every person got an email that had the wrong first name and they were in tears because people were so upset. But I also pointed out that the open rate and response rate was higher than ever because they had personalized it wrong and people wanted to let them know. So personalization is king when, when it's done right. So put their name and subject lines, use AI for list segmentation and make sure that you have content that relates to what they are interested in. So let's dive into our workbook and into Club Jam and grab some prompts and GPTs and create an amazing email campaign. So now you know how important email marketing is, let's create a strategy that'll really bring those customers back to you. So I'm in our workbook and the first thing we're going to do is plan our complete email strategy. Now just, I want you to go to the Club Jam Templates and Workbooks tab and we have an entire content planning document. And I want you to take that into consideration. This is going to be a complete email strategy for one kind of offer or email strategy. But again, I want you to think about holistically, because I've messed up on this before and if you went through it, I'm sorry, but I went through where I had multiple offers out there and each one had a email strategy associated to it. And, and what happened was, is that people wanted to download all of our free offers and then all of a sudden they were getting emails from me where I had planned each one to go about one or two times a week. So if they downloaded three or four, I was all of a sudden emailing them six or eight times a week. So I just want to put that out there because I want you to think through your complete email strategy before you even get into these prompts. So first of all, does your business have a monthly or weekly email that you put out? So let's talk about just that email strategy or are we talking about the email strategy connected to your offer? Make sure you know which one you're building and look at it holistically before you go in and start building these. So I used Claude for this and I did it for a couple reasons and I'll show you why. Again, I went the free version route. I'm not using any sort of project. I uploaded my Customer Journey document, I uploaded my tone of voice, and I uploaded my business blueprint known as my setup document. So I added all of that along with the prompt from our workbook, and basically it came up with a really awesome email strategy. Seven emails. And the templates were really nice and exactly in my tone and what I wanted. I thought they were great. So it kind of gives an overview of what it put out and why. And the reason I decided to use Claude is because I think it has a great job. I think it does a great job creating HTML. So Claude code is beyond. I just think it's way beyond chat GPT. And so what I did is I uploaded my brand colors and logo, which if you don't have that yet, we're going to be talking about it in the next module, so don't worry about it. So I go ahead and it did bring in my colors in my fonts, but it didn't really bring in my logo, which I didn't love. So it's not something exactly I would use. But I also Just took it at first pass. It's something that I could definitely work with. So I just. It told me what colors I use and all that, which was great. From there, went back to my workbook and went on to create an email template. So it gave me that first one and it was full of like random content. It even had a musical note. So I put in this. And actually all it did was create little areas for me to add content. And that's okay because I actually asked it to create a HTML template which then I would upload into my email server, whichever one I want to use. And I would use it as a template every time and then change the content within it. So I actually thought that that was fine that it did that. From there, we wanted to talk through behavioral triggers because as you saw in the presentation, there's a lot to be said about personalizing your emails. So, you know, every business is going to be different upon where you can segment and customize, maximize your exact prospects. So, you know, I'm thinking of my friend Sarah. She owns a ceramic studio and shop in Colorado and she offers lessons, she offers painting nights, she offers summer camp. So she could tag her prospects in a lot of different ways and personalize the content that they're interested in. And how I would do that from an automated standpoint and is whatever form you're using on your website. So if you're using Squarespace or Lovable or if you're using Kajabi or WordPress, every time somebody fills out a specific form, they need to be tagged. And then from there you can create email sequences based on their behaviors. So that's what this prompt is. It's in your workbook. You can go ahead and grab it. Before you do this, if you want to, just send a quick chat into Claude and say, hey, help me think through some tags that I could do to segment my customers. It already has all your information in this chat, so I think you should go ahead and do that. But if you already know, then let's move forward with your personalization email prompt and see what you get from there. It's really about monitoring. So you want to monitor opens, clicks and responses. Those are the most important things. So the open rate and what's good and what's bad depends on how big your list is. So if you have a list of 100 people, a really great open rate would be anything over 40%. That would be awesome. A really amazing rate would be a 20% click. That would be amazing. And then response rate maybe 5 to 10. That would be amazing. So if you're anywhere around those engagement metrics, you're doing awesome. And then you want to think about, okay, you've personalized your email with tags around their behaviors, but now you can have email sequences based on their engagement with your emails. And again, this will deter. This will be determined in what sort of platform you're using and what sort of sequences and tracking they allow. We use Kajabi, so we have all of this stuff. I can see who's opened, who's clicked. I can see how long people spend on certain pages of our website. I know it's very creepy. We recommend if you don't have a course convertkit change to kit and it's super easy to set up, it's affordable. We really like this one. So check it out. They have all sorts of features you could see use cases and templates. Spend some time in there. We think they're great. $25 a month is not bad. And you can have a really big list. Forgot what it's up to, but it's pretty good. Oh, a thousand subscribers, which is awesome. So, yeah, go ahead and do that. And I do want to talk about templates and what that looks like, but that's kind of part of our next module, so I'm going to hold off. But yeah, I'd love to see what sort of emails you create and go to the community and tell us what you learned and, and what you created in this module. All right, well, see you in the next one.