THE BLOG PROGRAM Podcast Transcript Episode 29 30 Email Marketing Power Tips For Bloggers (Part 3 of 3) To get automatic updates of this show to your mobile device, you can subscribe here: Click here to Subscribe via itunes Click here to Subscribe via RSS (direct feed) ================= This is The Blog Program Episode 29. In this one we are going to complete the 3 part series on Email Marketing Power Tips For Bloggers. ================= Well, hello there and welcome to the show! It's actually been a couple of weeks since the last podcast episode came out so I'm kind of excited to get this one out the door and over to you on your phone or your ipad or whatever you might be using. Before we get started here, I want to let you know about the latest blog post over at the Academy. And if you haven't checked it out, you might want to do that. Basically, I was a guest on another podcast recently, called, "The Tropical Entrepreneur". Really cool podcast by a guy named Josh and he is putting out a daily interview show very similar to John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire. And he posted a really cool question to me; basically gave me the scenario of having three months to build up a business from scratch where I only had the evenings to work on it and some time on the weekends... And what would I do? Like, give me the step by step on exactly what I would do. And I thought it was a really cool question because it put me in the situation that I know a lot of my readers are; and that is... a lot of you have a full time job, you have a limited amount of time to work on growing an online business. And you don't want to take the rest of your life to do it, so what do you do? So, I sat down and gave it some thought and I created 10 Steps that I would do. And I told him those 10 Steps but I went ahead and elaborated on it a little bit and made a full-on blog post about it. So that blog post is over at blogmarketingacademy.com/blog, it is called "Ten Steps I Would Follow To Start Over And Build My Business From Scratch In Three Months".
The reaction that I have been getting to that blog post has been pretty good. Actually, it's been bringing a lot of traffic to the site, too, which is awesome. So I think you are going to get a lot out of it. If you haven't already seen that, once again it's called "Ten Steps I Would Follow To Start Over And Build My Business In Three Months". With that, let's go on and get started on this week's feature segment. =============== Okay, so in this one we are going to go ahead and complete our series. We started going in to 30 different email marketing power tips for bloggers. And back in Episode 27 I covered 1 to 10, in Episode 28 I covered 11 to 20 and in this Episode 29, we are going to complete it with Tips 21 through 30. So if you did not catch those last 2 episodes make sure you go back and grab them now and take a listen. And they don't go any particular order; It's just that if you like to go on a chronological order it might make sense to go back and listen to 27 & 28 first. But these tips are not exactly something where they build upon one another so you can listen to it any way you want. With that, let's jump right into it. 21. If you use an autoresponder sequence (and you should), you might want to go ahead and schedule it. And what do I mean by that? Well, there's this inherent conflict sometimes with the autoresponder sequence, which is basically a pre-set series of emails that is going to get delivered to your subscribers over time and the one-off emails that you send. Now, it particularly becomes apparent in systems like Aweber. Now, Aweber is designed so that if you set up an email sequence then it's going to deliver that autoresponder to them over time. But if you also send out one-off emails that you custom write, well you run the risk of having your autoresponder trigger out on the same day as you might have sent off a one-off email. So, in that case, what happens is that unbeknownst to you, you could actually end up emailing your list of at least some of your subscribers twice in one day. Now, is that a horrible thing? Nah, not necessarily especially if you are doing a good job with your emails. But there is a way that you can avoid that; and that is to actually schedule your autoresponder in order to tell it what day it is to deliver. Aweber gives you this capability. When you set up an email in your autoresponder sequence, you can actually tell it what days of the week are okay to send it.
So if you want to exempt Wednesday (just off the top of my head), you just say "do not send any autoresponder messages on a Wednesday"; well then when you set up that email for the autoresponder sequence you just make sure to tell it not to send on Wednesdays. And what you are doing at that point is saying, "Well, Wednesday is just going to be my day where I can send out a one-off email" and you don't run the risk of emailing them more than once in a single day. Again, you can sit there and decide whether that is a big deal to you, and maybe it's not... but if you really want to maintain that tight control on email timing you can utilize that email autoresponder scheduler feature. Aweber has it, MailChimp might, I actually haven't been there in a long time... And I know of more advanced systems like the one I use at OfficeAutoPilot which is now called Ontraport, while I do the same thing. 22. Use your list to actually drive comments. Now, a lot of bloggers... we want comments. And a lot of bloggers do struggle of how to get people to interact with them more. Well, a really great way to do that is by utilizing your email list. So what you do is, you write the blog post and then when you go and you notify your list you do it in a personal way. By the way, going back to one of my prior tips where I said "Don't depend on a blog broadcast automated email". So what you could do is you can write the emails in such a way where you tease your next blog post in order to entice them to actually click over to it. But then in that email you can actually propose a question to them; propose something where you actually are inviting them actively to reply to you. And then what you could do is bring the conversation back to your blog. So it's a way of actually having a two-way communication with your email list, rather than just being a one-way flow. You can actually turn it into a two-way flow by saying, "Hey, so I got this question for you, I really would appreciate you to kind of come and give me your response. I want you to click over to this link on this blog post and just post your reply as a comment. And that could drive additional comments on your blog. 23. This goes back into the subject of autoresponders - This just works better this way on autoresponders... It's the concept of what's called "open loop". Now, open loop works like this: It creates like an unfinished thing. Unfinished circuit; so to speak, in the minds of your readers and they just naturally want to close it. They naturally want to give it a resolution. Here's an example of this, and one that I've used many times. If you have ever watched the Episode of 24, or you watched an episode of - some of my favorite shows... if you watched Breaking Bad or one of these really good series it just makes you really want to watch the next one... They are utilizing open loops throughout.
They will start like an element of the plot and then they will just leave you with a cliffhanger you are just like, "What the hell happened?" You really want to watch the next one to find out what the hell just happened. That is what I mean by an open loop. It's leaving cliffhangers; leaving something undone that you just really want to finish it. You really want to know what happened. Well you can utilize this in your emails. It works best as an email series. When you write a series of emails altogether and you can nest in these open loops to where you are kind of alluding to something that is kind of to come later or you can kind of start going down one path and be like, "I'll let you know more about that in my next email" and you drop these cliffhangers in there to where they really want to open the next email that you send them. And it works really well, by the way, if you couple this up with your subject lines. If they know that you are running a series of really valuable emails on a particular topic, you can actually... in the subject line, have [whatever your subject is]... and then go - Part 1 of 5, part 2 of 5... And they will see those numbers in there and they will kind of see that it goes in a chronological order and that they are building upon one another. It builds this sense of "Wanna know what is going to happen". Now, if you do that, as well as drop open loops in the actual text of your email to where you really get their curiosity going and then you leave them hanging, then they will want to read the next part of your series. Works really well. You know, when you write these emails, these are not like boring, selfcontained little things and you could actually look at each email that you send to your list as part of an overall sequence and you can build it out appropriately. 24. Use your most popular posts and then you could turn those into topics for your email list. Here's the idea behind this If you go into Google Analytics or wherever you get your stats from for your blog, you could see what the most popular content on your site is. Well, it's not so much that you want to just copy and paste that and send that to your list but what it does do is it tells you what is hot. What are the topics that people are really resonating with; because that is one of the most popular post in your site. So what you can then do is repurpose that into an entry in your autoresponder sequence or into a one-off email which you can then drive into a call to action; but you know that those are hot topics so that you can actually then write something and put it into your list. Or you can also drop some additional information on the same topic and then point them into that popular post on your blog. So there are lots of things that you could do there but the whole idea with this tip is to utilize your blog as a source of intelligence on what your audience wants. And then you can use that information to tailor the emails in your email list to the things that they need and want. And that is going to increase your open rates and your click through rates.
25. Storyboarding - and this lends itself really well to what I just talked about with regard to open loops. Storyboarding comes from the world of Hollywood where people are actually authoring out what the scenes in the movie or a play might be. If you go online and you search for "storyboard" on Google you are going to find a lot of images on this. Like these little frame by frame drawings of the different scenes of movie and what's happening and people will lay them out that way. You could do the exact same thing with your emails. You could even do them with blog posts. You can do this with any form of content - where you storyboard them out. You say, "I'm going to write a series of emails on a particular thing" and you can have a side by side storyboard plan on what is going to happen there. Now, one of the ways that you could do this; and this is one of the ways I've done before - is to open up a text editor where you are going to actually write your emails; but then open up three or four different windows of the same text editor and put them all side by side on the exact same screen. And then you can have four or more emails (whatever fits on your screen) side by side on the same monitor and you could see how one email that you write flows onto the next one. And it's a form of storyboarding. You are basically creating these little frames on your screen and you are authoring each element of the storyboard. And you can build in these open loops that way; you can have a little paragraph on "Part 1" refer to something that you are going to close that loop for them in "Part no. 3" or something like that. If you are doing a marketing sequence you can say, "I've created a really cool bonus for you" or something like that... "I'll let you know about it on part 4". Whatever you want to do, but you can drop these open loops throughout. It's a lot easier to see that and plan for it when you actually have these different emails of your sequence sitting on the same screen side by side so that you actually see that one leads onto the next and then you are not getting into this mindset of each one being self-contained all by itself. So that's storyboarding. I definitely recommend you give it a whir. 26. When you send out an email to your list I recommend that the front name actually just be YOU; your personal name. The reason for that is because... I think people resonate with people more than they do brands. They are going to value an email from a human being a lot more than they are going to some company name. Now, if you are really in a big corporate environment and you are running an email list or a blog for them, you might not be able to do that. So you need to take this tip based on the setting that you are in.
But most of us listening to this; are probably in a situation where we are the person. So even if you are talking about your blog has got some name which is not your name, you can still have the emails that send out to your list be from your name so that your name appears in the front field and not the name of your blog. And it's because it's more like a personal email from a friend. I talked about that in the prior tip how when you write to your list you want to address them in a personal tone and treat them like a friend or a person in your family. Well, it kind of goes without saying that if you are going to treat them that way it cannot be from XYZ, Incorporated because it's not personal. It needs to be from you. Your name. 27. The return email address on your outgoing email should be an actual email address that is seen by a real person. Now, I say this because I know that some bloggers and some companies will actually send out mass emails to their list and it will have some "bounce" address that doesn't really go anywhere. It's almost like you are trying to hide from your own subscribers at that point. And you go in with this misguided assumption that "I don't really want to get that volume of replies because it's just going to clutter on my inbox". So you're putting up a shield between you and your subscribers. And it's not good. It's a stupid mindset, actually. So what you want to have is when somebody hits "reply" on one of the emails that you send out to your list, you want that reply to go to you. And if you are in a company situation, you want to very least have that email go to somebody in your company whose task was actually "replying" because it is very important to reply to everything that your email subscribers send you back. It's a two-way communication. There's not a one-way communication. So you never want to close the door on the ability for your email subscribers to get an email from you that was sent out to the list and be able to hit the "reply button" and talk back. In fact, you actually want to write your emails to where you encourage them to do exactly that. It's very, very important. So, how those emails go directly to you or somebody tasked with the ability to reply to them and make sure that it is a part of the procedure to actually reply to them in a personal way. We are not talking about canned replies; we are not talking about bull crap... a real, actual personal reply where this person actually feels like they just had a conversation. That's what you want. Ideally, you would do it, but understand that as a business grows it could be a little difficult to do that so you might want to have somebody else do it for you. But it's still be their job to do exactly that because you want to treat everybody like a person.
28. The 7 Word Question. That 7 word question is: What is your biggest challenge right now? Now, what do you do with that question? What I'd do with that question is that I'll actually have it as an email that is the first email that is on my autoresponder sequence. So, they subscribe to my list, they are going to get the Welcome Email of course, they are going to get delivered to them, whatever they might have subscribed to. But then what they are going to get is an email that says, "What is your biggest challenge right now?" And I actually framed that in the topic of what my niche is; which is blogging and marketing because I don't want them to tell me about things that aren't related. But what you get from this is a lot of data as to what they are struggling with, what kind of things that they want to hear from you... really, really good information. Not only that, you get this information in the words that they use to communicate it. So it's not just the matter of learning what your audience needs and wants. It's also a matter of seeing what words, what language they use, what emotional language they use to communicate that problem to you. That's very important when it comes to making sure that your content resonates with them. Not only that, it will become important as you do marketing and try to convert people into actual sales because you need to have the message that resonates with them. So it's a very, very important thing to do and I think an email autoresponder is just the ideal place to do it. Now, speaks to my last tip quite closely and that is... If they are going to reply to that message and tell you all about that biggest challenge, then obviously, to that email - when they hit the "reply" and answer you, it needs to go to you. You cannot have it go to some anonymous email address or some corporate thing. It needs to go to an actual human being so they feel like they are actually having a conversation. And I'll tell you two really interesting thing about that email - that 7 word question. The emails that I get back in reply to that are often very long. I mean, people sometimes tell me their life stories just as a result to that 7 word question. I get so much information not only about the various things that are important to the people on my list, about what they need and want... but also their life; how they phrase it. Really, really powerful stuff. The other thing that I will make mention is that, if you are in the business of making sales with your blog, oftentimes that conversation that comes - because as a result of that 7 word question; can lend itself to a sales opportunity. Many, many times I have made a sale of one of the courses of blogmarketingacademy.com, simply because this person told me about their challenge and then I reply back to them in a personal way and be like, "I totally got that" I give them some information or some tips on that and then I say, "Hey, you might want to check out this course which seems to me precisely tailored to you based on what you just told me - your challenges." So, I recommend this particular course that is designed to help solve that problem. And I do this in a personal setting. This is not an automated autoresponder sequence; this is literally me typing out this email to them and treats them like a real human being.
And I've closed many sales that way on courses inside the Academy simply because of that. So, there are a lot of things that happen once you spark that conversation. It's a very powerful email. 29. Segment your list. Very, very important. Now, segmentation of a list is a very big topic, potentially. But it comes down to the idea of not treating your entire list as one big block of emails. I'm going to go over that more here on the last tip no. 30, but the thing about segmenting is you want to track what your email subscribers are interested in and you want to categorize them according to that. Now, one of the ways that you can do that is by having multiple points of opting-in on your blog that are based on certain email list giveaways or certain landing pages that hit a certain topic. And then what you can actually do is, based on what opt-in form that came in from, you can assume that that person is interested in whatever the topic was or whatever the giveaway was on that opt-in form. So, for example... If I were to have you subscribed to a giveaway for my list that talked all about email marketing (because that is what we are talking about right here in this podcast) then I can assume that if you came in from that particular opt-in form, you are probably interested in email marketing, right? Which means that you are going to be segmented differently than somebody who may have come in on a page on my site that talk about "how to be more productive". Now, it could be that the same person is interested in more than one thing. And the person can be in more than one segment. But the idea here is that you are actually tracking that behavior. And so that when you email out to your list you can more precisely target it based on the things that they are interested in. So, I recommend that when you think of email list giveaway offers and different pathways into your email list that you not treat everybody exactly the same. You want to actually track where they come in from and you want to do things with your email list offers and using different opt-in forms in your blog so that you can actually have some likelihood of being able to appropriately segment these people under little buckets because your list is just a big database. But within that database you got these little buckets of people who are interested in particular things. And the more closely you can hit them with only the things they are interested in and not the things they are not interested in; the higher conversion rates you are going to get. Now that leads me to my last tip...
30. You don't want to fall into this trap of always emailing your entire list all the time. That is what happens when you don't segment anything - is that your whole list is just a list. There it is... it's just a LIST. So everything you have to say gets sent to the entire list every single time. Now, doing that is a really good way to burn out your list. It's a really good way to drive down your delivery rates. And why is that? Well, it's because statistically, there's no way around. You will be emailing things to your subscribers that they are not interested in. And when you do that enough, they are going to start tuning you out; they are going to spam-filter you, they are going to do all kinds of things that you don't want them to do because you are not offering value to them. So, the way that you fix that is by segmenting like we just talked about and then getting into the habit... is that when you have something to email out to your list, you actually ask yourself... "Who is this going to be most relevant to?" And you don't need to email out the entire list every single time. If you have an email list segment based on topic X, and then you have some perfect product to recommend which is going to help everybody who is interested in topic X or has that particular problem to solve, it will make sense to target only those people on your list that are interested on topic X. You don't need to email out the same thing to everybody else! Or at the very least, if you do want to email out to everybody on your list, you might treat them differently because the people who are not in that segment are going to be a little bit more of a cold lead so you need to treat them a little bit differently than somebody who has already expressed strong interest on that particular subject. So, always ask yourself "Who this email is going to be most relevant to?" And don't get stuck in this habit of emailing your entire list all the time. Now, in order to not get stuck in that habit, it does require some advance planning. So, that goes without saying, you got to have to think through this email segment stuff and get that done. =================== Now, I will end off here because we have now just gone through all 30 tips between the last three episodes; 30 Tips... is I want to let you know about a course that I have over at blogmarketingacademy.com and it's called "Master Your List". It's actually a workshop series that I did which goes in to how to build your list, how to treat your list once they are on the list. And it goes into a lot of different little strategies and tactics on how to best utilize your list and get good results even from small list. Because one thing I don't like to see people do; and I find that more of my audience does this and like... is to get into this mindset of thinking that your email list is too small to be relevant. It's not. I mean, literally unless you got one or two people. But here's the thing... every single email subscriber on your list is a real flesh and blood human being. And I've had people come to me and say, "Eh, my email list is only 500 people" like they think that's small!
Put yourself in a room, on a stage with 500 people sitting at the audience staring at you. And then see how you feel about a crowd of 500 people being a small amount of people. These are not small amount of people. They seem small when you are out there comparing yourself to other people brag about the size of their lists like morons. Or where you are looking out is just like email address and this little glimpse on your list, and it's not like...when you just look at them as numbers, it's going to be really easy to fall into that mindset of thinking that it's small. But these are really human beings and you need to treat them that way. And when you treat them that way, you can get big results from even the list that you think are small. So, the course is called "Master Your List", I'm not going to sit here and barrage you with it. If you are interested in learning more about it, head over to blogmarketingacademy.com and click on the top menu link that talks about "Courses" or "Products" (if my new design has gone live by the time you're listening to this; and it probably will... And you can learn more about that course called "Master Your List". =============== Alright... well, thanks so much for listening to The Blog Program. I hope you found this episode and the last couple valuable to you. As usual, if you did find it valuable I would highly appreciate it if you run over to itunes or wherever you happen to find this podcast and post a quick review and/or a star rating for me. Let's just kind of let the world know what you think about The Blog Program. If you are not already subscribed to my email list, I would encourage you to go over to blogmarketingacademy.com/newsletter and get subscribed. I always keep my community up to date with what's new over at the site but also you will be clued on things that I'm doing, like webinars and things like that. I actually just did a webinar a week and a half or so ago; the feedback was off the charts on it. It all had to do with how I do my content internally and how I've done the content which has powered my six-figure business now for almost a decade and I now have it down to a point where I can create that content in about 3 hours or so each week, so it doesn't take a lot of time. So, I went in to a lot of stuff on that webinar. If you want to keep in touch with what's going on at blogmarketingacademy.com and also be in the loop with regard to the webinars that I am going to be doing and the workshops; because I'm going to be doing a lot more of them - then you can head over to blogmarketingacademy.com/newsletter and make sure that you are on the notification list. Okay! With that I hope you have a good rest of the day and I'll see you on the next episode of The Blog Program!