A Beginners Guide To Email Marketing

If you feel like a beginner when it comes to email marketing, don't worry, you're not the only one. There's plenty of people. It could be that you just don't know how to do it. You don't know what tools to use. How often should you email your list? Maybe you feel like email marketing is dead and that there's no real reason to actually do it because why? You have social media. Well, email marketing is the oldest form of digital marketing and it's still the best over social media or even YouTube marketing, which is something that I love to do, or podcasting as well. Really what it all comes down to is about building your email list and not just having a big list, but having a quality list. And today we are going to go over everything that you need to know to just get started with email marketing. We're going to go over how email marketing and why it is more reliable than social media. We'll go over the different tools that you can use, how to collect emails and do it on autopilot, which is my favorite way to do it. Also, we'll go over my email strategy so you can get an inside look of that and then some of the best practices that I recommend when it comes to email marketing. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Profit Your Knowledge podcast. Today is episode number 2, and I'm your host, James Allen, here to help you turn your knowledge, passions, and skills into an online business. And build a life of freedom. I'm super pumped to talk about today's episode. Email marketing is a favorite topic of mine because this is how we actually make sales in our business. It's really the lifeblood of our business next to content and actually creating content, which we'll go into a little bit today. But before we get into all that, if you are new to this channel or the YouTube channel or the podcast, welcome. if you're in a place where you want to start an online business and you just have no idea where to go, what to do first, second, third, fourth, and so on, and you want to know what the real needle movers are that are going to help you grow your online business, at least in the method, in the way that I teach. Maybe you're looking for a different method, or you're a service-based, service-based business and you want to create some more scalable income. You're tired of just being glued to the phone all the time. Then this would be a great resource for you. I created a 5-step action guide that I just want to give to you. It's totally free, especially if you're new. Pick it up, try it out, especially if you've been listening for a bit and you haven't picked it up. Pick it up, check it out. It's like 8 pages long. It's very brief, very concise. But I wrote it all out, wrote out the whole method that's been responsible for helping people create 5, 6, or even 7-figure online businesses and working part-time hours doing so by creating digital products, evergreen content, all this stuff while keeping costs to a minimum. I go over all of it and I wrote it all out. And then just cut it down so it's very concise, as concise as I can make it while still being actionable. And the biggest thing is that you go through it, take about 10 minutes, and then you actually take action on the things that you learn. Inside the guide, there's also a couple videos that I've put inside of there to give you a better understanding of what I actually mean when I say, you know, different parts of different steps. So check it out. It's basically like a mini course in a PDF form because it links to different videos and it's my gift to you. So if you're ready to start your online business, pick it up. Place to go get the guide at is profityourknowledge.com/guide. Again, totally free. My gift to you. There's also a link in the description of this episode as well. Okay, let's talk about email marketing. Email marketing is still the best medium for selling what you know online or just selling in general. People use this all the time. And if you read any book about marketing or sales in the internet space, Everybody talks about growing your email list, nurturing your email list. It's all in the list. Everybody talks about that. And there's a couple reasons why. You own your list. That's the first thing. Nobody else owns your list. I guess maybe if you're renting through a software, technically they do, but there's ways to save your list and make sure that you actually do it, that it's actually yours. But what's cool about an email list is that social media platforms come and go. MySpace was a thing and then it disappeared and then it became Facebook. But then if you had an audience on MySpace and you were doing business stuff, you'd have to start building your audience on Facebook. Now, now we have Instagram, we have TikTok at the time of this recording anyway, even YouTube. And what's crazy is that those social media platforms are more like rented space. And it's like renting online space. You put up pieces of content, you show up, and on social media, I feel it's not as reliable because you put up a piece of content and then it gets lost in the feed. Maybe if people really wanted to dig, they could find those things, but it doesn't go up that much, or it doesn't go up for that long, unless you do like evergreen content, which we'll talk about today. But the biggest thing to understand is that you own your email list. If Facebook falls apart, Instagram falls apart, TikTok, falls apart. I even saw something about TikTok, which I don't know if it's going to happen, but they were talking about how any Apple user that uses TikTok is actually not going to have TikTok or access to it, which is kind of crazy. And that's a huge market that just can't use TikTok anymore. And that you can't market to if you have a Samsung or an Android phone. But it's just crazy. It's just, you never know what's going to happen in the online world. So focus on building an email list, which we're going to get into all the ins and outs of it. In this episode. But the biggest understanding is that you own the list. It's all yours, and you can do whatever you want with that list. And there's a lot of power that comes with that and a lot of responsibility to deliver to your people. It is also the most common communication channel. It has been huge. Before it was mail, and then it switched to email. So everybody's on email, and I don't remember the exact statistics of how many people use Email, but it's a lot and people are opening up email all the time, every single day, day in and day out, especially with the use of smartphones. Everybody, it's so easy to do and that's why people get lost in checking their email. So everybody's glued to their email basically, and they love to buy things through email more than social media, because on social media people like to be social, they like to get entertained. Inside of an email, it's just a way, it's just a different dynamic really. So it's a lot better for building a relationship with your people on your email list and then being able to sell things to them. Also, something you can do with email that you can't really do with social media, or not as easily, is you can automate your emails, which we're going to get into a little bit more as we go deeper. But that's so cool. So someone opts in, you can send them through an entire email sequence or an automation that can automatically add more value to them and then sell your products. You can't do that with other channels. All right, the other thing is that email actually converts more than social media. According to OptinMonster, emails just convert better. This is straight from their website. They say people who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who did not receive email offers. In fact, email marketing has an ROI, return on investment, of $4,400 4,400%. That is massive. And if you're wondering if social media converts even better, think again. An order, or the average order value of an email is at least 3 times higher than that of social media, which is awesome because yeah, people are glued to their phones. And again, it's just a different dynamic being inside of email. So the big question, one of the biggest questions that I get all the time and that I found on the internet, et cetera, et cetera, and that I wanted to know for a long time was how do you actually collect Emails. How do you actually get these people onto your email list? I struggle with this for so long and I would read books and people said, oh, you got to build your list, build your list, build your list. But I had no idea how to do it. Or they'd say, oh, like pay for ads. And if you're smart, when you do paid ads, I'm not a paid ads guy, but what I would do and really focus on is running ads that go to opt-in. Because if you can opt-in or you get people to opt in to your email list, then you can start growing your list, start nurturing them, and then they'll weed themselves out. As you go. People unsubscribe all the time, and it's okay. I get unsubscribes all the time. It's fine. I think of it as a good thing because people are— it's basically cleaning my list for me of people who really want to stick around. So don't be afraid of unsubscribes. But how we collect emails— the best way to do it to make sure your email list is quality, because it's not just about having a big email list, like Like I've ran ads, but I had, I had bad leads when I was doing that. The best way to make sure that your leads are qualified, that they actually care about what you have to say, is to create a lead magnet. And there's a couple of different things here, a couple of benefits. This episode isn't just about lead magnets, but with lead magnets, you get to create a lead magnet that speaks to a desire that they have, which is really cool. And also, people don't really just want to subscribe to marketing emails, especially if they know what their marketing emails— like nobody likes to be sold to. I don't know, but people love to buy things. They love to get free stuff, get value, and most importantly, feel like they're getting a great value, especially if they pay for something. They want to know that the value that they're getting is greater than the amount that they're paying, which is kind of sales rules number one. But a relevant lead magnet is something that's relevant to your product or service that you're trying to sell. And the reason that they're going to be a more qualified lead is because they opt in for something Like a great example is my 5-step guide that I told you about in the beginning of this episode. And I do in every single episode, um, for a couple of reasons. Number one, I get an email subscriber because you are going to have to give me your email in order to pick up that 5-step guide. But also it's a 5-step guide that teaches you how to start your online business and grow your online business and create a scalable income teaching the things that you know. And that's how I help people. If people hire me one-on-one, that is the method that I walk them through, that I help them with. It's just the amount of support that they have is way better than just reading through a lead magnet, even though it's filled with action steps and it's still actionable. So a great lead magnet is something that this person can implement that day. And great forms of lead magnets are things like checklists. It could literally be a one-page PDF checklist. It could be a short guide like the one that I have. So go ahead, opt in to the guide. You can unsubscribe if you want, but if you opt into the guide, you can read through it and you can see a good example of a lead magnet. Do I have the best lead magnet in the world? Maybe not, but it's a good one because I've done my research. I've built a lot of lead magnets in the past. So check out that guide as a great example as well. Another great way to collect emails or a great lead magnet is a quiz. Quizzes are awesome because people want to learn more about themselves. And especially if you can position it to them. Like if I created a quiz, it was something like how to decide like what type of business owner you are, what type of online business owner you are. You go through this quiz and it tells you what type of business owner you are, what kind of personality type you have. All those— if you ever see the personality type one that you have to opt in for, you have to give them your email address and they take you through this quiz or you go through the quiz and then they say, do you want your results? Give us your email address. People do this all the time. This is just how online business works because people understand these big companies. They understand as well that they need to collect an email address because it's the best medium for selling products and building a relationship with people. You can also do an exclusive workshop or a podcast episode or podclass, if you want to call it that, where the only way that they can access this private information or resource is by giving you their email address. So they're qualifying themselves because a lot of people will look at like your free content, look at your website, and everything should be pointing towards your lead magnet to capture an email address. Everything should be. Every piece of content I make, I offer my lead magnet. Does everybody take up on it? No. But do people take up on it? All the time. I'm getting opt-ins every day. People running through, checking it out, downloading it. It's just the nature of how it works. Okay. Another great example is templates. You can create some sort of template to help them depending on what kind of business that you have. One other thing to consider when you create a lead magnet is making sure that your email list is GDPR compliant. GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. And this came from like Europe was really big on this. So basically in a nutshell, I'm not going to go too deep into it. It basically allows people to know that they're going to subscribe to marketing emails and they're going to be getting extra stuff instead of just getting a download. So the easiest way to do this is that where you have your opt-in form underneath, it just has to explain to them or they have to do a little checkbox or something or like a two-step opt-in to make sure that they understand that they are opting in to subscribe to weekly emails or regular emails and that they can get marketed and presented different offers and stuff. So as long as people just have an understanding, like, okay, I understand, like, you're going to send me more stuff and potentially try and sell me stuff, that's okay. So that's what GDPR compliant is. Just make sure that people know that they're opting into additional content and things like that. All right. Um, so you've got your lead magnet, GDPR compliant. You make sure that they know that they check a box or something to make sure they know they're subscribing to marketing emails. Uh, and then what we want to do is we also want to create some sort of, or sign up from some sort of software or database where we can actually build our email list. And great examples are things like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Constant Contact. You can also use ActiveCampaign, or my favorite is Kajabi. And if you look in the description of my YouTube channel, if you scroll down to free resources, there is a link where you can check out a free 30 days. Plus you get a course and you get some one-on-one coaching if you decide to sign up and all that cool stuff. So there's a page that tells you all about that. But Kajabi is awesome because it does, it does all of that stuff. It collects emails. It also allows you to host courses, host your website. Everything that I do in my business is inside of Kajabi. But Kajabi, you have to pay for. If you want like free option, I would check out Mailchimp for sure. ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign, I believe both of them do a free version. The only thing with the free versions of these, these companies like Mailchimp or any of those is that they limit you on automations, which depending on where you're at in your business can be a really important thing. I mean, you should get to the point where you do have automations or customer journeys as they call them inside of Mailchimp. Where as soon as somebody opts in, they get automated emails that can build a relationship and ultimately sell your courses or products and services through that. So free plans you can get, like in Mailchimp, you can get up to 2,000 from— what is it— 2,000 subscribers, email subscribers. But the only thing is that you don't get to do automations. So if you're just starting out, check out Mailchimp. It's not my favorite tool and I've, I have, I've played with it a little bit and I've worked with clients that use it, but everybody I work with ends up switching over to Kajabi because it's awesome. So with MailChimp, you can just get started. ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, typically they all have a free plan. But yeah, just keep an eye out for the automation feature. That's the biggest one out of all the feature lists that they have. So let's say right now you got a lead magnet. You make sure that when people opt in, they understand it's GDPR compliant. They understand they're marketing to or they're going to get marketed to. And then you have a tool like, or software like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, or Kajabi. You use something like that. Then what we want to do to actually get discovered and have people, you know, learn about our lead magnets, we can start building our list so they opt in to get the free lead magnet, is we want to start creating content. And content can be a lot of things. It can be TikTok posts, it can be Instagram Reels, Facebook posts. It could be anything, you know, the biggest thing is that I would say with everything in your business, point to your lead magnet. So in every YouTube video or podcast episode you have, offer your lead magnet because it's a value add. It's something that's going to help this person genuinely, like genuinely with my lead magnet, the 5-step guide, you could use that and never buy anything from me. And it's fine as long as you use it, because I would rather have you get an awesome result before we consider actually working together, because then you know that I can deliver just for free, right? But also it's just a great value add to you and it's something that's going to help build trust, all that kind of stuff. But you could literally take that, run with it, and create your own online business because you understand the method. It's really simple. The execution of the method, a bit more complex, takes practice. There's more to it, but you'll have a good idea of how to get started doing it. You can build your email list, create digital product, etc., etc. So when we create content, my favorite form of content is evergreen content, and that's things like YouTube, blog posts, podcasts. Those are the biggest things because you get way more bang for your buck and time, or I guess ROI on your time, return on your investment, your time investment and energy investment, because evergreen content is always up. I put up a YouTube video or podcast like this. I also move it over to a little blog post, but that goes up forever until I decide to take it down. Or if podcasts and YouTube channels and the internet just fell apart, which it's pretty unlikely that that would happen, but it could. Social media posts can't do that. If I put up a Facebook post, like I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, it just gets lost in the feed. Sure, people can go back to your profile, scroll all the way down to try and find that one post you did that was very impactful. Maybe they could save it or they check out your Instagram, try and find it, but it doesn't organize it, organize it as well as a YouTube video or YouTube channel with multiple videos. There's no search function. That's what's cool about YouTube. YouTube is my favorite by far, but the podcast is also awesome. They are always up. It's a free way to market. You don't got to pay for ads. And the beautiful thing is that because it's evergreen, every time you create a piece of content like me creating this right now, it stays up forever, like I mentioned, and it basically recreates a version of me, which is like multiplying myself. It's creating an employee basically that offers a lead magnet and that, that can bring the people to my, my, my business ultimately tripping on my words right now. But that's the beautiful thing about evergreen content is it's free, it goes up, it multiplies you it multiplies your time basically. And if you're always promoting your lead magnet like we're talking about, and you know that it's something that would be eye-catching or would get someone a quick win, it would be digestible for people. It just, it's a no-brainer, that lead magnet. And you're always promoting in your content. Now you have this employee that is adding value to people and bringing leads to your business. So focus on evergreen content. Inside the 5-step guide, I also talk about evergreen content, go into more detail about it. so you have a better understanding of how to do it. It's also a video linked inside of that. Okay, just to recap, email is the best right now to collect emails. Have a relevant lead magnet, make sure that they understand it's GDPR compliant. Um, use a software where you can build your email list like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, or Kajabi, something along those lines, and create evergreen content while always promoting your lead magnet inside of your content. Over time, you will get discovered. People will find you. If they find your content valuable and they discovered you, start getting views and watch time and all that, or podcast listeners or blog viewers, then they see that this lead magnet's there. It's got to speak to them, which comes down to good customer research, topic for a different day. They're like, heck yeah, it's a no-brainer. So they opt in. Now that they're on your email list, what do you do? Well, here are a couple best practices for nurturing your email list. The first thing that I would recommend, well, I guess depending on where you're at, is to create an automated welcome sequence. And this is something that is about— it could be 5 emails, 5, maybe 7 emails tops. 5 is great. That's just short. It's concise. But what the sequence does is it introduces you to them. It welcomes them to your little ecosystem, which is your email list. And your goal here is to start building a relationship. And what's beautiful again about email is that you can automate this. So it's an automated email sequence. Someone finds your content, they are like, heck, that lead magnet sounds sick. They click, they download it. It triggers an automated email sequence that adds more value to this person, establishes what you expect from them, what they should expect from you, and it builds a relationship like you're being a human talking to them. Okay. And what we want to do is start teaching them more about what you have to offer. And depending on where you're at, if you're just starting out, you don't have an online course or digital products or anything like that, then you can have an email sequence that teaches them more about what you do. It shows some case studies. Like, these are all ideas that you can mix and match. But once you get to about day 3 to— yeah, day 3, I would say, is when you start. To offer your product or introduce your product, or it could be to book a call with you as well. Again, if you don't have a product and then 4 and 5, you just keep focusing on booking a call. So like day number 1 would be giving them the lead magnet. Obviously, that's something you have to make sure that you have is as soon as somebody opts in, they get an email where it delivers the lead magnet, says, hey, here's your free download, or they get that somehow because if they never got it, then that's a bad start to a relationship, if you ask me. But day 1 can be establishing rapport, you know, building rapport, establishing what you expect from them, what they should expect from you, and teaching them a bit more about what you do. It could be introducing yourself as well so they can get a better idea of you. And then day number 2, just keep adding value. Teach them. Maybe you have another little bundle that you can give them or another guide or training or something that you can give these people as well. And then day 3, again, start transitioning into introducing your offer. And you can teach and then go into transitioning your offer. You can just start introducing the offer. Day number 4 is always really good to do a case study or some sort of testimonial of your product or service, of someone working with you, what kind of results that they've been able to get. And in 3, 4, and 5, always just be having a button or a link where people can take an action, one specific action, whether that's to check out the sales page for your course or to book a call with you, either one. And what's cool too is about automated sequence that you could have a 5-day sequence that books a call with you. And then after that, you can connect or continue off of that initial sequence with another email sequence. Once you build a product that adds more value, establishes a deeper relationship, and then it goes into selling your product or offering your product really. And then they can check out the sales page and decide if they actually want to sign up. So that is awesome. Creating an email sequence. If you ever have questions, you can always just let me know down in the comments if you're on YouTube or if you're on my email list where you opt in, just send me an email, reply back to any of the emails and I'll check it out. Okay. When people are on your email list, one big thing is how often should you email the list? I'd recommend to email your list at least one time per week, and I'll get into what to actually email them. But I like to email them two times a week. I think, I think anywhere from 2 to 3 is like a sweet spot. I don't think it's too much. It's not doing it every single day. That's kind of irritating. But I've also experienced a good side of that where I opted in and someone was giving me great daily emails. So it kind of depends on your flow. It depends on your workload. But what I always like to think of with emails, just like with YouTube content or creating content, is What's the rhythm that you can stick with that you could stick with for the next 3 years? Every single week, if you can do one piece of content consistently for 3 years, stick with that. If 2 is going to be too much, you feel like it's not going to really work that way, then don't do it yet. But like what I do is every single week I make a YouTube video or podcast and I send that over to my email list. So this exact video or podcast is going to go to my email list. With the description and all this stuff. I'm going to turn it into an email. That's just a value add. It's like, hey, I created a new piece of content, go check it out. That's what I do. What I also started doing was on— that goes out on Tuesday, by the way. On Thursday, I would create another email that I only send out to my email list. Just, it helps make my email list a bit more exclusive instead of, oh, he just put up a piece of content, just shared it with us. But like, he does that with everyone. It's like, I feel that there should be a reason that people are on your email list, not just because they opted in. You're going to sell them stuff again. We're building a relationship with these people. So if you can, or I guess what is something that you can do to add more value to your list? My Thursday email is kind of whatever I want it to be. Sometimes I have just an inspirational story that I heard listening to a speaker or something that I know, just some old story that I know. That has been inspirational for me, and then I share it with them. And it's literally just an email sharing that. Another thing that I do, like this past week, I gave a free, a free guide or worksheet away. I just gave it away to them. I said, hey, I hope this helps you. And I explained what it is, obviously turned it into an email. And what I like to do is at the end of those emails, I just do a little PS like, hey, whenever you're ready, Here's a couple of ways you can work with me. 1, 2, 3, or 1, or it could be 2. It could be like, hey, check out my free course or join my Facebook group, or it could be book a call with me or someone on my team and it could be all 3 of those. So people run through these, they're like, man, this guy really adds a lot of value. This girl adds a lot of value to me. And at the end of the email, they see that they can have a couple of options whenever they're ready to work with you. It's just a soft offer. I really enjoy soft offers. It's not It's not being too salesy or anything, and it gives the power to the person, which I think is really powerful because they end up building a lot more trust with you. So Thursday emails, yeah, it's whatever I feel. Sometimes I just have a story from my own life because again, you're building a relationship. So I had a friend of mine, for example, who visited from Alaska and I hadn't seen him in 7 years or so, and we hung out for 2 weeks and I explained to them like how I took some time off my business, but it was still bringing in leads because of my evergreen YouTube content was still running and I was still able to hang out with my friend and help my business grow. So I explained a bit about that and then offered to book a call and then people book calls. You know, it's, it's really, it's really cool how you can do this. But I would say, I know I've talked about a lot, but to sum up, it's create an automated email sequence where you can give people some more value and ultimately transition into selling a course or offering a call to sit down with you and then emailing your list, at least putting up because you should be in a rhythm of at least putting up one piece of content, evergreen content every single week. So just email them that content, copy paste the description, make, turn it into an email and have a little link that lets them go check out your podcast episode or check out your new blog post or check out your new YouTube video, whatever it is. And then, yeah, have an extra day or two where you can add even more value. But what about actually selling to your list? A great rule of thumb is to give before you ever ask for anything. And like Gary Vaynerchuk's book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, basically the premise of the book is to give 3 times or add value 3 times, jab, jab, jab. And then the right hook is your big hit, and that's your offer that you make to people or your big ask that you have. So for example, Let's say that you put out one piece of content every single week and that's your value add because your content is incredibly valuable, of course. So you're adding value to people once a week and then once a month. So after 3 weeks, you have an email that asks to check out your course or it offers to check out your course or it offers to book a phone call with you. It's some sort of ask or more of a call to action. Or it can even be that you're offering a deal or you're launching a new course or you're launching some sort of new product. It could be a membership site or it could be a mastermind or a group coaching program. It could be whatever you want. Okay, so those are kind of the best practices. Automate your email sequence, email, email your list at least once per week, preferably 2 to 3 times, I think is a sweet spot. But you decide what's right for you and what makes sense. Give before you ever ask for anything. So do 3 gives and then 1 offer or 1 ask and focus on building a relationship. That's really the biggest thing here. It may take time. People may need to be on your email list for a while, check out quite a few pieces of content. It could be a couple of years before they officially decide to buy a course or a digital product or to book a call with you because it just took them a bit longer to actually build that kind of trust in you. Email works because you own your list. You get to automate it. Email converts better than social media. The way you collect emails by having an email or a lead magnet that points to opt-in so they can get your lead magnet. Make sure it's GDPR compliant. Use a tool like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Kajabi, something like that. Focus on creating content, always offering your lead magnet so people discover you. Every single day, any time of day, doesn't matter. They find out about your, your lead magnet, they opt in, they check it out, have an automated email sequence that welcomes them to your world. You can just be like saying hi, basically, and then email them at least once or 1 to 3 times per week. Focus on building a relationship and make sure that you're actually making offers to your email list. Those are the biggest things. So if you want more help or you want to learn more about starting your online business, then do check out my 5-step guide. Or if you want to see what a good lead magnet is, then check out the 5-step guide. Just opt in again. You can unsubscribe if you want, but hopefully I add enough value to where you want to stick around. And again, to pick up that lead magnet, just go to ProfitYourKnowledge.com/guide, or there's a link in the description as well. So that's all I got for you today. Email marketing is what we should be focusing on because that's where we get to own our little space in the internet world, and that's where you get to build a better relationship and actually make sales a lot more efficiently than trying to sell on social media, 'cause people don't want to be sold to on social media, most people anyway. So I hope you have an awesome day. Check out the 5-step guide, and I will see you in the next one.