4 Simple Ways to Use Email to Engage Your Community

Good morning. Happy Monday to everybody out there. It's a cold one. It's a cold one here. But today we're going to talk about 4 ways, 4 simple ways that you can engage your community through email. And I thought this would be pretty appropriate based on kind of some things that have happened over the last 24, 48 hours. And so I want to talk about it today because Platforms, lists, audiences, they're all important. So we're going to talk about how we can make the most of what we've built. So if you're joining me live, I would love to say hi to you in the chat. Let me know what the temperature is wherever you're watching from. Tell me where you're watching from. Tell me what the temperature is. It's 21 here in Texas. That's really, really cold for us. It says it feels like 14 outside. I believe it. So let me know that you're watching. Here's what we're going to talk about this morning. There— everyone is aware of the TikTok situation, and I don't need to go into detail on that because, um, it's probably all over your feed. There's a lot of haters on, on my feed about, now it's time to go get a real job. They have no idea how much work it is to be a content creator, first of all. So I call them haters because they have to go punch a clock while TikTok content creators are, are living their best lives creating content. They have no idea how much work it takes to build content. But when TikTok shut down, first of all, a lot of us didn't really think it was going to happen because it's been talked about so much that when it really happened, I thought, wow, it really happened. Like, I didn't expect it to happen. And that really puts a lot of things in perspective for me. It was funny how it came back less than 24 hours later, but I got to thinking about all the people that had built their whole business on TikTok and how awful that was. I saw a reel from someone that said, we're saying goodbye to our 9 million followers, and I thought, holy goodness, that is a lot to lose. And so, you know, one thing that I am very much a proponent of is having a multi-channel marketing system. And when I say that, I don't I feel like you need to be on every platform because that's exhausting and that's kind of impossible, right? Unless you have like a big giant team that can run your socials on every platform. But I want you to really be aware of what you've built, where you've built it on. We've seen, I've seen very close friends of mine lose their Facebook accounts this year, this last year. And what hap— what would happen today if Meta went away? Most of us are built on Facebook and Instagram, right? What if we logged in tonight and Meta was gone? There would be panic amongst a lot of us. And I think that that's important to talk about today. I'm going to talk about it in a couple of different ways. I'm going to focus on email because we've all been busy building that. And that is ours to keep. But I also just wanna kind of talk about just another platform that we could jump onto if we are solely Meta-based right now, pretty easily. Okay, let me come to the chat, say good morning, and then we're gonna dive in. If you're a note-taker, this is a great episode. I say episode like as a podcast episode. This is a great live if you wanna grab a notebook. I have some really actionable things that you can start doing this week, actually, to engage your email list. So we're going to go through those if you want to grab a notebook. Let's see how cold it is. Rebecca says, good morning, it's cold. Yeah, it's just cold. Hey, Mandy Lee, good morning. Carrie's with me this morning. She says it's 20, but it feels like 15. It's not supposed to be this cold in the South. Negative 9 degrees over there. Good morning, Jen. Negative 9 here too. What is that even feel like. Good morning, Bondina. Good morning, Jocelyn. It's 27 degrees here in D.C., so it's colder in Texas than it is in D.C. That's a problem. That's a problem. Good morning, Bev. Hey, Christina. Let's talk about this. Thank you for the transition, Mandy Lee. Let's talk about YouTube because here I want you to put this in your notes right now as something that you can do. If you are— your business is not on YouTube, this is something you can very easily do. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to give you some tips here. We took Launch Your Box to YouTube last year, 2022, '23. I don't know what year it is. '23. So like a year and a half ago. And I'm going to say I have no regrets because I'm live right now on Facebook. I'm also live on YouTube right now. It takes no extra effort for me to be live on YouTube and Facebook at the same time. I'm doing the same thing. This is something all of you can do. When I think about my subscription box business, all I would have to do to really get a YouTube started for my business is just take my live box openings and upload them to YouTube, make some really good SEO descriptions for them. And then every time that I'm live on Facebook for my business, I can also be live on YouTube just like I am right now for Launch Your Box. So let me know in the chat if you have a YouTube for your subscription box business. Just let me know in the chat. Here's something that you can start building now. If Meta were to go away, You could start building a community on YouTube. And I'm telling you, YouTube is a great place for a community. We don't want to just have socials out there that we have to run ads to, to get seen. We want to build a community. And so I think it's such an easy platform for us to just take what we're already doing and add it to YouTube. And you can upload videos or you can go live, whatever you prefer. So if you're going live on Facebook, say you're doing the January box reveal, I'm doing that tonight. I can either stream in both places like I am now. And yes, Lexi, I'm on StreamYard doing that, but there's lots of streaming software that you can do that with. Or I can just go live on Facebook and upload to YouTube. But what you guys don't see right here on the back end, I can see that Lexi's on Facebook, Cherie's on Facebook, Andrea's on Facebook. I can see Cherie's on YouTube. I could— I can see, uh, Mandy Lee's on YouTube. I can see where people are coming from. And so if you go live on YouTube, just like when you go live on Facebook, you're feeding that YouTube algorithm. So I wouldn't be afraid of going live. But if that feels complicated because you've never been streaming before in multiple places, just upload your lives for now. Build a community. But you have to communicate. You can't have a community without communication. Okay. So when you upload your box opening over on YouTube and there's comments, you got to go check those comments every day. You have to engage in the comments. On Facebook and on YouTube. Carrie, who's on my team, is watching me right now. She's got YouTube pulled up, she's got Facebook pulled up, and she's answering questions on both so that there is engagement and comments on both of those channels right now. You can do that, like, if you have an assistant that you can do that with, or you can go back, like, when I'm done with this live. If I was by myself, I could go back and engage in the comments on Facebook. I could go back and engage in the comments on YouTube as well. So we want to build communities outside of Meta or TikTok, or we don't wanna have our communities all in one place. So YouTube is a great channel to do that. Think about how many times you search for something and a YouTube video comes up in your search. How many times do you search for something and a YouTube video comes up in your search? It's Google. It's Google SEO right there. And so, yes, I do have the paid version of StreamYard. So, but I know people that are using Restream. There's some other streaming services. So, so, yes, just a tip for you. YouTube is a great place to build a community. So if you haven't done that yet for your subscription box business, I'm gonna highly recommend it, and you can literally start today. If you haven't done your January box opening yet, let's get it on, let's do it, and then get it on YouTube. If you— and go back and put all the rest of the last 6 months on there. And, and, um, in your description, be very descriptive about the products that you're showing because that's what people are searching. So if people are searching Valentine's sweatshirt, okay, that's in my spoiler, that's in my box this month. I'm doing the live tonight. Um, then that's gonna come up. My video is gonna come up on their Google search. Okay, so that's what I want you to think about. We're very— we're a group that is very meta-heavy, and meta has been good to us. That has been very good to us. But I don't want that to also cripple us if something were to happen. So I want you to think about an alternative platform. And that could be YouTube. Okay, so I'm gonna let you marinate on that. But let's talk about email. Okay. It's something that is super powerful. I call it my ATM. I call email my e-commerce ATM because literally you just type up an email, hit send, and then money comes out in the form of sales, right? That's what email does for me. Let me answer this question right here. Crystal says, would this work for a t-shirt subscription? Yes, anytime you're doing the reveal, or Crystal, you know, anytime you're doing like a style, like style the shirt, that's a video you could put on there. You could even put that on as a YouTube Short. I did a video last week where I'm styling one t-shirt 5 different ways. It's just a little short, little reel where I'm doing transition with my hands. All of those things would be great on YouTube. That would be a YouTube Short one because it's vertical. And it's like just like a minute. But anything that's like 5 minutes or more, we want to put on as a video. If you're selling live, you can still do that on YouTube. You just have to drop the link in there for them to go shop with you. But I would treat it the same. And then I would also build a little bit of content. YouTube likes short— I would call it medium-form content. Short content is like our Reels and our TikToks and things like that. Long-form content is going to be like a 30-minute live that I'm doing now. But kind of, it likes that medium content, that 5 to 15 minutes. So if you can explain something, if you can show something, if you can show how to pair it with something, that's going to be your YouTube content for that. Okay. So, all right, let's get into, let's get into email. I love email, y'all. I just told you it was my, it was my e-commerce ATM. But I want you to think about not just selling, on email, but I want you to think about building a community on email. Okay, so here's— I've got 4 ways that you can build a community with email, and I want you to think about this. And this is something you can send out something today regarding this. When we're just selling, selling, selling all the time, we're losing that connection. So when I'm live, I am going to tell stories. I'm going to like— we're going to talk about how cold it is. Like, I just got back from Palm Springs, California. It was beautiful and 70 and palm trees everywhere. And now I'm in this Arctic whatever vortex. But I'm telling stories and you're getting to know my personality when I'm live. Even when I'm live here at the warehouse and I'm selling stuff, I'm telling stories, right? For that connection point, we kind of have to do that the same way in email. We tend to just put the things for sale and shoot it out. I want you to start building a community with your email so that one, your open rates go up, your click rates go up. People want to open your email because you're not just selling to them in your email. Okay, so let's talk about 4 different things, 4 different ways that you can build a community in email. Behind the scenes content. We do it all the time for social media. Why don't we put that in email form? I could very easily take my email subscriber on a journey of how we put together this January box, how we printed things, how we pressed things, how we monogram things. What does this look like? Like, if we could give them behind-the-scenes look at what we're doing in an email— we do it all the time on socials, right? Like, I'm showing a video of us monogramming, I'm showing a video of us packing. But what if I could tell that story in an email format? And I'm not opposed to selling because that's what we do, but the story is about the box. And then I'm also going to tell you how to subscribe to the box because now I've connected that box with a whole process. So if we're not putting any behind-the-scenes content in our emails, that's what we need to start doing. We need to start treating it just like we would social media. We need to give a piece We need to give people a reason to watch our videos, read our posts, and open our emails. Okay? And that comes with a, with a fun hook like check out behind the scenes in the warehouse. If I sent you that versus check out our 5 new sweatshirts in the shop, you're like, I don't need any more sweatshirts, right? Like you're just deleting it. But if I said check out behind the scenes making our January monogram box in this email, like, oh, I'm curious, how do they do that? Let me see that. And so that's going to cause people to come over and click and open. Okay. So think about adding behind the scenes content in an email. I'm not putting videos in that email, Mandy Lee. I'm going to do— I don't like videos in email very much because I think it slows down the email. I'll just do image shots of us doing something. Okay. I could link the video. And I could link the video and then, you know, have them go over to my socials. But I want to keep them engaged in email. I want to build a community on email. So I'm going to do a behind-the-scenes email look at making something, right? That's how we engage them. Then, then they're going to want to open that email. Okay. Number 2, another way that you can really engage your community through email is going to be like limited time offers or early access for your email subscribers. Okay. So I want you to think about if you have a limited time offer, maybe it's 24 hours, 48 hours, or if something's coming up and you want to give your email subscribers early access, that can all be done through email. And that's also going to start to train and teach your email subscribers to open their emails because they're going to get first access. And that needs to be in your subject line. First access, early access, limited time. Those urgency words need to be in that email to create that urgency to open it. And then if you're saying, hey, hey, email subscribers, because you're on my email list, because you opened this email, you get to shop the whatever sale before everyone else, or you get to grab this pink white checkered sweater before I go live tomorrow and show it to everyone. And so they're getting exclusivity there. You're creating that exclusivity, that scarcity, that urgency with the email. And you're, you're telling them that they're the ones getting the early access because they're on your email list. Okay. So I want you to think about limited time offers or early access for your subscribers. We've got to train them, right? You think about your business. You've trained them that you have new arrivals on this day or you're going live on this day. I just think about like, this is going to show you my age a little bit. Stores have trained you to shop with them forever. This goes back to— we'll go back to like ordering pizza. When I was a kid, God is going to make me really old. We never ordered pizza unless we had a coupon. And the pizza places trained you to go look in the back of the phone book. Yes, there's a thing called the phone book. And get the coupon out to order your pizza. Maybe just because my parents were frugal, I don't know. But we never ordered pizza without a coupon. Like, you just, you couldn't ever pay full price for pizza. Like, that was just unheard of. When we went to JCPenney's, we never went to JCPenney's without the flyer that you got in the mail. We never went to Bed Bath and Beyond without your 40% off coupon. They're training us not to shop with them or to shop with us in a certain way. I only buy Bath and Body Works when it's 75% off, and twice a year I stock up on my lotions, I stock up on my soap. They're training us how to shop with them. Okay. So we're going to do the same thing. Thank y'all for remembering the coupons in the phone book. You're making me not feel very old right now. So stores have been training us how to shop with them, how to, how to communicate with them, how to consume their content. We have to do the same thing with our email. If they know they're going to open the email and learn something fun about our business or our brand, they're going to continue to open the emails. And if I have a little here's how you become a subscriber at the bottom, it doesn't feel salesy all the time, right? And so that's what we have to do. So number 1, exclusive behind-the-scenes content. Number 2, limited time offers and early access. If you regularly give your email subscribers limited time or early access above everyone else, you're training them to open that email. Okay. The next one is user-generated content and kind of subscriber features. This is where you want to talk about products. You want to talk about things, but you also want to use some user-generated content. Example, I have a nice, awesome sweatshirt that I have going on right now. I've shared lots of pictures of it and I'm pulling that into an email and I'm sharing all these comments on it. Like, this is the softest sweater I've ever owned. I love how lightweight yet warm this is. And I'm just sharing these user-generated comments. And then if I get, if I get buyers to share a photo with it in there or whatever that is, I can add that into, or I can take a picture of me wearing that sweatshirt. And so we want to share user-generated content features because how many times do you make a buying decision based on what someone else thought about it? A complete stranger to you thought about it all the time. I'm not buying anything on Amazon without reading the reviews. Am I right? If I see a Facebook ad for something that I'm interested in, I am checking the comments before I ever go to the website to see what kind of business this is, if anyone else has bought it, and what their thoughts are on it. I, I don't know these people from anyone. Right? I'm just taking the word of some stranger that has purchased this product. And as weird as that sounds, that's what we do. So if we can take our comments from a product and pull them into an email, show— it could be one item. And I'm a fan of really drilling down your email to not have too many things in it. If it's one sweatshirt and all this email is about is this sweatshirt, and then you've got 5 or 6 comments from buyers who absolutely love it, and then maybe I have it in a couple different colors, that's all the email has to be. We feel like we have to throw everything in an email and we're actually doing a disservice. We just wanna show, we wanna highlight the features of that one product. We wanna show that other people love it, and that's gonna drive consumption and it's going to drive sales. Okay, so you can do that with like the subject line could be, what are, what are people saying about the Ultra Soft Monogram Sweatshirt? What are they saying? Let me check it out. You know, you can do that. Yes, Jen, you can do that with a customer box opening if it fits your brand and everything and it's a nice video, throw it in there. Ask permission. Before you email that to your list. But think about your own buying habits and how customer comments and reviews are a big part of your buying decision. Let's put that in emails with our products, not just, hey, buy me. Hey, buy me because Stacy said she loved it. Buy it because Christy said she loved it. Buy it because Susan said she loved it. Buy it because these strangers are telling you to buy it. Not just me who's making the sale, but these other people that have bought it. Okay, so that's number 3, user-generated content features. Now, number 4 is something I have been testing and doing. And so number 4 is repurposing your best reels and storytelling. Okay, so I've been doing— through the holidays, I knew I was going to send a ton of sales emails. Like, I sent an email every single day, probably November and December, um, selling something. And so I wanted to try to offset that with a little more of a connection email. I'm going to pull it up real quick, the one I sent yesterday. So it was called, um, Holiday Hot Mess. Email series. And basically every Sunday I would write an email and I created a little template and I'll show you what that looks like of like a storytelling, like what, what I'm being a hot mess at, which was really just what was going on for my week. And then I had a section of what the warehouse was up to. And again, this is um, hang on, I gotta get my authentication factor code. I mean, I love secure things, but sometimes they're just a pain in the rear. I don't want to get hacked and all the things, but sometimes finding codes for everything sucks the life out of you. That's so dramatic. That's so dramatic. Um, okay, so I'm just gonna pull it up and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So I do a little section of my storytelling and then what the warehouse is working on, and then I will sell one product in that particular email. So I'm going to share my screen real quick. Okay, share screen. You have to sing when you do that. It's like the only way to do it. Okay, so this is the one that I sent yesterday. So I was sending these every Sunday through the holidays, and, um, and so I decided that let me ask them if they still want them because I sent it every Sunday in November. I think I started at the end of October, October, November, December, and I did a post and I said, hey, um, holiday hot mess emails are officially done, but are you enjoying them? Would you like me to continue them in the new year? I got so much engagement on that post. They love them. They want them. So now I'm calling it New Year, Same Hot Mess because the other one was Holiday Hot Mess. Okay. And so I've numbered these like with an issue because it's like a magazine issue. It's like a magazine article. So I put issue number 10. This is the 10th one and it's called Sunshine and Palm Trees. And that's the title. They're like, ooh, what is Sarah up to? And so I am talking about my holiday I need to change this. I need to take out holiday and the Christmas tree. I didn't even realize that till now. But I was talking about my week. What have I been doing for the week? And so I was telling them that I spent the week in Palm Springs with my mastermind, and a lot of them don't even know that I'm a business coach. So I just explained a little bit that, hey, I'm a business coach. My mastermind has 6 and 7 figure say revenue earners in it. And I talked a little bit about Palm Springs and how we ran into Diane Keaton at one of the restaurants we went to. It's just simply telling you what I've done for the week, and people are interested, and it— and they want to see a look into what you're doing for the week. And I'm not always traveling and stuff, so it could be like, you know, we've been packing boxes at the warehouse, and I have some pictures of the warehouse here, or whatever has been going on. I talk about my kids in here, so it's just a personal thing. And then I did a little warehouse update. What are we working on? And I'm like, I'm not sure what they're up to. I've been gone all week. Um, and I told them that I'm gonna go live Monday night to do our January box reveal, and if you want to know when I'm live, just text me. Um, so that's kind of the warehouse update. So the format is what I've got going on, what the warehouse has going on, and then a weekly special treat yourself. So I feature one thing in this every week. Well, because I brought them all these cute little monogram sweatshirts, I thought that would be a really cute feature because it ties in, it's tying into something in the story. I took them all these monogram sweatshirts as a gift and they loved them. And so I added that into my email just as a Hey, I tied it into the story. Here's what we did here. And then I'll have 2 pictures of them all wearing these sweatshirts. And you know what this has? Let's see what my open rate is on this. I have a 55% open rate. My click rate's a little low and I don't expect it to be big because this is not a sales email. But I did have a 0.4 click rate and I've sold 1 sweatshirt. So out of this, and I just sent this last night, so 70 7,800 people have opened this email from me. 7,800 people are curious about what palm trees and sunshine means. And, and so they're checking out— that's building a connection with people. Whether I get 1 sale, 10 sales, or no sales, I'm building a connection and I'm tying the product into what I'm doing. So you can also do this. I want to show you, let me show you something else here. I want you to figure out how, if you don't know what to talk about, like, I don't know what to talk about, Sarah, like I'm not interesting. I'm not interesting either. I'm going to show you a way that you can do this. I'm going to pull up my Instagram real quick just because it's easy to find some things versus Facebook. Okay, so here's my Instagram. So I was looking and I want to go over to Reels. I want to see what my— what content is hitting. So I was starting to look at Reels. Don't judge me by my Reels. But when I look at, okay, this little Reel, we're taking a snow day, got 1,389 likes. I could talk about how we took the day off for a snow day. This is a personal connection. I could talk about what it's like to get snow in the South because we don't know what this white stuff is falling from the sky. I could talk about, and then I could add like, here's some, you know, nice thick sweaters in the shop if you are taking a snow day too. I can tie it back into a product. Okay, so that could be one that could be a very easy storytelling connection. Of taking a snow day. Okay, um, let me find— okay, here's another one that took off, 2,400. So I was doing a segment on the news called Carney's Checklist, and so I could talk about what it's like to be at the news station. I could show some pictures of behind the scenes at the news station, what I took, how long my segment was, how nervous I was, and what it was like to be on the news. For the business. And I can also link the product that I talked about on that news segment. So you could, you could take any of these that are getting engagement and you could say, okay, people really like this video. How could I turn that into an email? Okay, just like this, this September packing day, I could take them behind the scenes with some screenshots of what they were doing and they're actually racing with the boxes to the table. And we could talk about how much fun we had how much we work hard, but we have fun. It's all just connecting points. So when you look at, when you look at the week of social media, like go back and look at the week of social media, what was your most popular post or video? And then how could you turn that into a connection email? How can you engage your list and start building community right from your inbox? Train your customers to open your emails, build that connection, and make some sales. That's your challenge for this week. No matter what happens in the TikTok land and the social media world, can we build a community outside of our social media? Can you go jump on YouTube? You're doing the same things on, on Meta, so you have a backup plan. Can you fill your inbox with not just sales emails but engagement emails? That's what I want you to think about today. I've given you 4 ways to do that. And so jumpstart. You can send one right now today if you feel motivated. Get off this live, take 30 minutes, write an email and get it sent out today and then make a plan in your weekly schedule to send something that's engaging. Every single time. All right, I'm gonna go get busy. I gotta catch up from being gone last week. Thanks for joining me, um, this Monday morning, and I'll see you guys soon. Bye.