MBA971 How To Improve the Quality of Your Email List

Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that gives you what you need in about 10 minutes so you can keep on doing what you love with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. If you're just getting started with and you want to make sure that what you're creating is what your customers actually want to buy, this process is called idea Validation and we created a course, a seven part video course on how to validate your ideas. Whether it's your business idea, the product, the pricing, the service, whatever it is and you can enroll to this course for free. Just go to 100- MBA-NET to enroll for absolutely nothing. Just drop your email and you're all set. In today's episode, you will learn how to improve the quality of your email list. When it comes to Internet marketing, you hear the phrase the money's in the list all the time and people emphasize the idea of having a big list so you can market to so many people. But the size of the list is really not as important as the quality of the list. You want people that are really engaged on your email list, people that open your emails, click through and actually reply to you. It's better to have a more engaged list of about 1,000 people than a 10,000 person list that's not engaged. Again, this has to do with conversions. The higher conversion, the less emails you actually need. So in today's episode, I'm going to break down how you can improve the quality of your email list today. What you can do before you start collecting emails, while you're collecting those emails and even after. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode is supported by Acer looking for a laptop that delivers on both performance and price. The Acer Swift 5 offers a powerful Intel Core processor, super slim design and more. Discover new possibilities with the Acer Swift 5. Go to acer.com, click on store and enter coupon code 100 MBA at checkout to receive 10% plus free ground shipping on a Swift Series laptop, including already discounted models. Offer valid through April 30, 2018 and limit to one per qualified order. Windows hello, the password is you. Windows 10 improving the quality of your email list should be one of the top priorities in your business. This reminds me of a great article by Kevin Kelly. It's called Thousand True Fans. And if you just google it, you'll find it. It's very, very popular. And it's the concept of you really just thousand true fans. To have a successful business, you want a thousand people that really love your stuff. I know a lot of small businesses, a lot of small online businesses that have small email lists. 20003000 people, and they're making six figures because the people on their email list love what they do and they're not tire kickers. So how do you make sure that the quality of your list is the best it could be? So it starts with how you collect the emails in the first place. So for most of us, we put an opt in box on our website. We ask for their name and email address in exchange for something. Whether it's to sign up for a newsletter or a email course, or a video course or a one page PDF, whatever it is, we're giving them something in exchange for signing up. Now whatever attracts people to sign up is going to have a big effect on who signs up. Right? That makes total sense. So keep that in mind. Whatever you're offering for the email address will attract a certain type of person. Ask yourself, the person that signs up, the person that takes on this freebie, are they the type of person you want on your email list? Can they afford the product that you're trying to sell? Can they actually get a win? Can they actually benefit from what you're offering them? And are your products a good match to make sure that they're successful? So obviously these opt ins are ways to build trust. It's obviously a way for people to get on your email list so you can build that trust, but it has to be related to what you actually offer. We actually have for sale. So Nicole, I really work hard on this, this opt in product match to make sure that the people that actually opt in to our email lists are as good as we can find the best people for our products. So for example, with our software, Webinar Ninja, one of our biggest draws or biggest opt ins is our seven day course. It's called you'd Webinar Blueprint. And this course walks them through how to run a webinar. Now this is a perfect fit because no one would be interested in running a webinar unless they want to use a webinar software. So if they're thinking about getting into webinars, that's probably their first step. How to put one together, how to think of a topic, how to field questions, how to deal with the tech. So again we Crafted this course to attract people to sign up for this course that would ultimately be interested in buying our product. Now why is this even important? Because you pay for every single person that subscribed to your list. You know, most email marketing software, whether it's ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft or ConvertKit, they have different tiers. So you're gonna pay X amount of dollars for a thousand subscribers. The next tier might be 5,000, the next tier might be 10,000. The point is, is that you don't want thousands of people on your list that really have no intention of engaging with you or buying from you now or into the future. Let's get real, you run a business here. This is not a charity organization. If somebody is on your email list and they haven't opened an email in years, why are you paying for them to be on your list? More about that in a bit. How we can prune our list, but the point is that you want the best quality people on your list. So you're not paying for dud emails or dud subscribers, people that are just not going to buy now or ever. And yes, you're going to have people that are on your email list that won't buy for other reasons, but they're engaged and they might share your content. And that's great, you want to keep these people on, but I'm talking about people that just do not respond, do not open, basically ignore your emails. So one of the ways that once you have them on your email list to make sure you can organize these subscribers and see how well they're doing and the value they're adding to your business is by a system called tagging. So most email software like ActiveCampaign, like ConvertKit, like Infusionsoft, like AWeber, they have a way to tag people that basically says that I'm gonna put a little label on this subscriber to let me know how they got on the list. So I have all these ways on my website for them to get on my list, whether it's a course or a webinar or maybe a PDF. So I wanna tag how they got on there so I can know what things work and what things don't. So let's just imagine right now I have five subscribers on my list and I have two ways of opting in. I have a course and a PDF and every time somebody opt ins to my list, I put a tag on them saying PDF or course. Now when I go into my email marketing software, most of these softwares have A rating system for every subscriber so I can see how well they respond to me. So the rating system based on opens how often they open the email, how often they click on links inside the email engagement. Like they might open the email more than once. So they give them like a rating, like five stars or one star. So I can take a look at the ratings and if I see that, hey, everybody who opts into my PDF has a low rating or most of them have a low rating, maybe this PDF is attracting the wrong subscriber. You get it? So now you know where to focus your efforts. Maybe you want to improve that PDF, change it out with something else. Tagging also helps you not have multiple lists inside of your email marketing software. That can get very confusing. If you have a list for every opt in, you can have, you know, literally hundreds of lists. By tagging them, you can just dump them into one list and you can just say, hey, this is how they got on the list. Then obviously you can tag them when they become a buyer. So you can say, hey, this person is a buyer. They're on my list. I want to give them a certain email because they're a buyer and only buyers that are tagged with the buyer tag get this email. Now another strategy is that when you write your campaigns, your emails, your newsletters out to your list, try to get them to engage. Because this is going to help the email marketing software rate the actual subscriber based on their engagement. But if you don't ask them to engage, it's going to be hard for them to rate them. So make it a habit to ask them to reply or to click on a link or to watch a video that you have. The point here is that you asking them to do something when they're reading the email. Because if you don't, all the actual software has to go by is the open rate. But reply and clicking gives them another metric. I often add a reply or ask to reply in my automations. So when they're on my email list for, let's say a video course, after they've completed the video course, I send them an automated email asking them, hey, how was the course? I would love to hear your feedback. Just click reply to this email and let me know what you think so you can automate this process. So it's easy. All right, so let's say for example, you've been building your email list for some time now. It's been six months, a year now it's time to really take a look at your email list and prune it again. You don't want to be paying for people that shouldn't be on your list. So one of the ways to do this is to send a campaign to all the email subscribers that have a low rating or with a lot of these email marketing softwares, you can actually give a condition like they haven't opened an email in three months or they haven't clicked on a link in a year. So you're sending an email campaign just to those people, and in this campaign you're going to ask them to take action or you're going to remove them from the list. Now, that's not a threat, it's just saying, hey, I've noticed that you haven't been engaged on our email list. You haven't opened an email or clicked on anything. And I completely understand if you've been busy. Hey, we all get busy. But can you let me know if you'd like to continue to be on my email list? If so, just click this link and this link can go to any page. You can just create a simple page on your website that says, hey, thanks for confirming your subscription, or thanks for being a subscriber to my email list. I'll keep the emails coming. It can be something simple with a funny GIF or something like that, or you can say, reply to this email and say, keep me on. But I find the link thing very simple because you just have to click a link and that's it. Now, the point here is that you want them to take action. So that way, after you send this campaign, you can filter for everybody that has not clicked on the link. So everybody who did not click on the link on this campaign, you can scrub them off, you can say, delete that contact and you could tell them in that email that you've sent that, hey, if you don't click on the link, I will just unsubscribe you and you won't be getting any emails from me again. I hope I was helpful in the time that we were together and I'm always around if you want to subscribe again. If you need our help in the future so you can have fun with it, you can be polite about it. There's nothing wrong with doing this. And in fact, when I've received an email like this, I was actually compelled to click that link as soon as possible because like, hey, sorry, I just got busy. But I love being on your email list. You'll be surprised. You'll get a lot of people clicking, but you'll also get People that just ignore it again because, hey, they're not engaged. And that's when you got to pull the trigger. Filter for those people and unsubscribe them to your list. No reason for you to be paying their way. Again, quality over quantity, guys. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Here's an Interesting stat. 1/4th of all Americans say they'd start their own business in the next year if they could. But only a fraction of those actually do. Why? Well, because taking that leap can be very scary. Luckily, there's Weebly. We've mentioned Weebly a whole bunch of times on this show. Weebly is the easiest way to create an incredible looking website. But more importantly, it's a whole e commerce platform packed with tools to help you sell your products, process payments, manage inventory, create marketing campaigns, tell your brand's story, and a whole lot more. Weebly's mission is to help turn people's great ideas into into successful online businesses. You see, that's the key here. Yes, you want a beautiful website, but you want to make sure you have a successful online business on your hands. This is why Weebly focuses on providing top notch customer service. If you have a question, you can just pick up the phone and talk to an expert. Many of whom have started online businesses themselves. This shows Weebly knows their success comes from the success of their customers. So if you have a product idea you want to share with the world, check out Weebly. You can have a beautiful, powerful online store up and running in a matter of hours. And because you're listening to this podcast, you can visit weebly.com mba and get 15% off your first purchase. That's Weebly. W E-E-B-L-Y.com mba to get 15% off your first purchase. Don't just build a beautiful website, build a successful online business with Weebly. Alright, a few more tips when it comes to improving the quality of your email list. Now, when it comes to cleaning up your list and even removing people that are not responding to you, just like we mentioned right now, this is gonna be a tough exercise for some of us. I know it was for me for the first time because you worked so hard to build that email list and we're all kind of, you know, driven by what we call vanity metrics. You know, my email list is now at, you know, 50,000 subscribers and we just feel good about that even though maybe half of them are duds and haven't even read an email from you in years. So it might be a little hard for us to be like unsubscribe, remove the people that I worked so hard to get on and a lot of us invested a lot of money, whether it's Facebook ads or you know, Google AdWords to get people onto our list. But hey, you gotta do it. You're gonna save money. You're also gonna save yourself a lot of headaches. And on top of that, email marketing services can penalize you if your unsubscribe rate is super high. That means if a lot of people click that unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails, they might flag the system and say, hey, what's going on here? A lot of you aren't subscribing, maybe this person sending out spam. So if you have bad matches, it's better for you to remove them than for them to remove you because they feel like, hey, I don't want to get these emails anymore. So it's sort of like a preventative measure or preempting, you know, the unsubscribe. Lastly, as you build your business and been in business for a while, those vanity metrics start to fade away and you're like, hey, you know what? It's all just about how my business is doing. It's growing. Am I profitable? Am I increasing my profit? And it's really just about effectiveness. So you really want to improve your effectiveness and this is what this exercise is all about. Now one last thing I did not mention that I want to mention. One of the things you can do to improve the quality of a list and improve the engagement in your list is to improve your emails. Yes, I'm talking about the actual copy that you write. Are you writing engaging copy? Is your email quality worth reading? Making more of an effort when you write your email campaigns and automations make a world of a difference. Sometimes I just love to revisit our automations and campaigns to see if I can improve it, tweak it a bit and help our open rates and engagement increase. So in other words, sometimes it's not them, sometimes it's you. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love the show, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We would love to hear from you. We read every single review. I love reading these reviews. It lets me know what you love about the show. It also lets other people know what you love about the show so they can subscribe and we can spread the $100 MBA across the globe. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Email marketing, in my opinion, is one of the most effective marketing channels. There's nothing like having access to somebody's inbox when it comes to email. You have to deal with email. You can't just scroll through it like a newsfeed on Facebook, right? You gotta archive it, open it, delete it, reply, do something with it. So if you really haven't made a serious effort with email marketing yet, I encourage you to do so. In our experience, it's the most effective way to market to your target market. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where we talk about when is the best time to raise prices in your business. Economies change inflation, your product improves. There's plenty of reasons to raise your prices. But when is the best time? How do you do it? We talk about it in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Until then, take care. Of.