5-Step 4th Quarter Email Audit

Good morning. Happy Monday morning. You know, I was sitting here getting ready for my live and I was thinking, this is like my favorite part of a Monday morning, like getting to show up and go live and hang out with all of you on a Monday morning before I get into all the nitty-gritty stuff of a Monday. I love that. If you love hanging out with me on Monday morning, first thing in the morning, let me know in the chat. Um, today we're talking about email, and it is a— is one of my favorite marketing, um, what would you call it, one of my marketing strategies. It's one of my favorite marketing strategies, but I want to make sure that you are locked and loaded for Q4. We are in the middle of Q4 already, um, but I know we have a lot of holiday promotions coming up, and so, um, I want to give you a 5-step audit that you can do, um, in your email CRM, um, to make sure that you are locked and loaded for Q4. Okay. And, and they're simple. It's not gonna be super complicated. Um, I just wanna make sure that we've thought about these things, that we're taking a look at these things so that we can maximize what's happening with our email campaigns as we start our holiday promotions. Okay. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Let me know, um, in the chat, If you're watching, um, this morning, we got a lot going on in the warehouse. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pan over. I mean, there is some there. Listen, anybody that's seen my desk, those of you in Scale Your Box, they got to see my desk full on last week during a Zoom call. But my desk is messy. It's just life. I'm gonna pan over. We got all this going on in the warehouse today, so we're shipping today, um, but we have all that happening. So they are busy getting the October boxes out and out the door. But I'm working on Q4, so we're going to talk about it. Let me come to the chat and say good morning to everybody and then we will dive in. If you are a note taker, this is definitely one I want you to just jot some notes down. I want you to create a little checklist for you so that you can, after this live, you can work on this this week. There's a couple, there's 5 things I'm going to go over with you. So grab a notebook real quick while I say good morning and then we'll dive right into these 5 things that I want you to audit in your email CRM. RM. Good morning, Andrea. Good to see you. Good morning, Jocelyn. Good morning, Tony. Good morning, Carolyn. Good to see you. Christina says, yes, I love hanging out and getting all the great info. I love our Monday mornings. Like, I get to hang out with you on Monday mornings, and it's just, it's just one of the bright spots of my, uh, weeks all the time. Carmela says, love spending Monday morning with you, Sarah. Thank you, Carmela. Good morning, Myra. Hey, Rebecca. Good morning, Sierra. Good morning, Jonica. Good Good morning. The team is here with me. I think Jen's here with me this morning. Good morning, Rebecca. Good morning, Cameron. Good morning, Vicki. Hey, Nikki. Good morning, everybody. It's good to see y'all. Can I give a shout out to Nicole? I'm going to give a little shout out. Girl, I've been seeing you working. I've been seeing you inside Launch Your Box getting your stuff together. So I'm super proud of you. Keep going. You've got this. Let's give some love to Nicole this morning. Good morning, everybody. All right. Okay, here we go. We're ready. Number 1, we're going to 5-step email audit that I want you to make sure you're locked and loaded for Q4. Okay. So the first thing is engage now. Engage now. Write that down. Engage now. We've got a lot of promotions coming up. That could be a launch. It could be a gift box. It could be a Black Friday sale. It could be gift subscriptions. It could be mystery boxes. It could be all these things, right? And we cannot wait until we start those promotions to really engage our email list. If you've been sending email campaigns on a weekly basis, great. You're already engaged. I want you to get a little more personal though. One thing that we talked about on my team was how do we get away from just sending sales emails, sales emails, sales emails, and how do we nurture our list a little bit more? And so we've come up with a holiday series, um, it's called Sarah's Holiday Hot Mess, and it's just behind the scenes of the business and life and all the things that we have going on. And we're going to send that out on a weekly basis. We're going to get a little more personal. I'm going to tie it to some products as well, because during this time frame I want to keep selling, but I also want to get personal. So I want you to be sending 1 to 3 times a week right now, today, this week, 1 to 3 times a week. Okay. I want you to get personal. I want you to take your list behind the scenes. I want you to do some things like bestsellers of the week. Like, let's get some products in front of them. Let's get, let's get in there in their inbox. Let's get them opening our emails. Let's send subscription emails. So like, here's a sneak peek of next month. Here's the box reveal. Here's all the things like You can send— these are just ideas for you. We could do an email about new arrivals that have shown up in your shop. So 1 to 3 times a week starts now. If you're not doing it, we've got to engage now so that when our holiday promotions come, we don't hit the spam folder, we don't hit the junk folder. We need to start engaging. So here's some ideas. You're taking notes. Get personal. What's happening around your shop? What's happening around your life? What's happening for what's coming up? Let's take them behind the scenes. Just do an email behind the scenes. A couple pictures of what's happening in this warehouse today would be a fabulous email, like just a couple pictures of all this stuff. I can hear the embroidery machines are running, so I could take a picture of the machines and a picture of all the stacks of boxes, letting them know our subscriptions are on the way. Just take them behind the scenes. Don't overthink it. Another option is to send them bestsellers of the week. What's been selling in your shop over the last week? What are your top 3? What are your top 5 bestsellers from the last week? Throw them in an email. Let's get it out there. Okay, you can send a subscription email that could be a sneak peek, that could be a box reveal, that could be, um, subscriber shares or testimonials. You could send something about your subscription. And then another idea I had was just new arrivals. We send new arrival email once or twice a week. So these are ways that you can start engaging your list, and let's start doing it now. 1 to 3 times a week, I need you emailing your list starting this week. Okay, put it on your to-do list. Number 2, we've got to clean up our list. I just cleaned up my list a couple weeks ago, and there's a couple reasons we need to clean up our lists. We need to start engaging them. So if you've not been engaging them, I need you to engage them for a few weeks before you clean that list. But if you've been emailing regularly, I need you to go ahead and clean up that list. And what I did, I just created a segment that says anyone that has received 10 emails or more, at least 10 emails in the last 6 months and not, and opened 0 emails, it's a whole segment in the last 6 months, I want to suppress them off my list. And so I created that segment that said in Klaviyo, I'm going to see if I can give this to you. Has or has not done received emails 10 times in the past 6 months. So that's the segment. And then I click the little and button in Klaviyo. Has or has not done, opened emails 0 times in 6 months. Okay, that gave me a segment of people. It was a couple thousand people and I thought they're dead weight. We're dragging our dead weight into Q4. Stop dragging your dead weight around. I'm paying for every email that gets sent to my dead weight. I can save money instantly. They're not opening 'em anyway. Why do I want 'em on my list, right? Chop the dead weight. What's going to happen is you'll stop paying to send all those emails to your dead weight. Your open rate will increase, which also helps your deliverability. And then you're going, you're going to see an uplift in your emails once you clear the dead weight out. Okay. Clean up your list. Number 2, stop paying for all these people to not open your emails. If they're really interested, they'll come back. They'll come back for, for whatever reason. They'll get on your list, they'll opt in, they'll buy something. But right now they're deadweight and we're not dragging our deadweight into Q4. Okay? We don't have time for it. We don't have the money for it. We're just not dragging deadweight around all year long. Let them go. And as hard as it is for me to suppress thousands of emails, they're not serving me anyway. Okay? They're not serving me. And I am paying hefty for these. Emails every single week. So let's clean up the list. Let's do it this week. If you haven't been emailing regularly, I need you to start doing that before you clean up your list. Okay. Now, number 1, engage in your list now 1 to 3 times a week. Number 2, clean up your list. Get rid of your dead weight. Number 3, I want you to check your automations. A lot of times we kind of treat this like a rotisserie chicken, set it and forget it. Right? That's what I, that's my saying, set it and forget it. You guys might be too young. You might not know what that means. But I want you to check your automations. And what I'm talking about is check your browse abandonment automation, make sure it's up to date, make sure it has what you need, make sure, just make sure it looks good. We might have set it up a year or two ago or even longer and we haven't looked at it since. Check your browse abandonment automation. Check your cart abandonment automation. Make it personal, okay? Make these more personal instead of just professional. We have to, we have to dig into the emotions, okay? The other thing I want you to set up is some automations. If you don't have automations for your best sellers, this is the time to set them up. So if someone buys— right now I have this Sweater Weather bundle going. I've sold hundreds of them, but I have an automation on the back end of that. When someone buys the Sweater Weather bundle, they're going to get an email flow inviting them to be a subscriber. Okay, so I want you to take some of your best-selling products that you sell all year and set up some email automations on that. That could be another bundle, that could be a gift set, that could be something else, but make sure we've checked our automation Browse abandonment, cart abandonment first, and then I'm gonna tell you to take some of your best sellers and set up an automated flow on the back end of that purchase, post-purchase flow to sell them the next gift set or the subscription. Okay? All right. Number 4, create some templates. So I've been working on this. You know, casually since Thursday, kind of Thursday, Friday, and over the weekend a little bit. But as I'm prepping for all of my holiday promotions, I've gone into Klaviyo and I have set up some templates for each of those promotions. And so I've set up some text, I've set up some image blocks, I've set up some headlines, and I wrote some emails. And they're going to be tweaked a little bit based on performance. But I want you to go ahead and get yourself set up early, okay? By setting up some templates. And I go back and I look at last year's and I tweak those a little bit and I have them set up and I rename them 2024 Holiday Box Promotion Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, or I have Better Than Black Friday Day 1. Set yourself up some templates inside Klaviyo and you don't even have to start a campaign to do that. You just go into Klaviyo and you go into I think it's called content. I'm gonna look real quick before I tell you wrong. Yeah, if you go into content and then you click templates, you'll be able to just create some templates inside Klaviyo so that when you get to your Black Friday sale, when you get to your holiday box sale, when you get to whatever promotion is coming up for you, your launch, you already have the templates made and all you have to do is create the campaign, add the template, send it out. So I want you to do that now. Don't wait until you're in the weeds. We tend to be like, I got other stuff going on that I can work on today. I don't need to work on something that I need next month. Next month you're going to be in the weeds and it's going to happen fast and it's going to, it's going to be, it's going to be overwhelming. And I know this because, you know, I have about 11 years in the game. I've gone through 11 Q4s in my business and I know what it's going to be like over the next 60 days. Okay. I know that you're probably not going to be as coherent. You're not going to be thinking clearly. You're not going to have the time. You're going to feel frazzled. You're going to feel chaotic. And that's okay. That's how we all feel in November, especially mid to late November, early December. I know that about myself. I know that about a lot of you. So I try to get ahead of it the best way that I can. So I just sat down. We binge-watched Love Is Blind last week and wrote, created email templates. So just do that in your downtime. Do that getting ahead of it. Do that so that you're prepared, because what happens in that moment, if you're not prepared, is you skip it. Oh my gosh, I don't have time to write an email. Oh my gosh, I don't— I'm not thinking clearly. I don't know what to even write. So I know that about us. So I like to get ahead of that. So number 4, go into your email CRM and create some templates ahead of your promotions so that it's a quick campaign that gets sent out when you need it. Okay. All right. Number 5. This is your 5 steps to audit your email for Q4. Number 5 is you've got to have a plan. What's your email plan for each of your promotions? What are you sending? When are you sending? And what's the intention behind that email? You need to take calendar and you need to write out your plan. Okay, I did this with, um, I did this with— I mean, I'm gonna bust out my notebook for you real quick. Um, I did this with October, and I, I need to sit down and do it with November. Um, but let me find it real quick. I just printed a calendar from Canva, and I started to write out my plan. Okay, so my marketing plan. This is my live. This is what's going to happen. We're going to send an email. We're going to do X number of posts. Here's another live. Here's another email. Here's the plan for the weekend. Here's what, what I'm selling. This is October. I need to sit down and do this with November and then do it with December. Okay, so that I don't— when I'm tired, and I haven't washed my hair in 4 days and I don't know if I'm coming or going. I don't know when the last time I ate, because this is all going to happen in November. If y'all haven't been through November as a small business owner, this is going to happen. I'll be like, let me get the plan out because I'm very good at executing a plan. If I have a plan, I'm not as good executing a plan when I leave it all in here and I have to remember to think about it every day. When I can create a plan, I am 10 times more likely to execute it. And because I have a plan, I created all the templates while I was binge-watching Love Is Blind, okay? Because I had a plan and all I had to do was look at the plan. So take time to sit down and create a plan. That could be the rest of October if you don't have an October plan. It's okay. It's okay. It's October 14th. You have 2 more weeks of this month. Let's sit down. Let's make a plan for the rest of October. Let's make a plan for early November and let's keep working on our plans and make sure that we're executing. Because when we have a plan, then we can create templates, then we can set up automations, then we know what we're doing and how to engage. So here is my 5-step email audit for Q4. Ready, note-takers? Number 1, engage now. I want you to start sending 1 to 3 emails a week. If you've been sending an email every week, great. I'm super proud of you. Let's double it. Let's really get them engaged. And I gave you several tips of what you can send. So go back and watch that if you need to. Number 2, clean up that list. Stop paying for people that aren't opening your emails anyway. Quit carrying the dead weight around. Like, it's exhausting. Let's get it off, get it off our shoulders and let's clean up the list. Number 3, check your automations. We need those locked and loaded so they can work for you. While you're working so hard in Q4. Number 4, I want you to create some templates for your upcoming promotions inside your CRM. So when it comes time to send emails, you have them. You might just have to pop a picture in or add, add a link, but you've got them ready to go and you don't have to stress about that in the moment. And number 5, create your hand— create your plan. Okay? Set up an email plan, set up a marketing plan. Walk through what you're going to do to sell product over the next 60 days. Okay, that's all we have. We have 60 days from today. We have to maximize those 60 days to the fullest. And I don't want you to get into day 30 and be so stressed out that you can't continue because you're not prepared. We have 60 days to make sales. We have 60 days to get in front of people. We have 60 days to do the best that we can do in our business, and we've got to set ourselves up for success for that. And those 60 days start today. We have 60 days, and I'm saying 60 days because by December 15th, we got to get everything shipped out. Okay, like we don't have time. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, you have 70 days, but most of us have 60 days. So I want you to really own that. I want you to really own your marketing, and email is such an important part of our marketing. Okay, I want you to have a great Great week. Let's go do an email audit this week. Let's create some plans. I know you're going to feel better once you do. All right, have a great week. Go sell some stuff. Let's go. We got 60 days. Let's do it. I'll talk to you guys soon. Have a great Monday.