How to be Consistent With Email Marketing

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. Hey friends, I am so thrilled with this series. So far on email marketing. I’m so grateful for both Kate doster and Liz Wilcox, who we’re here to talk about how to grow your email list and how to welcome new people onto your email list. But before we go any further talking about emails, I want to talk about consistency for a second, because staying consistent is something that I think most small business owners struggle with. And that doesn’t have to be just email marketing. I think it really plays into all forms of marketing. Consistency is a really tough thing. And it plays both on our mindset, as well as the time that we have to function as business owners, we need to allocate hours of our day or hours of our week, let’s say, to be able to complete what we need to complete to stay consistent in our marketing efforts. And without the right systems and strategies set up to support us in those efforts. It is very overwhelming to show up in a way that is consistent. That is strategic. And that feels good as a business owner who is doing the marketing for their business. But before I begin I want to say thank you to a few people who have left reviews recently for the podcast. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of the reviews. So I want to thank Colee James who’s probably the most recent person to leave a message and she says episode 35 with Liz Wilcox was so actionable, I immediately planned out and rewrote my welcome series. I can’t wait to dive into the other episodes. Another person who had something to say recently was actually one of our guests from Episode 28 research loop. She said with all the quote unquote rules in the entrepreneurial world, Erin gets to the point, making it clear that creating great copy has everything to do with you, who you are and what you do want to stand out and be noticed. Listen to Aaron. And finally, there is Katie Brinkley, who says love listening to these episodes, I had no idea there were so much to copy. But each episode I learned so much more. Thank you all thank you to everyone who has left a review reviews are so helpful to us in the podcasting world. So if you haven’t gotten a chance to review us here on the top copy to me podcast, I would love it if you could hop into your favorite podcast player and do so reviews not only make my heart sing when I see these kind words from people who are listening, but it’s helpful to us to move our show up the rankings so we can get to new listeners who can hopefully enjoy the episodes, learn from the episodes, and take the content that you know we’re working so hard to share with you into their own businesses to help their own marketing. Let’s jump into what we’re all here for today. And that’s the the word consistency. I know myself in business, it is really hard to stay consistent with my own marketing priorities, that for my business, I kind of fall in the backside behind my client work. You know, I’ve said this many times throughout the years of running my business that it’s easy to prioritize my client work and a lot harder to prioritize my own businesses marketing. Honestly, I think that’s something I’ve heard from every single one of my small to medium sized business clients, that prioritizing the marketing in their business is an absolute must do in their brain. But yet, it’s something that they fail at over and over again. And what happens is, you know, talking with my clients talking with my peers, we all tend to feel a lot of shame about this. It’s one of those things that you know, you should be doing. But because there is, in some cases, no urgency, you don’t take action. In other cases, there might be an extreme amount of urgency, especially if finances are involved and you’re worried about increasing those finances. Yet the pressure of having to take action is so overwhelming that it leads to inaction. So while today’s episode will hopefully be things to help you like actionable steps to help you be more consistent, I want to acknowledge at first that there is a lot of mindset stuff that goes into this. There’s a lot of feelings, a lot of emotions. And you know, I just want to acknowledge that and hold a place for them. Because you are not the only person that feels those feelings and emotion. I wish that we in the online business world were a little bit more vocal about how difficult things can be in our own businesses. So if you’re listening to this, and you think to yourself, like why is this so hard for me? Why am I failing at this we’ll take a deep breath and change the way that you speak to yourself. First of all, you’re not failing at anything. You’re learning how to do things better for your business. And you’re prioritizing wanting to be consistent. You acknowledge the importance of consistency and you’re taking steps to learn how to put these practices into your you know, business to Jews so you can improve on them. We’re all starting from the same place of knowing consistency. is important and wanting to put more effort in. And that’s okay. Before we talk about the actual to do’s here, let’s talk about why consistency is so important. One, when you’re consistent with your emails, you’re going to, excuse me, you’re going to increase trust with your readers. This is especially true if the emails that you’re sending are not 100% sales driven. This is why it’s really important that we have some story driven content in our email marketing, that we have client case studies, we have varied content. So that consistency is something that our readers tend to expect from us, they’re trained to know that we’re going to show up in their inboxes. But they don’t feel like the only way we are showing up in their inboxes is for a way that benefits us and not necessarily then varying content is really helpful to build those relationships with the readers. But showing up on a regular schedule, is what will increase the trust. Now I just talked about building relationships. But it’s also a way being consistent is also a way to introduce some personality into your business. Now, if you are a multi person business, or maybe let’s say you’re a product based business, where you as the are not a service provider, you’re not the face of your brand, maybe this doesn’t influence you as much. But if you are a service provider, or if you are the face of your business and brand, I always get asked questions about how do I get my personality here or I’m more of an introvert, I don’t want to be an extrovert in my marketing. Email gives you the opportunity to showcase little facets of who you are. And what’s important to you. quirks anything that you are comfortable sharing with your audience in a way that is not overwhelming. Email also gives you an opportunity to show your expertise, which is really important. You know, we talk about building trust, but it’s hard to be able to boast about yourself in your marketing, or at least I know for myself, it’s hard to boast. Sometimes I don’t even recognize the things I could be boasting about. And for my clients, I hear this all the time, especially when we’re working on about pages. They’ll read the content, or we’ll just talk about it during one of our like website wireframing calls. And they’ll say Oh, I couldn’t say that, Oh, that’s too much. I don’t want to seem like I’m boasting, I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging. But the truth is we need to boast and brag, we need to showcase our best self. So that way people feel confident about working with us so that they trust us. So they believe in us. So that way they can share their hard earned money by investing in us because they, they trust us they know that we’re experts, email gives you the opportunity to, to do that. And it also gives you the space to share stories that don’t necessarily belong on your website. But those stories are about you as the business owner or maybe about why the business was formed or some type of a story that is important to you in your business. We definitely talked about this last week with the episode we do with Liz Wilcox, but email gives you an opportunity to both set and fulfill expectations with your audience. So what I mean by setting expectations is letting them know who you are, that you are a business that you have products or services. And then it allows you the chance to fulfill those expectations. Maybe what you’re doing by fulfilling an expectation is simply sharing your brand story. Or maybe what you’re doing by fulfilling the expectation is sending them offers, sending them discounts, maybe alerting them of sales, as a business, these are things that we need to do to stay afloat and our customers know that of us. And they’re looking for that. So email gives us that opportunity to share those offers with our potential clients. And when we’re consistent, they know to look out for our voice to look out for our messages so that they can learn what’s happening in our business. And on that point, being consistent with your email marketing gives you the opportunity to boost sales. If you do not offer your services or products to your audience. They cannot buy from you. Now yes, I’m saying this, I’m accentuating this when I say it why because this is one of the ways I personally fail in email marketing is I don’t necessarily let my offers shine in my emails, I tend to either be educational, or sharing offers from other people that I may be acquainted with. But we need to let our audience know that we have something, something that will help them that we want to offer to them. So when we’re consistent in our emails, and we’re showing up regularly as the business owners that they are have come to trust that they they know have expertise and that they know are running a business. They are going to be more apt to purchase from us when we do offer our sales to them. That’s the basics. I’m not going to kind of drag this on here we all know consistency is important but Before we talk about how to be consistent, I want to give you a little hint, it’s important to establish your email marketing goals, before you determine the schedule that you want to be consistent with. Why? Because we want to know that in marketing and any type of marketing, we want to have a goal. So we can know what KPIs which are, excuse me, key performance indicators, if you don’t know what that is, what KPIs to measure, because we want to know if we’re achieving our goals, and we want to know that we’re moving forward in business. So before you think about setting an actual schedule, and then putting in the effort to be consistent, I want you to take some time and sit down and think, what are my goals with email marketing? You know, you could hear from anyone I think, actually, last episode, Liz said that she’d love for everyone to email their list at least once a week if it was feasible. But why are you doing that? What is the end goal for you and your business? How is it affecting your financial bottom line, your time bottom line, think about what ways your business could grow, if you are consistent in your marketing, and start, you know, establishing what you’re going to be tracking, you know what numbers you will be tracking to see if your efforts are successful, and how you’re going to, quote unquote, succeed when it comes to email marketing. Email is one of those things that is fluid. And it is not a campaign. And for most, obviously, there are email campaigns. But what I mean by that is, it’s something that you should be doing all of the time in your business. So there’s not one stop and go point that you can say, okay, the goal from September 1 Through October 17 was met, we’re good to go. These are things that we’re constantly self auditing, constantly checking and adjusting over time. But knowing what’s important in your business will absolutely be able to help you be consistent when you do put in the effort. After you know what those goals are, I’m going to suggest that you set a schedule that feels good for you. And it feels attainable. When we establish a schedule or a cadence are in our readers get to know what to expect from us. This is the same way we operate if we’re posting blogs on our websites, or even just writing on social media, when people know that we’re showing up regularly. Again, it increased trust, but it also trains them to know to look for us, especially if they like our content setting the schedule will help train your readers but it will also help train you to show up consistently. If you know that you have to email your list once a week, then what you know at that point is there are 52 times in a year that you will be sending out an email. And if you plan ahead for those 52 times that number won’t seem so outrageously high, if you know you’re doing it once a month. And that’s only 12 emails that you have to send in an entire year. So establishing a schedule should be the very first step that you take your attempts to be more consistent with your email marketing. After you look at your schedule, I want you to then think about strategy. Now strategy is in some ways, a bit of an umbrella though the rest of what I’m talking about. Because when we look at strategy, what we need to do is look at our overall business goals. For example, do you have anything any launches planned for the year? Do you have any seasonality in your business, outside influences such as affiliate launches that you incorporate into your business financial goals that impact the type of content that you share throughout the year? So one, knowing what your overarching business goals or approaches to your finances in business is going to be a first step when it comes to understanding how to plan and what’s strategic. Also, check your offers, what are you selling? For some people, it could be a whole slew of products. For others, it might be one signature service and everything in between those two. But knowing what you’re selling also influences the type of content that you determined to create strategy also plays into things like my suggestion to potentially batch the work that you’re doing in your business to collect and store some good content to use in different times. And it also plays into things like templates. So I’m going to jump into those other topics now. And just know that when I’m talking about them, I want you to look at them both for what I’m saying, but then how they play a role in the overall strategy on how you plan to attack let’s say for lack of a better word, your own email marketing, I’m going to suggest the easiest way for you to be consistent is to create a content bank that you can pull from that helps you determine what to say in your emails. Here’s why. The reason people are not consistent is because they do not know what to say. It is the curse of a blank page. The blinking cursor, the white screen with no letters on it, it’s overwhelming to know when to start. I think I’ve mentioned it either in this whole podcast before, or in maybe a guest episode that I’ve done on someone else’s show. But if you have not read an LeMans book, which is called Bird by Bird, it’s a book on writing, I highly recommend doing that. In this book, what she suggests in one of the sections, obviously, it’s a big book, but is to write what she calls a shitty first draft. The reason being so is it gives us the opportunity to just get content out there. And we can fix it later. I originally read this when I was in my graduate program, and I think it really saved me because I know it’s really hard for me to open a blank page and get my content out there. And you’re talking from someone who’s been writing since the like early 2000s, writing professionally since the early 2000s. So if I’m struggling to write content, and you’re not in the marketing world, but you are a small business owner, I imagine you’re also really struggling. So when we have ideas out there, when we have that strategy of how we’ll approach our content, the first steps already taken, you know, if we know, here’s the topic I’m talking about, and here’s the reason I’m talking about this topic, at least we can jot down some immediate thoughts. But if we don’t know what to say, and we just show up and look at the screen, hoping that we’ll have some spark of inspiration. That’s generally why people are not consistent, they fail in the moment and they say, Okay, I’ll just do it next week. And then next week comes and it gets missed, and the week after, and the week after. And then finally, two months have gone by, they have not emailed their list. And they feel like they have to jump in and be like, Oh, hey, sorry, I haven’t been around for a while, which is one of the worst things to do, because it automatically puts your readers off, it reminds them that you’re not being consistent, I probably should have mentioned this in the section about why consistency is important. But here, what I’m talking about skipping our schedule, and then all like showing up all of a sudden, the reason why that can be just so jarring is that Bo may forget who you are. And even if they don’t forget, they remember who you are, they may realize they don’t actually need you or that they’ve gotten on fine without you. So when after a few months of time has gone by you have sent them an email, especially if it’s a sales email, you’re going to notice an increased amount of unsubscribes. However, if you are showing up consistently in your business, these people are going to be along that journey with you, you’re going to be familiar to them. Like I said, you’ve built up that remembrance in the sense that they expect you to share content with them being inconsistent really leads to them losing their interest in what it is you’re offering them. So let’s get back talking about that content bank. You might be listening to this and thinking to yourself, great, I love the idea, Aaron, but I’m not a great Ideator like how the heck do I know what to put in a content bank, the first thing they want you to do is to think about things that happen at a certain time in your business. So if this is easier for you, maybe grab a piece of paper and then write January through December, and then maybe even underneath that add quarter one, quarter, two, quarter three annually, anything that you can start to take notes about what happens during those timeframes. Here’s an example for you for the past few years and my business, I have launched a website auditing workshop in the month of March. It’s called Spring, clean your website. And I help people like walk through all of the copy tech content analytics things that they have to do to make sure that their website is in tip top shape in March. Now if you’ve listened to the episode that we did with ash Chow, we all know that pre launching anything is really important when it comes to the success of the lunch. So prior to March, I want to make sure that I am talking to my list about the importance of having a healthy website about making sure your copy is current. And it speaks to what you do in business. So that when I actually do offer the workshop, people are primed to buy they expected it from me. And it does not feel like all of a sudden I’m throwing sales offers at them without showing them that I understand where they’re coming from and that I can help them give them that website transformation. Now because this happens every March, I know that I really need to focus my let’s say mid January through February content leading up to the launch with information that can help them prepare for this or help them just expect it in the future. So do you have anything like that in your business? If so, that’s going to be the first thing that you put in your content, bank, anything that is set to happen at a certain time. After that. I want you to look at the content you’ve already created in your business and see if it can serve as either One inspiration for new emails or two, can you repurpose it. And when I say repurpose, I mean, maybe you take a small thing you’ve written for social media and you expand on it. Maybe you take this long blog post that you’ve written as like pillar content for your website, and you just share one small piece of it, whatever it is, look at what you’ve already created. And see if you could add those themes, those topics, or even potentially the whole thing into your content bank for potential future emails you send your audience, you can look at topics that are relevant to your business. So for example, things that have to do with your expertise, things that have to do with your client work, things that have to do with the services or the products you offer, things that have to do with maybe like your hot take on a particular industry topic, jot those down, like literally just get information into that content bank. So when it’s time to sit down and write, whether you’re batching, or whether you know, oh, gosh, I write an email every Tuesday. And here we are Tuesday at 11pm. And I really want to stay consistent. You can just open your content bank and be like, Okay, here’s a topic that I feel comfortable talking about at this moment. After you’ve created the content bank, what you’re going to do is look for themes and create series out of the themes that you have. So for example, I talk a lot about websites. So my themes, for example, could be website copywriting, it could be like about pages. If I have found I’ve taken a ton of notes on the about page, then maybe I know that I have a whole month’s worth of emails that are just going to focus on about pages that are just going to focus on about pages. Similarly, and especially the instance of if we know we have lunches coming in our business, or if there is seasonality to our offers, we want to look at the calendar, look at our email schedule, look at our content bank and take that information to plot out the content that goes near those seasonal times, just so I can make sure we are all on the same page here. First look at your calendar, if you know you’re launching something in September, plan backwards, listen to the episodes I did on pre launch content as well as non sleazy sales, and how to have lazy lunches. Those were with Ashe Chow, just Haney and Kristen McIntyre. I’ll link to them in the show notes for you. But there’s great explanations there for how to prep for a launch. So again, you have something going in September, work backward into August and July. And just plot out what you’re going to say on the calendar for the for the topic that you’re lunching on. When you have all of those things filled in the ones that are particular, when it comes to calendar dates, you’re going to notice that there are a lot of holes. So look at the holes that you have in your calendar, and take the themes you’ve created again, using my example of maybe I’m talking about about pages a lot will then know that if there’s nothing in my calendar for me, and I want to spend the month talking about about pages, I can plot those all in for me, especially if I have at least something different to talk about. For each of those themes. Let’s take this version two point, version 2.0 of the podcast. If you’re already doing this in your business, if you already have all of your content planned out, you might think to yourself like, okay, and this isn’t that strategic, like I want to be a little bit more strategic, there is a way that you can do like a step up from this. And I don’t want you to stress about that if you’re if you’re new to being consistent. But another way you can look at this is to plan out your content in a strategic way that’s alternating. So for example, if every six emails you share like a testimonial, or you share your clients stories, every five emails, you share some type of educational content. So you can actually determine what type of content you’d like to share based on a revolving strategy. So that way, what you’re sharing with your audience is always going to be fresh, it’s always going to be relevant, and there is an actual method to the madness of strategy. Now I want to talk about batching work, and it’s something that I both love and hate because as someone who has ADHD and is neurodivergent. It batching doesn’t necessarily come easy to me. But I think batching can really help people with consistency. So I’m going to talk about it here. If it is something that comes easy to you 100% batch your emails, if you’re batching your emails and you’re creating them ahead of time you can schedule them and they will always be getting to your audience when you expect them to. If batching is hard, see what you can take from my suggestion and incorporate it into your own business. So when you bad I would suggest coming up first with your list of emails, you know, I just mentioned using a calendar to plan them filling in any holes necessary with potential topic ideas. That could be one batching session. So that way when you walk away from the batching session, you can say, Okay, well, that’s the whole year or Okay, that’s my whole quarter even because that’s like, what 13, a quarter of the year is 13 weeks. So just coming up with 13 potential topics could be the whole batching session, you move away from it, you do something else. Step two would be researching and taking notes. Now you might think, Well, why would I research anything like I know, the topic that I’m going to be talking to my audience about? Research is important guys. Like I researched this episode one, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t really forgetting anything, too, because I wanted to see like, Are there any good stats that I could add. And while I haven’t mentioned it yet, I did find a stat that I loved as of 2020. This is according to HubSpot email generate $36, for every $1 spent, and I guarantee that post pandemic, it is way more than $36, because we relied so heavily on selling or big brands relied so heavily on selling via email, because people couldn’t come into the store. So just recognize that all of this work you’re doing now in your business to show up and be more consistent, is bringing a monetary value into your business. You may not see it at this very moment. But being consistent can help you see it into the future. But let’s get back to work. Do your research, take notes on what you find. And think of them as tiny little outlines. Do not write the whole thing here. Maybe what you do is you open a document, you write January 1, let’s pretend that’s your first email you’re going to be consistent with, and you have just a few bullet points that you put down under that email, then you have January 8, just a few bullet points. If you do that for one quarter at a time, you’re going to completely avoid the blank page problem, because you’ll already have content created that you can flush out later. After you do that. Maybe you take it and you make outlines for all of those things where you actually show Okay, well, here’s what I’m going to here’s my intro, here’s a few notes from my inside paragraphs followed by my conclusion. Or maybe you just jump in and start writing a few emails at a time. Batching can really help you because it’s preparing the work that you do now so that you can schedule it into the future. And before I finished my little rant that I’ve been sharing with you guys, here, I want to talk about templates. Creating an email template can really help you be able to do what I just said, like the fill in the blanks, by knowing that you have content that goes in a specific place. One person that I follow is Elise, she runs the blog, Elise gets crafty. I have read her content for years now. And I don’t remember exactly what they are off the top of my head. But there’s something like what’s been on a blog recently, what am I reading? What am I loving? And all she really has to do is share that quick story in the introduction of her email, share those regular things that are created in her template that are going to be in each and every one of them, and then answer them right. So she’ll be putting new books that she’s writing. And she’ll be sharing new blog posts or show notes that she has within the email. So again, it is building that trust because your audience not only knows you’re going to show up at a specific time, but they also know what you’re going to say in the email when you show up. Templates are not for everyone. And if you decide not to go this route, I just suggest you may be creating a blank template in your email provider so that it has like a designed heading that matches your brand. So people know who you are. As soon as they open the email that has a footer with all of your company information in it. If they want to click over to your website or social they can get in touch with you that way. But templates can help when it comes to consistency because you’re not starting from square one every single time that you step into your email service provider and think okay, what do I say now? How do I format this? How do I approach this? Now before I end this episode, I just decided I wanted to try something a little bit different here. And what I did was I put out a call to my audience and I said, Hey, I’m going to be having an episode soon about email consistency. And I would love to invite a few different people on and let them share their own suggestions, their own tips for being consistent in email marketing. Because we all approach things so differently. There might be good information that you can take from what inspires them, what helps them in your own business. And it was actually so great. And I am going to include some of them right now. So I would like to introduce some of our listeners to share their tips for you about how they stay consistent within their own email marketing. I will let them speak for themself. 29:55 Hi, I’m Deanna Seymour, a digital marketing strategist and graphic designer. So My tip for being consistent with email marketing is to keep a folder on your desktop of photos that have stories attached to them, that you can write about in future emails. For me, telling personal stories is a big part of my email marketing. And since I’m a graphic designer, my emails usually have some sort of visual element to them. So whenever I stumble upon a photo that I know has a cool story behind it, I toss it in the folder. I’m talking childhood photos, pictures, I’m tagged in on social media things from my camera roll, like right now on my phone, or even some things that I’ve made for clients that I just really like. So if I sit down to write an email, and I can’t think of anything to write, get a little case of the writer’s block, I just open that folder, and an idea will usually pop right out at me. So having that folder is an easy way to make sure that I don’t miss a week when I’m not feeling inspired. Or I don’t already have an email plant. Hey, Aaron, this is Dara Sklar and you are asking for tips on how to be more consistent with email. And one of my favorite things to do is to come up with a tech tip or a suggestion that is a value to my followers, and send that out. And you can’t even imagine how often I get thanks and appreciation and praise for the tips that I send out by email, which not only increases the engagement, of course, from people responding to the messages, but also it means that they’re more likely to open my emails in future. And their positive response always motivates and empowers me to write more emails. So my tip is to lead with something of value and doesn’t have any underlying sales or other tactic and lead with something of value on a regular basis because the appreciation you’re going to get from your audience is going to bolster your desire to send more emails. 31:47 Hi, this is Kaylee Herat. I am a doula and childbirth educator at Herat, doula services. And one way that I stay consistent with email marketing is to schedule things. I do not trust my brain to remember when I need to send something out when I last sent something out. And so I scheduled things in advance, I make templates to make scheduling things and sending quick emails faster. So schedule schedule schedule, so that you don’t have to remember to be consistent. 32:19 Hey, I’m Jen Brockman, I’m a printables template creator. What works for me currently to stay consistent with email marketing is scheduling ahead into an auto responder with upcoming marketing or specific promotions. And then if something comes up last minute, or I forgot to stick something in there, it’s easy to just open up, you know, like tomorrow’s email, edit it or I can even send out a special announcement. But for me, it’s really just like, planning it out a week ahead and being able to, you know, schedule them out daily. So that’s what I do. Thanks. 33:00 Hi, Aaron. I’m Jay, Senate, email marketing strategist and sometimes email conversion copywriter. My tip for being consistent with email marketing has been a game changer for me. It is a shadow newsletter. A shadow newsletter is effectively an essentially automating previously published email campaigns and also repurposing previously published content, blog posts, social media posts, a lengthy emails of white papers to an automation. That means when a new subscriber comes to the list, they’re automatically put into that automation and they begin receiving previously published content at whatever frequency you set up. Why has this been a game changer? Because I you anyone who wants to set up a shot or newsletter can automate into the future content that the list will receive both current members and future members. And in my experience, it’s much easier to create new content when you know that you’re going to slot it in for next April, rather than having to rush and push to get it out this Friday. 34:21 Hi, Amuro rata, a live violence coaching strategist for female business owners and freelancers. My tip for being consistent with email marketing, is to tap into the natural strengths of your menstrual cycle when planning, creating, editing, and scheduling your emails. your menstrual cycle influences your brain chemistry providing you with unique gifts and strengths at different times of the month. It’s made up of four different phases, which are created by the varying levels of hormones. They call the follicular ovulatory luteal and menstrual phase. For example, Use your follicular phase to brainstorm ideas for the emails that you want to create. During your ovulatory phase, you’re naturally most articulate and creatively fertile. So use this precious time to write from the heart and batch create. And then use your luteal phase to edit format and schedule your emails. And finally, review and reflect on the emails you have created. During your menstrual phase. You can reflect on questions like What have I learned? What would I like to keep doing and what could I do differently or better next cycle