Email Marketing Demystified Webinar Replay

Hey, everybody. Welcome. A couple minutes out from starting, I just want to make sure that you guys can see the screen. So I'll press that button. And I want to make sure we're recording, which it looks like we are, and make sure that you guys can hear me. So if you can hear me, maybe type something into the chat. That would be helpful. So far, nobody's typing anything into the chat. So. Since people can hear me, Wonder if. That's. I'm not muted. Maybe the chat's disabled or something. Oh, now. Okay, I see it. I was looking in the wrong spot. There we go. Okay. Still got a minute or two. I'm gonna try to make a poll. Let me pull. How big is your email address it. Okay, so let's do the poll. Hopefully. You guys can fill that out. Kind of want to get a gauge of experience again. Let me know how the audio volume is. I do have a different microphone I can use if I'm being too quiet. So tell me. Tell me to speak up if you're having audio problems. Okay. Three people say sound is great. That's good. Another minute or so on a poll. 82% of you have voted, so that's good. All right, we'll call it. There looks like 88%, so try to close it. And. Here we have the poll results. 40% of you are new to email marketing, don't have an email list yet. 23% of you have up to 500 people on your list. 20% of you have up to 2,500 people on your list. 7% have to 10,000 people on your email list. And 10% of you have more than 10,000 people on your email list. So we have a little bit of a range of experience. I'm hoping that there will be some value for everybody here, regardless of skill level. Looks like we've kind of got the people that we're going to get. So we will go ahead and get started. Now. Feel free to type questions in the chat in the questions box at any point. And I'm happy to take. We'll probably stop for breaks between or stop for breaks in between kind of the main sections. And, you know, we'll stop for questions at that point. So I think that'd be a good way to do it. Can you guys see my PowerPoint or my Google Slides right now? I just want to make sure that you can see. Oh, I gotta click the button. Can you guys see the PowerPoint now? Billy Schlatter says yes. Thanks, Billy. And a whole bunch of other people are Saying yes, great. Great to have that engagement there. I'm going to try to do present. Okay. There we go. So this is email marketing demystified. This is a talk I've done a couple of times. I've never done it on a webinar before. I'm kind of new to GoToWebinars, so you'll have to forgive me if the audio is not quite right or something's not ideal. But we're, we're trying. Nice to see a lot of familiar faces here. Sunil, Anthony, Daniel, good seeing you. Looking forward to seeing you next later in the week. Kay, good seeing you. A whole lot of familiar names. There's 38 of you, so I won't go through every name, but good seeing a lot of familiar faces. Alex. Yeah. So email marketing demystified. Today we are going to cover the basics of email marketing and we are going to kind of have an overview, soup to nuts presentation and kind of as the giveaway, if you look in the handout section of GoToMeeting, there's a PDF copy of my book. It's the full book, everything on email marketing. Feel free to download that, save it to your files and use that as a reference later. You can get a printed copy on Amazon if you want, or the audiobook version. But if you just need a PDF that you can scan through, that's there for you for free right now. What I've been told is the first part of every presentation is to establish credibility, tell people why they should listen to you. So here is why you should listen to me about email marketing. I run a financial media company called MarketBeat. We publish a daily investment newsletter to about 720,000 people. We send about 400 million emails each year. So if you go to MarketBeat, you can sign up to get a newsletter for your stocks. You type in the companies you're interested in, and then we send out a personalized newsletter every day with news for your stocks. And all 720,000 people get a different variation of that newsletter depending on the companies that they're following. MarketBeat and our other news websites, we get about 4 million page views each month. We're on track to do about $5.2 million this year in annual revenue. And we do that with four employees. So we get a lot done with not a whole lot of people. Let's dive in. I think a big misconception that people have about email marketing is that it's kind of a thing that was useful and helpful ten years ago, but is less useful and helpful today because everybody's on Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and all these other social networks. What I think a lot of people don't realize is that email marketing is as big as all these other social networks combined. I think Facebook is kind of the largest social network. You know, it's got a billion two, a billion three people. Email has 2.5 billion people using it and that's pretty powerful. So every now and then there's an article saying that email is dead. Everyone is not using it. We're always seeing Slack now, we're always seeing Facebook now. But the stats really do say otherwise. Don't listen to the tech press that's constantly declaring the death of email. There's a great website called emailisnotdead.com. see if I can pull it up for you guys. Not my website, but I love it. It just has all the stats for email. Six billion email accounts. That number is going to go up to 7.8 billion in a couple years. I guess there's now 3.7 billion email users worldwide. I guess that's a different study. 3.1 billion non spam emails sent every hour. 81% of shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases either online or in a store. And as a result of email, based off previous shopping behaviors, 70% of consumers say that email is their preferred channel for receiving commercial messages. 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a direct result of an email marketing message. I'm not going to go through all of these, but I think it really kind of paints a compelling picture that email is alive and well and something that is going to be part of the Internet business for a very long time to come. I don't see it going away. In the last 20 years. It's very ingrained as kind of the part of the Internet operating system. It's just something that everyone has. And if you think about like Facebook and Twitter and all these other social networks, they all require you to use an email address to create an account. And the reason it is is because everybody has one. And that really is kind of the biggest social network is email. So why should we care? There's a few reasons in terms of the stuff that you can place on your website that will make you money. Email is going to be the most profitable ad unit. If we go to a new tab, go to MarketBeat, clear my cookies quick so I can show the pop up. The most profitable ad that we have on this website is not the ad that's up here for E trade. It's not this ad on the top for an affiliate webinar we're promoting, it's our email opt in and that's why it kind of shows up front and center. And I want to show you kind of why. You know, some people think these are annoying, but there is a good business reason why this is here. Get to the next slide if I can. There we go. I want to once hold on. My present button. There we go. Sorry about that. So a typical ad will make about $20, $10 to $20 for every thousand people that see it on our website for kind of a good ad placement. So if you're kind of on the top of the website and if you are or like in the top of the right sidebar, you'll make $10 to $20 on that ad unit if you're lucky. Our email opt in makes us $154 for every thousand people that see it. Because I know that for every thousand people that show up, a couple, maybe 20 of them are going to sign up for premium subscriptions. So on average I'll make $5.48 for every thousand people. How does that work? Yeah. Oh, for every email subscriber, I'll make an average $5.48 from them email. In terms of a paid subscription, I'll make $1.06. In terms of advertiser emails make $1.18 through co registration advertising, sending our users back to different people's co reg ad units. So for every email sign up, I'll make $7.72. And if 2% of those people opt in that hit Marketbeats homepage, that's an ad unit that's worth $155 to me. You just won't find that anywhere else. So in terms of like your ad real estate on your website, an email opt in form is really the best thing that you can stick up there. Second, email marketing, it's a long term marketing asset. It's not something that somebody else can take away. It's not Facebook where you can go to Facebook page, then later they start charging you to reach the people that like your page. You know, right now the big thing is Facebook messenger bots. You got to imagine it's only a matter of time before they start charging you to, you know, the people that you built on a Facebook messenger kind of platform. On the Facebook messenger platform, this is kind of a fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you situation. You know, at some point Facebook is going to look at that and say, hey, we're going to want more money from you guys to use our platform to communicate with your customers. You saw the same thing, you see the same thing with Google. You know, every year there's more search result is more of the search results or ads. It's less organic content. So if you type in kind of a profitable term, you think you look at the prime real estate, it's all, you know, advertisements here, you really have to scroll down to get to organic results. And even there's more Google results and more paid results as you search for stuff. So what? Hold on. Gotta stop doing that. Really gotta stop doing that. So when you're reliant on somebody else's platform, you know, they can change the rules of the game on you and make it not work anymore. That's not really the case with email because it's not really owned by any one big company. So for email to change, like the closest thing that ever happened was when Google added those multiple tabs to the inboxes that really made no discernible effect on us. But nobody can change the spec of email. Like Facebook. Can't just say we're going to change how email works. Can't do that because Facebook isn't owned by anybody. Nobody. There's no one big tech company that can screw you or change the rules down the line. So yeah, I mean Google, they can't mess with it, which is very nice for a marketer that's depending on that. As a long term asset. Email is also, it's a long term marketing asset, something that you can continue to use over a long period of time to generate revenue for your business. We have subscribers dating back to 2011, seven years ago that signed up for MarketBeat when we were first collecting emails. And they're still engaging with our content and clicking on links, responding to emails, reading our content today and, and you just don't see that with very many other things. If you go to a website, the likelihood of you coming back to it on a regular basis seven years later is pretty low. But email can help change that. So you can use, you know, you can use your email list to kind of promote, you know, your products, you can promote your partner's products through advertising. All sorts of stuff you can do with that and you can, we'll talk about more that a little bit later. The other thing that email is really good for is kind of nurturing. So if somebody comes to your website for the first time, it might come back, they might not, but if they give you their email address, you can send them a series of emails over the course of a couple months, an autoresponder series, and that you can use that content, that steady feed of content into their inbox to kind of build that relationship with them, introduce your brand to them and do lots of good things so that somebody that was on your website once becomes kind of a friend and a fan of your work and then hopefully into a customer. All right, let's. This is kind of the core of the content of the webinar Today. My goal is to get out of here by 3 o' clock so we can have five different sections. We're going to talk about the technical aspects of building an email platform. What email service provider do you use? Everything. Right. And we're going to talk about getting opt ins, we're going to talk about actually sending BMO to your list, we'll talk about monetization and then we'll talk about list maintenance or list hygiene, keeping your list happy and healthy. If you have questions, feel free to type them into the questions box and we'll kind of COVID those at the end of each section. So if you're going to collect emails, the first thing you have to do is set up a email service provider. And there are different classifications of these, kind of ranging in features and price. There are just raw infrastructure providers that do mail delivery and nothing else. SendGrid and Mandrel, I guess not Mandrel so much anymore are examples of these. Mail Gun is another one. But all they do is deliver your email. So if you're a programmer and you need something to deliver messages, something like a sendgrid is which what we use is a great way to do that. There are also kind of more general email service providers. These are the awebers, the mailchimps, activecampaign, a whole bunch of these that people are using these days. But what these platforms do is they will not only process the delivery of your messages, they will also process your list management. They'll handle unsubscribes, they'll make sure that your SPF and your DKIM records are set up properly so that your emails are validated. And just kind of make sure you're following best practices in regards to email formatting and spam compliance and all that stuff. Then kind of the next tier up from that and certainly it gets more expensive, are kind of the marketing automation platforms. Drip is an example of this. Infusionsoft is an example of this. So if you want to have kind of more advanced sequences. Where if say somebody buys a product and then they get a different email sequence or somebody opts into a specific lead magnet, then they get, you know, that specific campaign. You want to start to do some really complicated, I guess, different autoresponders send the right message to the right person at the right time. That's kind of when you look into a DRIP or an infusion software, some of the other kind of more advanced platforms, you know, mailchimp certainly does do some of that now. It's gotten better. But if you are going to kind of do those more advanced sequences, you probably want to look at drip or something like that for recommendations. You know, mailchimp is a great way to get started. A lot of people get started on mailchimp because I think you can even do a free list. Up to a couple hundred or maybe a thousand people, I don't remember. But if you don't know enough to make an informed decision, mailchimp is an okay place to start. I like Drip. My friend Rob Walling started that several years ago. I think he recently sold out, but it's still a great platform. And then SendGrid, if you're a programmer and you need some like an API to deliver email for you, SendGrid is a great solution. Any questions at this point? We did this at same presentation at Zeel a couple weeks ago and all sorts of questions, but I'm not seeing questions yet. So just give a minute to see if any show up here. All right, not seeing any questions yet. So we're just going to keep on going. So if you want to collect, you know, the first step, you know, after you kind of get your mailchimp account set up or whatever you're going to use, the next step is to build kind of a lead magnet. So a lead magnet is a reason for somebody to give you their email address. You know, a lead magnet can be a lot of different things. It can be, it could be a free report, it could be a download of some kind, could be a cheat sheet, a checklist. In our case it's a newsletter. So I'll show you what we do for our lead magnet. It's pretty simple. So I'm going to type in, go to our market URL and just kind of replicate that first time visitor experience. So you can see our lead magnet here. Right now we are promoting our investing newsletter that shows insider buying and selling transactions. So the idea is that if Wells Fargo CEO is buying and selling company stocks, maybe there's a reason for that. They're buying the stock, maybe he thinks the stock should go up. If he's selling the stock, maybe he thinks it's going to go down. We have a newsletter that reports all those insider transactions that are filed with the sec. So we say, hey, is there insider trading at Wells Fargo? Give us your email address and we'll send you a newsletter. Daily newsletter Auto delays insider transactions from Wells Fargo and other companies. So we personalized this based off the page that they're on and it's basically a newsletter. So I typed in my email, I click the button and I get the newsletter. One kind of cool thing about our couple things are unique about our opt in to other people's. If you go to another page it's going to show you the same opt in but it's going to be focused on that other company. That's our exit intent. I'm going to try to show this again. Show it with Apple. So now instead of Wells Fargo, it's inside trading Apple. So very personalized based off the content that we're receiving. You also notice the Facebook like box down here. This was a split test that we did, kind of showing that 7,400 people like our page. That was a nice, that was a nice kind of split test that increased opt ins by about 10%. Obviously you want fewer fields. We only collect the email address. Stats show that you'll get 20 to 30% fewer opt ins for each additional field that you add. So even there's a big difference between name and email and just email. We always just do email for that. So this opt in does look pretty plain but it has been tested over the years. It's very optimal. Oh, we've tested colors, we've tested button text, we've texted or tested the text for the your email address field. We've done this text, we've done the Facebook thing. Privacy policy we added because of gdpr, all sorts of stuff. I do recommend using an entry pop up. So that's a pop up that shows up right when somebody visits your website. There's plenty of ways to do this. We hard coded our own. So I have a developer named Rebecca McKeever, she made this just in JavaScript and then it does a post to our post to our website to collect the email optin. But certainly you can do that with the plugin. OptinMonster is a very popular one. Sumo Mi is another one. There's several of these. They all kind of do slightly different things. So I don't have like a great recommendation for One over the other. But something that kind of is in your face right away. I recommend as a way to get email options. That way nobody misses it. These are pretty common on the Internet. Now some it people will kind of say that they hate them because they hate marketing and they don't want to get interrupted. But the reality is that lots of people fill out this form and people wouldn't fill out the form if they didn't want the emails. Right? So ultimately you think you're providing value to your users through your newsletter and through your email content. And if you want to be able to provide value, you have to give them the opportunity for them to get your email. Second, I do think there's always room to add secondary opt ins. So in market be here you can see this other opt in in the sidebar and sometimes people will just click out of the click out of your pop up right away. But then they'll scroll down and you'll see this opt in and then on the bottom of the page they'll see this opt in and sometimes see if I can get to fire, you know we'll have an exit intent. So if you mouse out on like maybe like the second page view, you know you'll see this exit intent. So I scroll out like I'm getting ready to leave and then the page content changes saying hey, we see that you might be on your way out. Wonder if I can show a different one of these. Another one of our sites, American Banking News, it's also one of our sites. So we've got kind of the background animated gif which works really well. Kind of a punny kind of thing, drawing in information. Cut through the noise with their free newsletter. Obviously very graphical, really hard to miss this. So it really gets the attention of people after this. So definitely use more than one opt inside a page and then finally you should leverage your thank you page. So when you type in an email on our MarketBeat signup form, you'll see an ad for this is an ad unit from Investing Media Solutions and for every person that hits this page, like for every email sign up, we'll make about 90 cents. So obviously if I were to click on one of these ads and click the button here, I would be opted in to receive this marijuana investing thing from company called Equidia. Equi. I don't know how to pronounce it. Equidia. I think that's my buddy Paul, Paul's company. But if you were to click on that, click that button, I would make two to three dollars. And of course if I click on more of these, I'm not gonna do this. But then it's kind of a couple bucks for each one. So on average every person that hits this page is worth 90 cents. And that is just kind of unheard of in terms of ad revenue. Typically you make $10 for a thousand page views. That's I think a penny per impression. This is 90 pennies per impression. And the reason is that this works so well is that people are most likely to take action right after they've taken a previous action. So if somebody buys, you know the person that's most likely to buy from you is the person I just bought from you. That's why upsellers work so well. People are on kind of that action taking train of thought and if you can give people another thing to do right after they sign up, they're very likely to take that action. So we have one page of what's called CO Red Tier. There's another page, this other ad, this is a pay per click thing. And if I say no thanks again, you know, it'll go to our sales page for Market B Daily Premium. So yeah, put something on your thank you page. Don't just leave it to say thank you for signing up for a newsletter, put something else there that's called action. If you're a non profit, you can have a donate button. If you're a business, you can have a link to your product. Give people another action that they can take after they sign up. We do have a few questions that have come in. Let's answer those quick before we kind of go on to I guess section 2B and different ways to collect opt ins. My friend Kay, she says do you have a recommendation on the time delay for an entry pop up? Honestly, I don't think it makes that big of a difference whether you show your pop up right away or on scroll or a few seconds later. I just, in my experience, my testing it hasn't made a big difference either way. Certainly your mileage will vary depending on your audience and your brand and your pop up. My people are often coming from a news site so they're there to read the article and then they're leaving. So I show it right away so I can do that. My friend Sunil. Nice to see you, Sunil. He says, I use a service like infusionsoft. Should I use a separate domain or email marketing from that platform or use our main company's domain? I've seen it done both ways. So with MarketBeat we send mail from the domain analystratings.net and that was actually our old domain name. Our company used to be AnalystRatings.net or called Analyst Ratings Network. And then when we switched over to MarketBeat in 2015, we had such a, you know, a good reputation built up for that domain. We just left it. So we're going to use that domain forever. As far as I'm concerned. It probably doesn't make a big difference whether you use a separate domain for your infusionsoft stuff versus your personal email. The one thing that you might want to be aware of is that if you get like on a spam list for sending out a lot of messages, which we do every now and then, everybody that sends a lot of messages will end up on a blacklist of some kind of that could stop your personal work messages from getting through. So that's kind of a consideration. Most of my email comes out from mattattpulsen.com but markbeat emails come out from analystratings.net so if that were happen to make it on a blacklist, my personal emails would still go through. But again, I've seen it done both ways. I wouldn't use the same email address though. If my kind of email blast from message is madmatpulsen.com I probably wouldn't use that as my personal email. As you're emailing a whole lot of people, you're going to get a whole lot of vacation autoresponders from people saying they're out of the office. That tends to be a problem because if we send an email to 400,000 people from MarketBeat, we will get as many as a couple thousand out of office messages back. So I wouldn't do that. Nick says, what was the Google keyword plugin that displayed when you did a Google search? That was Keywords Anywhere. Great little plugin I can't remember who told me about or Keywords Everywhere. Can't remember who told me about that. It's a great little plugin that will show you search volume. It's free, so that's kind of neat. But it just shows your search volume for the stuff you're searching for. I find that very useful. All right, hold on, Steve, Mark says are you advertising MarketBeat anywhere to get people into the funnel? Yes, I am. And we'll talk about that in a minute. Sunil says separate domain better. Thanks, Matt. Okay, great. Go back to the presentation. So there are some other ways to collect emails and these are many ways that we build our marketbeats list. Co registration advertising. So if you go on somebody else's website and you fill out their opt in form, you'll see an ad for MarketBeat or your brand. We do this to the tune of 70 to $100,000 a month. We buy a whole lot of Coredge so anywhere that we can buy it from, you know we will. So if you go to like the Forbes or thestreet.com or any number of other financial websites, you sign up for their email list, there'll be an ad for MarketBeat and I'll pay 2 to $3 for those opt ins. You can do an email swap. So if somebody in your same industry has an email list, you can send an email to their list and they can send an email to your list and hopefully you can both get some customers from it. You can rent other people's email lists. So if I wanted to send a message to another financial media website's email list, I could go find the right agency and pay them either a cost per click or on a CPM basis to email their mailing list. You can do that. I don't do that because the lead cost ends up being a lot higher than co reg but certainly a lot of people do that. People will pay to email our list on a CPC basis. They'll pay, you know, $3 to $3.50 to send a message per click from anybody that clicks through on an email that we send to our list for them. Don't buy a list though. Like you shouldn't go out and buy like somebody's email list because those like lists that you can buy and like get the actual email list, they tend to not be very well maintained. They'll get you on a blacklist, they'll get you marked as a spammer, not recommended to do that. But if somebody else sends an email for you where you're kind of renting their list, where it goes to their mailchimp account or their infusionsoft account and it's just your content, you can do that all day long. If you're writing kind of email content to people like you're writing information or a newsletter, go ahead and stick that on your website because that is another page that you can get for SEO value. So if you have content that's unique to email, stick that on your website, Google will index it, maybe people will find your website through that content and it's just kind of another content piece that you can use your email. Sending out an email have a share button. That way somebody can share your Email with somebody else. Most of the email service providers do this for you. So you'll have, you know, you'll be able to share the content of the email either through Facebook or through email or through Twitter or wherever else. Those are kind of a nice add on your email signature. Always put some of your email signature as a call to action. That way everybody that emails you will kind of, we'll kind of have an opportunity to learn more about you. So for me I just have my social profiles and then say, hey, you looking to grow your business? Read some of my content on my website. It's kind of an easy thing to do that'll help you out over time. And typically the people that you're sending like individual messages to or your most engaged kind of leads and contacts. So that's kind of a good way to engage those people. If you ever do an in person event, have a clipboard, hand it around, get people to type their name and email and then obviously go type that into mailchimp or whatever later. Great way to collect email addresses. If you have a store, you can do that at checkout too, like a retail store. Lots of ways to get emails but you know, never underestimate the power of a clipboard with a name and email sign up form. You can get a lot of emails that way on a contest or a giveaway. So if you have something you can give away to people, you can get them to fill out an email form to sign up for that contest. Obviously there's kind of legalities involved in running a contest, so be careful with that. If you have a lead magnet or you have a newsletter or free report, something like that that you want to give away, you can obviously share those out on social media, getting your options. That way you can build your email list with landing Pages and Google AdWords or content recommendations like Yahoo. Gemini. We did this with Yahoo. Gemini for a while. I think they just renamed Gemini to something else. But we would have like a free report. So It'd be like 10 stocks to sell. Now we would show that to people interested in investing on Yahoo Finance. They would go to a landing page, see if I can pull that up. I think this is the page we're using. So it was 20 stocks. So now they would land on this page and say have some copy here saying these stocks are going to go down. Maybe give us your email and we'll send you this free report. So we would advertise this page through Yahoo. Gemini or through Taboola or whoever else. Dynomi send people to this page, hopefully collect some emails that way. Facebook. On your Facebook page you can have a call to action where people can give you their email address. I'll try to see if I can pull that out. Sign up thing. Page. So here's my Facebook page and then go away. Yeah, I've got a button here that says learn more. Go to my email signup page where you can have this button do any number of things. You can get people back to your website, get email sign up. That's an easy thing to do. Facebook also has a way to collect leads directly through Facebook ads now called Facebook lead ads. I wonder if I can find an example of that. I think most of these are on mobile, but you can kind of see this. I'm going to zoom in on this kind of blurry, but you see this example of this ad where there's a subscribe button and then Facebook kind of fills out the contact information for you and a submit button and then that information will be passed on to the advertiser you and then you can go ahead and follow up with those people via email if you want to. We don't do that with MarketBeat because my audience is primarily 50, 60, 70 year old men and our demographic just isn't on Facebook so we can't really do that. But if you have a demo that's kind of on Facebook, might be something to look at. And finally, Twitter has their own kind of lead ads that you can check out as well. You stop for questions. Again, my friend Alex. Can everyone remember how to pronounce Alex's last name? Says what possible legal issues could arise in email marketing? The big thing there is the can spam legislation in the United States. There's requirements. We'll talk about those later. But if you are spamming people and you don't have the right can spam email stuff in there, you could get in trouble if you're emailing Canadians. That's absol. Problem is they have what's called Canada's anti spam law, which is more strict than the United States. And now in Europe they have what's called the GDPR or the General Data Protection rule and that's also more strict. That's why we have this privacy policy link on our email now. There's lots of compliance stuff. We'll maybe dive into that a little bit later. Any other questions before we move on? All right, number three, writing and sending great content. So if you're building an email list, you do have to email your list. Obviously the worst thing you can do with your email list is to set it up, collect emails, and never send email. Because if you don't send an email for more than a couple weeks at a time, people will forget that they signed up for your mailing list and they will start pressing the spam report button on your message because it's. I don't remember getting this. I don't remember signing up for this. This is obviously spam. Press the report spam button and then that's bad for deliverability. If you get too high of a spam report rate, you can get kicked off mailchimp or whoever you're using. So you want to keep people engaged. So you want to make sure they get email at least every couple weeks simply for the fact that they remember that they signed up for your mailing list. So the first email that anybody ever gets from you is called your welcome email. And that's probably the most important message that you're getting. That's probably the most important message that you can send or you send to your audience because it's their first kind of email interaction with your brand. And I'm going to try to pull up ours. Yeah, there we go. And preview button. So this is what our welcome email looks like. Try to zoom in a little bit. So it says thank you for signing up for a newsletter. Then I set some expectations here telling people how often they're going to get emailed and when they're going to get emailed. So we're going to say we're going to send you these analyst ideas and news headlines at about 1pm Eastern every day. So we're telling people it's a daily newsletter. We're telling people it's a free subscription. And then normally here there would be your username and password for MarketBeat, but that's placeholder. And it says here's some stuff you can do in the meantime so you can set up your watch list so that you can specify what stocks you want news for. You can edit your mailing preferences so that you can pick out what newsletter that you want. Add us to your safe sender list so that that's kind of a good white flag. Sign to Gmail and Yahoo and AOL and Hotmail that people want to receive your messages. If they add you to your address list or your safe sender list, that will tell Google or whoever else that you want to get their emails. And then we've got a Facebook group and then people can kind of pick and choose what they want to do here. And then the last thing is kind of call to action for our premium product. So it's kind of giving people a to do list of stuff they can do. That's kind of how you write a welcome email. You know, ours probably on the long side in terms of, like, stuff that we're asking people to do, we could probably simplify this a little bit more. We have kind of five call to actions and, you know, might make sense to cut that down to three or so and have people do other stuff later on. So your autoresponder series, I'm just gonna pull up marketbeats so you guys will get our way. I'll look into our kind of our home CRM. But you can see we send out an email on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five. Then we kind of the first five days, it's every day. And then we go from day five to day seven to nine, 11, 13. I think we do it all the way up through kind of 28 days is the current length of our autoresponder series. And then on the first day is just, here's some stuff you can do on a website. Here are some research tools on MarketBeat that you can access that are free. You know, go ahead. Here's all the stuff that's on our website. Go ahead, check it out. Then on our second day, you know, it's. You've been getting your news out for a couple days. Check out our premium product. You know, go to the, go to the sales page, see if it's right for you. On the third day of somebody being on our email list, it's another kind of content thing. It's, hey, go use this free tool. It's really good. Here's how you can use it. So you kind of want to have. Every other day is content versus sales. So we do content sales. Content sales. I guess there's two sales emails in a row. More content sales. Add us to your autoresponder. Add us to your white list. Sales, content, sales. We kind of rotate like that. Every other email is providing value and taking value. So for every email where you're trying to get them to do something that makes you money, you should have an email. We are just providing value. So I like to do email responders for about 30 days. After that, we'll put them kind of our main email blast series. So while people are getting our autoresponder series, which is just kind of our standard email sequence that everybody gets when they first sign up for their list, they'll get that and at the end of 28 days they'll get our email blasts. So here's kind of our calendar for this. It's a mix of ads. So this is today we are sending out. We're going to relaunch a product pretty soon. So we're doing an email for that tomorrow. We have an advertisement from a company called Wyatt Investment Research. And this is the email going out tomorrow. And here's the copy for that. That's kind of our system. Most people are ever going to see that. So that's kind of cool. Marketing automation campaign. So the way that we do that is we have different lists. So if somebody signs up for our premium product, which is MarketBee Daily Premium, they'll start to get this email sequence. So they'll get a welcome message from MarketBee Daily Premium that gives them more stuff to do when they buy. Log into your account, check for your newsletter, set up your watch list, take the tour and then save send your list again. Got my next signature there. So if they sign up for a premium product, they get removed from the main autoresponder list and then they get added to this. That kind of says give people different ways to make the best use of their premium subscription. And then if they upgrade again, you know, they'll get put on the all access series. So depending on where people are at in their customer life cycle, they'll get a different email sequence. If they go to our landing page and then they don't buy, they'll get this other email sequence called card abandonments. These are very valuable. So if somebody goes to our sales page which is here, and then if they're signed in and then they hit this page and then they don't buy, they'll get put in this auto or this abandonment sequence. So I think I reset these numbers in March. We've had about 7,000 people abandoned that since then. That email gets a 45% open rate, which is very good. And we've got 20 sales from that first email. Actually that's the one that's sent 60 minutes after they leave the page. 19 conversions from that, $6,000 or so in sales. And then these are obviously very valuable. Every thousand emails we make get $891 in revenue that we make, which is pretty cool. So different types of sequences for different actions. Lots of questions coming in. We'll get to those in a second. It's a little bit more about marketing automation campaigns really. The future of email is kind of sending the right message to the right person at the right Time have the days of everybody getting all the same emails is kind of coming to an end. So depending on where people are at in their life cycle of being a customer, everybody should get different emails. So when they're first on your mailing list, they should get kind of an indoctrination, warm up welcome. Learn more about a sequence when they take actions to indicate they want to be a customer, maybe a card abandonment, maybe they express interest. They should get different emails if they, you know, you do some kind of segmentation where if somebody clicks on, if somebody clicks on an email for a specific topic, you might put them in a different segment. This report I have, I want to show you guys. So on all of our emails that we send, we tag them with different topics like say, you know, investing. Some people might be interested in stocks, some people might be interested in gold, some people might be interested in dividend stocks. So we have a report that, you know, we tag people based off their interest level in these different topics based on what emails they open, what emails they click on. It's called segmentation. We do a lot of that. This report is kind of slow, so it might take a second to load. So we know that people that are like day traders, you know, we have about 85,000 people of those our list that have shown interest in day trading stuff, you know, 67,000 of people that are interested in cryptocurrencies, energy stocks, foreign currency trading, marijuana stocks, very popular right now because they're going up so high. Your technology, real estate. And that way, if we have an email that we know that's only going to work well with people that trade options because it's for an options product, maybe we'll only send it to that segment and that way we're not wasting other people's times that aren't interested in that topic. Let's do some questions now. Go back to the presentation. Kay says, what is the thinking behind various people at Markipy Be the sender. Good question. So a couple things that I know is that emails that are written from a woman's name tend to get higher open rates. So we use some sway to names for people that are employees of MarketBeat. We don't use our, you know, there are a couple women that work for me. You know, I don't use their names for privacy reasons. So we use other women's names. So an email from the same email from Matt Polson versus the same email from Rebecca McKeever, you know, having Rebecca's name on it is going to open it up have a higher open rates because it's from a woman and nothing, nothing sexist or about that at all. It's just that's what the stats show. So if I can have Rebecca send an email versus me send an email, I'm have Rebecca send the email because I know that I'll get higher open rates and higher engagement rates. Steve Mark says is the Markovy backend Dashboard something you created? Yes it is. He says it looks very friendly. Thank you. Yeah, this is a crazy system that we built over the last eight years or so. The dashboard has a lot of reports on it so it's pretty slow to load. I'll try to show that if I can but this manages all of our email stuff, all this management, our financials built that over time. Not gonna wait for it to load. Kay says, on your automation system are you using if this then that? No, we don't use if this then that for much other than posting to social media. It's good for that but other things haven't found a whole lot of value. Steve says are these stats monthly? No, they are kind of last six months since I've kind of reset that autoresponder series. And John says if you were to start over, would you write your own system or go with an email marketing provider? Definitely. Over time I've become more inclined to use off the shelf stuff versus building my own system. I'm a programmer so maybe I couldn't help it. But we have had some really nice things because we built our own system. We can do automations and segmentations in a way that people that have haven't done this can't. But it definitely was a lot of work to get here. Peter says, do you do anything with messaging platforms like Facebook to distribute your content? We tried. It didn't work out so well. We set up ManyChat. ManyChat is a tool that everybody uses to build Facebook messenger bots. I guess it's broken right now because it's been a while but we have 3,400 people that get it, worry about that later and we've tried it just didn't get very results compared to Web Push and our other stuff. So we stopped doing that. Getting a few more questions about our system. I'm going to skip those for now because it's not really applicable to anybody but me. Let's move on for now. We'll get to more questions later. Monetization so once you have an email list, there's lots of ways to make money with your email list, you can sell your own products. So we're doing that this week. Let's go back. We have two premium products. One is Markup all access and the other is Markup Daily Premium. So we can show those off here in a minute. This is kind of our product here. So we have our free newsletter. We have, we have our Premium Newsletter that's $20 a month and then our all access subscription which is $40 a month. I just set off my. Alexa, Alexa, stop. Okay, so with our free newsletter you get a newsletter you get in the afternoon. If you give us more money, you get more information. It's ad free. You can follow more stocks. You know, we send out emailers to promote this every six weeks or so. We'll have a sale, we'll have a sale to promote our products. So we might say, you know, 10 bucks a month for the first year, go ahead and sign up. Or like this, this month we're doing a relaunch or relaunching our flagship newsletter. That always does pretty well. You know, if we do a campaign like this, we'll get anywhere from. Let me find that report. So we did a Black Friday sale last year. I tried to find that. From that we did 126 new premium subscribers that created $25,000 in new recurring annual revenue. We sent out a total of 484,000 emails over that time. I think then 2900 click throughs to our website. 126 sales. So you know, that was all from email. Had 126 new customers just by emailing our list over the Black Friday kind of period and saying, hey, we're having a sale. How about you buy our product? You know, and writing those emails to sell your products is really not that complicated. I'll find an example and show you kind of how we do that. Here's an example of an email that we're going to send in the next couple weeks. So it's kind of a part of our relaunch campaign that we're doing now. This is the day before that. The campaign is over. It says, hey, I wanted to remind you that tomorrow is the last day of our launch period. If you sign up by tomorrow night, you're going to get this $100 discount and you're going to get a free PDF of my investing book. So sign up right now or the price is going to go up. And it says, hey, if you're not sure, remember that we have a 30 day, no questions asked guaranteed. You can cancel in the first 30 days, we're going to send you a refund. Why should you register? Here's all the reasons you should register. What's new in our launch? Here's all the new stuff. Then we have this call to action here and then don't miss out. Here's this timer saying hey, you only have 18 days left and by the time this actually sends out or say like two days left, these countdown timers work really well in my experience. And then another kind of call to action at the bottom saying hey, come to our landing page. Then it's our standard sales page here. Again click here to sign up and then our payment page. That's kind of the types of emails we send to promote our products. And obviously depending on what your products are, that's going to be. Yeah, as you can sell other people's products as an affiliate. There is a big campaign going on right now from a company called Stansberry Research. They're doing a big webinar later this month called the Melt Up Event. We've worked for Stansberry before so they said hey, why don't you get people to sign up for our big webinar thing and we'll give you 50% commission on whatever people buy. So we kind of like their stuff. So we sent out an email for them last week. See if I can find that here. Yeah, this is the email that we sent for them. So they wrote the copy and it says, you know, here's all this content from Stansberry and it's an opt in. So we sent this for them. So this will add people to Stansberry's hot list. We're being an affiliate for them and if people that we refer to them buy in the webinar then we'll get a 50% commission on what they sell. We don't often do affiliate stuff but we do it with the, with Stansberry and some of the other brands that are run by Agora Financial because they work really well, they know their stuff. So we like to work with them. You can also rent your email list so other people can pay to email your list. I probably won't show an example of that because I don't really want to show off, show that off right now. But People will pay 3 to 350 to email your list or $3 to $3.50 per click to email a list. So typically we'll work with an agency, we work with Investing Media Solutions and they'll book a spot and we'll send the email for their advertiser. The advertiser provides the copy and then they'll pay us that 3 or $3.50 a click, depending on what type of advertiser it is. Sometimes they pay more, sometimes they pay less. Really depends on what the content is, who the advertiser is. All that stuff. We do pretty well that way. Co registration, advertising, we do that against our mailing list. So every now and then we'll send out a free report to our mailing list. Let's see if I can find a good example of that from last month. Yeah, so here's, here's a free report that we made. It says, you know, eight retail stocks that are going to soar in 2019. So if you click on that, you'll see this co reg report. So it says, thank you for interested in this report. To view your report, please choose your free trading investing guides from our partners. So you can either click one of those or you can click no thanks. And if you say no thanks or say thank you, you can get your free report here. Or hey, you might also be interested in this other thing. You can click on that and then you finally get to the report that way. So by kind of putting these interstitial Coredge ads, you know, we can make 50 cents a click off those. Works pretty well for us. Then obviously you can drive traffic to your website. Sometimes we'll send people directly to a slideshow like this, an article that's kind of 10 pages long where you get people to keep going from one slide to the next to the next. And obviously every time that loads, there's more ad impressions and then that can add up over time. If we can get people to see 10 different pages on our websites, there's a pretty good chance they're going to click on an ad at some point. And then those work pretty well for us. Lots of different ways to make money with your email list, you've got something to sell. That's probably going to be the primary way you make money from your email list. You can. If you're a nonprofit, that just means you're sending people to come to your events that are fundraisers or make a donation to your organization. Don't think this doesn't apply to you because you're a nonprofit. If you're a nonprofit that is just getting people to volunteer, getting people to make a donation or otherwise engage with your organization. So same types of things apply to nonprofits as well. If you like a commission junction account or anything where you're an affiliate, you can find other products Promote your email list. You can directly rent it to advertisers. If you have direct relationships with your advertisers, you can do the Coredge thing. This is kind of more specific to finance and travel and crypto and some specific niches. So not everybody can do that, but a lot of people can do that. And then all sales, you can send people to your website and hopefully they'll click on an ad or buy something while they're there. John M says, do you have any opinions on HTML versus plain text emails? Kind of depends on what your brand is, who your audience is. We've kind of settled on using these templates. This is an example of something we know template. So we kind of do kind of a light branding, a lightly branded template where it's mostly text but it's got our market brand on there so that people see your logo, you get that logo ingrained in their mind or social media stuff and then mostly text. But the more template you get, the more it feels like an advertising email. So we try to keep it pretty light. If you do an all image email or just big templates, that tends to not work as well. I was a big fan of plain text for a long time and then we finally did add some kind of a little bit of a template here and that works pretty well for us. Batman Dell See Matt at Rhodium Weekend in a few days. Looking forward to seeing him and several other people here. He says how large of an email do you need before you can license it? It's really about 50,000 people less than that. People tend not to care, it's not big enough. But once you get to that 50,000 mark, that's kind of when you can really start doing some of that stuff. And then Daniel Bootler, good friend Daniel says you have a lot of affiliates disappearing on you without pain. No we don't because we only work with the most reputable people. There are plenty of shady characters in the financial media space and we are very careful about who we work with based off that. So we kind of filter that a lot by having investing in Media Solutions doing most of our sales for us. So they have been around forever. They know who all the reputable and non reputable advertisers in our space. And so they kind of go to some of that and any. And we typically don't do a direct relationship with people unless we know them very well. But the Agora people, we know them super well so they always get paid from them. And if we don't, we know how to find them. So, you know, we're just careful on who we select as our partners and that's never really a problem for affiliates to pay us. And then Daniel says, are HTML email templates dead? I don't think so. I think, you know, kind of lightly templated structure works pretty well. We're going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future. All of our test show doesn't really make a difference. So if it's not going to make a difference for us, I'd rather have our branding there. The market beat blue and with our logo and kind of our social media stuff just to kind of ingrain our brand in people's heads. And the last section here we are about done. Kay says, I like your content just above the unsubscribe. Yes, I stole this from Ezra Firestone. This is kind of another way to indoctrinate people in your brand. It used to just say, you should just have this part. I stole this from Azure. Firestone from Smart Marketer says, thanks for subscribing to MarketBeat. We're a small business, we help. Here's our mission statement. We use email to send you information. So that kind of like as people are thinking, thinking about unsubscribing, it gives them a second reminder about what our mission statement is and why we send email. And then if they really want to unsubscribe, then they can do that as well. All right, let's get to the last section. Email deliverability. Spam is a big problem on the Internet. And obviously if you don't want to be kind of grouped in with spammers, even if you are not a spammer, that can happen. You know, we get put on blacklist every now and then and we try to avoid it. So the way that we avoid it is one, we use an email service provider. There's safety in numbers with an email service provider. We use SendGrid. So and by using the email service provider, they will set up your. What are called your SPF and your DKIM records, which are basically validation records on your domain that says that this IP address in this domain or this domain or this IP address can send mail from this domain, kind of validate your messages. Your ESP typically takes care of that for you. They'll worry about warming up your IP addresses and all the other more complicated stuff that you need to do to make sure that your messages don't get stuck in a spam folder. Your email service provider simplifies a whole lot of that. So I Very rarely, rarely, rarely recommend sending email yourself. Always use a mailchimp or something like that because they kind of abstract a lot of that complicated stuff away from you. And SendGrid even does that with us certainly as well. You know, 10 years ago everyone would say if you use a double opt in, we don't say that anymore because the confirmations, not many people click those confirmation emails anymore. What we do instead is that if somebody doesn't open an email from us in the first 30 days of being on a billing as well, you know, 10 years ago everyone would say if you use a double opt in, we don't say that anymore because the confirmations, not many people click those confirmation emails anymore. What we do instead is that if somebody doesn't open an email from us in the first 30 days of being on a mailing list, we just kick them off. At that point, we kind of use that confirmed. The people can either click the confirmation link in an email or they can click on another link in an email. But if they don't kind of engage with our email at all in the first 30 days, we kick them off. And that kind of accomplishes the same types of things. You want to check your IPs in your domain for blacklist issues? I like to use a service called monterbl.com for that, or it's monte rbl.valli.org you can type in a domain name or sending an IP address and you can see if there's any problems here. So for all the domain blacklist, you know, I just checked 40, 40, 49 blacklist at once to see if there's any problems. Your mark tweet's good to go, but you want to check that every month or two, make sure you have no problems there. So there are some ways that you can actively reduce spam complaints, no matter how squeaky clean you are, through email practices, somebody's going to press the report spam button. So the way that we kind of mitigate that is to have an unsubscribe link at the top of your message. So we have this unsubscribe link here so that if some people are thinking about pressing that report spam button, let's see if I can find an email from MarketBeat. Here's our crypto newsletter. So if I want to get rid of this newsletter, I can click the report spam button or I can click the list unsubscribe button again. Your email service provider will help you do this, but that's kind of a new technology that's built into email. It's a special header that's sent that will allow people to unsubscribe easily. Or they can click this button here that will go to our mailing preferences page where they can say, I only want this type of email, or I can unsubscribe from all the email if I want to there as well. We just make it easy for people to unsubscribe. If you get a spam report rate of above 0.1%, it could be on blacklist. Your messages could go to the spam folder, your email service provider could kick you off. All sorts of bad stuff could happen if your spam report rate gets too high. But if you make it easy for people to unsubscribe, you know, that can mitigate some of that. You know, GMO now has the kind of promotion other whatever tabs. I don't use those at all. But the way to kind of, you know, some people think those ruin. See if I can find a picture over here. Some people all think that will hurt your deliverability rates. Yeah, there's a good picture of it. Your Gmail has these tabs now, and if you're stuck, it's stuck in promotions. The way that you can get around this is you email people and you say, can you go ahead and drag your message to this primary tab? I think we do this on our mailing preferences page. See if I can find that page. Yeah, our safe sender instructions. Yeah, so we'll send people to this page and say, hey, if you're a Gmail user, find an email from us, drag it to this primary tab, and then in the future our messages will get through. You know, a lot of people will try to say, maybe if you don't include these special words that you won't get in that promotions tab. Gmail is pretty smart. It's not really hard to outsmart them. But if you can get actively people to actively drive your messages into that primary, four, then if the user is telling Gmail, stick my messages in primary, then Gmail will do that. In the United States, we have this thing called can spam. It's a piece of legislation that got passed in 2003. It's not enforced very well. It's not enforced very often. But you do kind of have to make sure you require it, one, to be compliant with the law. But two, also to make sure that your messages are delivered. You're sending out a whole bunch of marketing messages and then you don't have. You don't have the proper stuff in there that you're supposed to have in there. You know your message is gonna get stuck in a spam folder so says messages can't be sent without an unsubscribe option. So you need unsubscribe link. You can't harvest email addresses. You should, I don't think, not sure about this stuff. But you should have your mailing address on there. You should have unsubscribe button, all that stuff and you can read these on your own requirement. But if you see on our email find that up here, you go to the bottom, you see our contact information. You know all this stuff on here, it's got our company name, it's got our student address. This is my downtown office. Unsubscribe link information about our mailing list. All this stuff is for can spam compliance. There's a reason everybody puts their mailing address on their email sense is because of that can spam law. We are a little bit past the hour point so I think we are going to wrap up, answer a couple more questions and we'll go from we'll call today. Kay says, what do you think of kickboxing? So Kickbox is a service that will clean up your emails and we actually use Kickbox as part of our registration process. So if you Sign up for MarketBeat and you type in a bad email address, I'll show an example of this of inaction. Try this again. Close the incognito. I'm gonna go back to MarketBeat. I'm gonna use a fake email address. I'm gonna say matt fiveholston.com that email doesn't exist. So it does show this but it didn't actually register me for the it looks like I got registered but I didn't because it knows it's a bad email address. So we do kickbox validation. I could show you the code that does it as part of our email signup process. Then if Kickbox says it's not a valid email address, it will kick people. They'll never even make it on our list. So we really like kickboxing. John M Says, have you seen any gotchas that would typically lead to being on a blacklist? Typically like what gets us on blacklist is every now and then we'll send an email for an advertiser. That email has been sent out a few times before a different mailing list. So if you have an advertiser email and it's kind of been through the winner a few times sent to other people's mailing list and it's very clearly an ad. Sometimes that will get a sign on blacklist, but it's really easy to get off. Yeah, I mean typically you just go to a website and then you fill out a link to get your Apple Blacklist. Jared says, what do you do if your site is listed on I wanted to blacklist on multi rbl. Typically you can click through and then there's always a form to unsubscribe you or get you off the blacklist. Really not hard to get off a blacklist. Typically it's just sending an email. Daniel Butler says, awesome webinar. You are the best. I think that's a great way to end it. Thank you all for coming today, coming and being on the webinar. If you have any more questions, go ahead and send me an email. Obviously I wrote a book on email marketing. You guys all have the PDF for now, but if you want to get the audiobook version or the Kindle version or the paperback version, you can go to myemailmarketingbook.com and check out as well. I think we're going to call it there. Sunil says. Will you email the recording? Yes, we will email the recording and we'll call it a day there. And thanks for showing up.