MBA1726 Newsletters vs Email Sequences

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Newsletters versus Email sequences. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Which one is best for your business? For your audience? For the people on your email list? First, let's define them. A newsletter is a email you send on a regular basis to your customers, to anybody on your email list. They could be a customer or non customer, pay potential customer leads and the main difference is that you're actually triggering this email, you're writing it in advance and maybe scheduling it to go out at a certain time or a certain day every week or every two weeks or every month. So in whatever tool you use to send emails, whether it's Mailchimp or ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign, you're writing up this newsletter maybe a week or two in advance, scheduling it to go out to the recipients so they can read what's new in your company, what's happening, your latest blog post, in your latest video or podcast episode, it's some sort of value you want to give your customer. An email sequence is different because it's not one email that goes out to everybody at a particular time or the same time. So with the newsletter you're sending out every Monday, for example, to everybody on your list. But with an email sequence, as soon as somebody joins your list, they get an automation sequence of emails. So they might get one email as soon as they join your email list, welcoming them. Then a day later they'll get an email with your latest blog posts. And these are pre written emails that get sent automatically in a certain sequence that you create in advance. And these sequences can go on for as long as you like, for as many emails as you want. Some people call this a shadow newsletter. I heard this from Brennan Dunn, who writes a lot of courses, creates a lot of courses when it comes to email marketing. We had Brennan on as a guest teacher back on episode 65, around six years ago. You can hit subscribe and find it in our archives if you'. It's called the shadow newsletter because from the recipient's end, from your potential customer's end, it's just an email, just like a newsletter is. But from your end, it's all pre scheduled, all automated. So which one is better? Well, I'm here to tell you that they both have value and it all depends on what you're trying to achieve. And I have my own thoughts on this. I think that traditional newsletters have their place. The advantage of a newsletter is that it's fresh content, fresh information that you just wrote recently, a week or two ago, max. So you might be covering recent topics, current events, you might be curating articles that have come up in your feed or that you've seen that are recent or relevant. With a newsletter or shadow newsletter, things can get old really quickly because if you wrote the sequence six months ago, those emails are not as timely as they are now in terms of the content, in terms of the actual information you're sharing. So what I recommend is you do send a newsletter. But I think the timeliness of what's going on, what's the latest and greatest, actually pertains or is actually more important for your actual customers. So sending a regular newsletter to your customers actually makes more sense because you want to retain them, you want to keep them happy and you want to give them value. You also want to update them. What's going on with your products or services, your company. And that information needs to be timely. But if you're trying to nurture an audience to, to become a customer, like the emails you send to potential customers on your email list, that necessarily doesn't need to be a newsletter. It can be what's called a shadow newsletter or an email sequence. And what you focus on is things that are not really a time bound. So when it comes to these email sequences, I would include content that is timeless. Like your most popular blog posts. Another email could be your backstory, how you started the company and why you do what you do. Another email in the sequence could be how some of your customers are getting the most out of your products and services that you sell. Some success stories, things that will get them over the line from being a non customer to a customer, because really that's your goal with that email list of people that are not customers yet. Now what's great about an email sequence is that you can actually go on all these different paths. You can really geek out and not only just have a linear set of emails that go out at a certain time after they signed up into your email list, but you can actually trigger depending on how they respond to those emails. So if they click a link in the email, you can send them a different email versus someone who didn't click an email. So if they clicked a link in an email you sent, you can send them a different series of emails that follow after that because they clicked on the link. If they didn't click, then you can send them a different set of emails so you can actually cater to how they're actually acting. If somebody opens your emails consistently in these email sequences, then you have a green light to continue to send them regular emails in the sequence. But what if somebody hasn't opened an email in a while? Maybe they haven't opened the last three emails or they haven't opened an email from you in a month. So now you know you're losing them a little bit. So you might want to give them a different type of email to re engage them. And of course Sprinkled in these sequences, you can make some offers to again, invite them to become a customer. Now, with anything in marketing, it takes experimentation. You're going to have to try this out. You're going to have to see what works for your email subscribers. That includes your newsletter and your email sequences. So anytime you set anything up, understand, you're going to have to tweak, you're going to have to modify, you're going to have to adjust, you're going to have to pivot. So keep an eye on it and just track its progress. One of the things I recommend is if your email marketing tool allows you to set goals. So you know, if you hit the goal, let's say, for example, you're creating an email sequence, and the goal is by the end of 30 days, you want to make sure those people become customers. This is a very simplistic goal, but I'm just trying to give you an example. If they did not become a customer, or let's say only 20% became a customer, this is a very simplistic example. But let's say, for example, after, you know, you run the campaign for 30 days, you realize only 2% have become customers. That's pretty low. You may want to make some tweaks and changes and see if you can get that up to 3 or 4 or 5 or 10%. If the frequency of your newsletters to your customers or once a week right now, and you feel like maybe the open rates are not as high, maybe send it every two weeks or once a month. Experiment and see if open rates go up. You gotta tweak things to make sure they work for your business, for your audience. I know there's a lot of businesses that love getting emails from you, from your company. I'm on an email list that literally sends an email every day, sometimes twice a day, and I open an email every single time because I love the content. But there are other companies on their list that maybe send an email once a month, and I don't even open those. So understand your audience, understand what they need and what they're happy with. You can also, of course, send out surveys. Surveys are helpful. They'll give you a rough estimate, I say rough estimate of the understanding of your customers. Because you have to understand when you send out a survey, those who answer surveys are engaged. You're getting a skewed result, right? You're getting the people actually answering the survey are already putting their hand up to say, I'm an active subscriber, but it doesn't mean, don't do surveys. It just means that. Understand that when you give out a survey that this is how it's skewed a little bit. So you can take that in consideration. Newsletters or email sequences I want to say right off the bat, obviously newsletters are going to be easier for you to do right now when you're getting started, maybe because you just have to write one email every week or every two weeks, or your frequency. Email sequences take an upfront investment, especially if you're running a very long sequence that's going to last you months. This could be 20, 30, 40 emails you have to write. Plus build out the infrastructure or the, the pattern of emails, the timing, all inside your email marketing software. And especially if you're going to do triggers and actions based on how they respond to those emails, that's another thing you're going to have to work on. So there is an upfront investment. The advantage of that is that then you don't have to send out emails or write emails every single week. It's good to go for all these new subscribers that come in. And of course you can use a combination of both. So if you want my advice and you just, you do no email marketing right now, get started with just a regular newsletter. Send out a newsletter to all your subscribers on a regular basis. Choose a cadence once a week, every two weeks, once a month. Up to you and of course up to your audience what they're able to do. You can always start with once a week and see how it goes and then move into email sequences. If you're already doing newsletters, keep doing it while trying email sequences with a different segment of your audience. Thanks so much for listening to the Hunter RBA show. If you love what you hear, smash that subscribe button and whatever you use to listen to podcasts or on every platform, Spotify, Citradio, Himalaya, Apple Podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get all our archive episodes, over 1700 episodes in the archives. It's the only way to get access. So hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to convert potential customers into customers. You can read thousands of articles out there. If you just search Google, you'll see there are so many pieces of data showing you that it performs way better than social media by a long shot. And the more crowded social media gets, the more important it is for you to build your email list so you can have access to people's inboxes. Something they can't ignore. I can't stress this enough. As the years roll by, it's becoming more and more a gold rush for email list building. So get started if you haven't already. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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