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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Heather figure out how often to email her list and what she should be sending to them when she does.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question from Heather Jackson at Potato Sack Diet Project
- Article on Periscope
- Live Event
- Elementary Librarian
- US History Teachers
- Flip Your Life Community
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. Got another great question about email marketing for you this week. We have a theme going on this month; we’re talking all about email marketing on all of our podcasts this month. This is how to get a bigger email list and sell to that list better. Today’s question comes from Heather Jackson who is a Flip Your Life community member. You can follow her at Facebook.com/potatosackproject. She’s got a cool little Facebook page there, she’s working on her website, and that will be up soon but you can follow her over on Facebook and check out what she’s up to. Heather writes, “How often should you keep in touch with your email list and is sending just your blog post links when they publish, enough? I am just starting out so I don’t really have a list but as it grows, I want to make sure I’m contacting them consistently. What should I do?” Jocelyn, what do you think about that?
JOCELYN: Alright, well, I have not always been the poster child for great email success.
SHANE: But we’ve gotten a lot better.
JOCELYN: We have improved a lot, and the thing that you have to remember Heather, and everyone else out there who maybe struggling with this question is that people give you their email address because they want you to contact them. That doesn’t mean that you should contact them ten times a day, but don’t feel bad about contacting them about once a week, maybe even twice a week. But don’t feel like you have to have a rigorous schedule and don’t get bent out of shape if you don’t adhere to that schedule that you build up in your mind. I think that’s a problem that a lot of people have, and they think that just sending out links to blog posts for instance like you mentioned is not good enough. But in fact, I think that sending out links to blog posts is totally a great list of – or a great use of your email list, and as long as you are sending them good value, and consistently sending them information that they are interested in, then that is perfectly acceptable to send to your list.
SHANE: It’s kinda like baseball; something like – we send out every Wednesday – our podcast comes on Tuesday and I’ve had people ask me before, like why don’t you send me an email out on Tuesday when your podcast releases? Well, I know that so many thousand people are gonna listen to that podcast because they are subscribed. You know, X-thousand people are gonna come in, download it, regardless of if I email him or not. Those people, I just want to go ahead and let them download everything and then I’ll wait till the next day before I schedule our email announcement for our podcast on Tuesdays, until Wednesday. We want that to come in on Wednesday to catch everybody else in our audience that might not be subscribed on iTunes or maybe missed that the podcast had come out, and forgot about it, and I want to remind them. So that’s one email that we send out. I usually also send out an email on Sunday night or Monday morning, just to touch base with people whatever we’ve got going on, or something new. This Monday, I actually sent a thing out for everybody to follow us on Periscope. We are really getting into Periscope. Periscope is a new thing out by Twitter where you can live stream. We’ve been doing a lot of Periscope-ing. You need to check it out, it’s the next big thing, and you can follow us on Periscope @FlippedLS. So we sent that on Monday, tomorrow – we’re recording this on a Tuesday, tomorrow, we will have a podcast email come out, and I’ll probably email something else out this weekend, or maybe close to the beginning of next week because we are about to announce our live event that’s coming out soon. We have experimented a lot with this. We tried once a week, twice a week, three times a week, randomly, we’ve done it where we’ve not even done it consistently; I promise you, I have seen very little – in our statistics, we’ve seen very little difference in open rates, in click-thru rates, in unsubscribes from doing it once a week, twice a week, three times a week. If you are delivering value, like Jocelyn said, if you are sending them good stuff, they want that. No one is going to turn good stuff down. The problem with open rates and the problem with emails is if you start sending junk, they are gonna start opening everything and they are not gonna want more emails and they’ll unsubscribe. But if all your stuff is good, there is no reason for them to leave.
JOCELYN: My strategy coming up for the Elementary Librarian site is to email my community members. I’m moving to a community-based model. So, they will receive an email about once a week, letting them know about new things that are going on in the community. If people are not a member of my community, I’m planning to send them out something at least monthly, possibly even every other week, just reminding them about some of the content that I have available on my site, which is a lot of blog posts and you know, different things I’ve done throughout the years –
SHANE: Holiday lesson plans and stuff like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, just to show them kind of what all is included in the Elementary Librarian community, and then I’m also planning on using a webinar strategy where I try to get people to come in to these free training courses that I am in the process of developing. I will also send them emails inviting them to those training modules.
SHANE: So that’s two different segments; one segment is monthly, which is more than enough to keep them abreast on what’s going on, and then the weekly one is people who are paying to be members. That’s what we do with your Flip Your Life membership area. The people that are paying us, we email them twice a week ‘cause they get our normal emails, and they get the newsletter that comes out for our membership community. For U.S. History Teachers, I’m gonna be emailing weekly to all non-members because I want to get – I’m gonna be sending a free lesson plan every Sunday night basically to teachers so they have Monday morning they got all their plans ready, and then they might join to get the plans for Tuesday through Friday. So they are going to be getting weekly stuff, but I actually plan on members to be getting emails a couple of times a week; maybe even like Monday, Wednesday, Friday because I’m gonna set up an autoresponder for when people join that it just goes and links them to where they need to be. They’ll tell me what lessons they are about to teach, and then I’ll have a plan set up to go ahead and remind them to get them back into the forums in using that content, downloading lesson plans so they keep paying their membership every month. So it just depends, how – you got to test this; nobody can tell you exactly what will work for your audience. Start it once a week and let that go for about a month, and then try twice a week and see what happens. If people start unsubscribing, don’t panic. Those probably weren’t your best customers anyway. Don’t assume that you are not delivering value, let them go because the people that stay are super-interested in your message, and they are the ones that are going to stick around and become customers.
JOCELYN: Alright Heather, I hope that was helpful for you in trying to determine how often you are going to be emailing your list and what you should be emailing to them.
SHANE: That is all the time we have for this Q&A; if you have any questions for us, go download Periscope and keep an eye out. We’re doing Q&As almost every single day on Periscope where you can jump on and ask us some questions. And if you need immediate help, all you have to do is head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife; check out our membership community, we are in our forums every single day. Our members can come in, ask questions, we get on it, we answer them, they know the next step to make their online business a success. It’s a great tool, a great resource, an amazing community of hundreds of entrepreneurs that Jocelyn and I lead, and we would love to have you in there as well. Until next time, y’all get out there, take action and flip your life. We’ll see you soon.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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Heather says
Hi guys, \r\n\r\nThanks for the \’shout out\’ and answering my question! :)\r\n\r\nWhat a great surprise. You are so fun to listen to and I still can\’t get over how \’hands-on\’ you are in the forums.\r\n\r\nYou offer so much value to everyone!\r\n\r\nHugs, Heather xoxo