801: Don’t Make These 2 BIG Mistakes In Your Email Marketing

0:01This episode is supported by What Should I Do With My Money? From Morgan Stanley. Okay, can we just talk about how money is legitimately one of the hardest topics to bring up. Like even when you think you have your stuff together, there's always this really weird awkwardness around it. That's why I am obsessed with this podcast. It actually makes money conversations feel approachable. I recently listened to an episode about affording multiple big life things at once, like a wedding, a house, an IVF, if they were all happening at the same time. And honestly, it hit home. So many people are wondering, can we actually have it all without sacrificing our sanity or our savings?

0:42What I love is that they bring in real experts who help break down these massive costs into actual doable steps. It's like having a money mentor in your ear who gets it. Search for What Should I Do With My Money in your podcast player. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Many thanks to What Should I Do With My Money and Morgan Stanley for their support. we're sending just straight up encouragement with no links we're letting people in behind the scenes we're sharing about exclusive offers it's just this rhythm that we've created this life force in our business my email list is the number one way that i drive sales and results in my business i'm jenna kutcher your host of the gold digger podcast i escaped the corporate world at the age of 23 with nothing more than a$300 camera from Craigslist and a dream.

1:31Now I'm running a seven figure online business that feels even better than it looks all from my house in small town, Minnesota with my family. Here we value time as our currency. We mix the woo and the work and we are in the pursuit of building businesses that give us the freedom to live lives that we love. I've always loved turning big goals into reality and I'm here to help you do the same. This isn't just a peek behind the curtain. Come along with me and my guests as we tear the whole curtain down. Every week we tackle practical, no-fluff marketing strategies and host honest discussions on what works and what doesn't.

2:08Join me and my expert guests for actionable insights to help you grow your dream business with confidence. Pull up a seat and get ready to be challenged, inspired, and empowered. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. Are you making big mistakes in your email marketing? This episode will help you find out. The conversation you're about to hear today originally aired on the This Is Small Business podcast, an original podcast by Amazon hosted by Andrea Marquez. I loved getting the opportunity to teach my favorite topic, email list to the This Is Small Business community. And I also love getting to share it with you.

2:44In this conversation, we talk about how to get started building your email list, how to use your list to test out new business ideas, and of course, the two biggest mistakes I see business owners making in their email marketing. Andrea is asking the questions you're probably wondering, and today you get to hear me answer them. Now, before we dive in, if you've been listening to the Gold Digger podcast and haven't started your email list yet, save your seat for my free class from zero subscribers or zero strategy to an engaged email list that lasts at growanemaillist.com. That's growanemaillist.com for my free training all about growing your email list.

3:22I cannot wait to teach you the three secrets to easily start, grow and serve your email list. So head to growanemaillist.com to save your seat and learn more. Now let's dive on into my interview with Andrea on This Is Small Business. It's no secret that starting a business is hard. Even if you have an amazing idea, bringing it to life can be super overwhelming. HubSpot's new entrepreneurship kit is designed to help you go from idea generator to full-fledged business owner. And let me tell you, I wish I had this when I was first starting my business. This all-inclusive kit takes the guesswork out of entrepreneurship with step-by-step guides, practical resources, and easy to use templates.

4:03It literally walks you through every stage of starting a business and even has freelance pricing worksheets, and loads more to help you get up and running immediately. Now, the best part is that it's free at HubSpot.com slash ENT. With expert guidance from HubSpot, starting a business doesn't have to be hard. So don't wait to start yours. Head to HubSpot.com slash ENT to download the free entrepreneurship kit, all from a company who knows a thing or two about growing bigger and better. That's hubspot.com slash ENT. I've been hearing a lot about the power of an email list or a newsletter and how much that can contribute to your growth and success as a business owner.

4:45It helps you reach people that want to hear from you and you get to own your audience, something that you can't have by just using social media. But how do you start an email analyst and how do you maintain it and push out content consistently? And beyond just owning your audience, what other benefits come from it? To answer these questions, I'll be talking to Jenna Kutcher, the host of one of the most popular marketing podcasts and also one of my favorites, The Gold Digger. One of the things that I'm obsessed with when it comes to being an entrepreneur is looking at the return on investment with the main investment being our time.

5:24I have two young kids. I don't have a ton of extra time. And so anytime that I'm spending in my business, I want to make sure that it's worth it, that it drives real results, that I can have the receipts to back it up. And so when you think about an email list and serving it, it is a lot easier than you're making it out to be because instead of screaming to the masses like you are on social media, you are reaching out to the people who have already exchanged something valuable to them to get something valuable from you. These are the people that have literally raised her hand and said, I want more of what you've got.

5:55And so you are speaking to the people who are already curious and invested in what you've created. And so it is an entirely different conversation than the one that you're trying to have or the one that you're trying to use to sell that is likely falling flat. Jenna figured out how powerful an email list can be early on in her career. And she'll be sharing all the steps she took to build her list so you can be just as successful.

6:22I'm Andrea Marquez and this is Small Business, a podcast brought to you by Amazon. Today, we'll talk about how you can build your email list, even if you think you don't have time for it, because an email list can be a lot more rewarding than you think. For every email subscriber you have on your email list, it should equate to one extra dollar of revenue per month if you are serving that subscriber. And so imagine if you even had 250 people on your email list, what that could equate to in terms of results for you. Food for thought, because adding one more follower to your social media following doesn't actually reap a lot of results.

7:00And so where is your energy going? Where is your focus going? This is exactly why email list building is our number one priority. We'll be giving you loads of actionable steps that you can use to go your email list. But first, let's hear how Jenna realized she needed an email list. So it was an embarrassing story. For my career trajectory, I started off as a wedding photographer, fully self-taught, used my camera to get out of my nine to five. Jenna's business was growing and doing well, but eventually she felt burnt out. I'm sure there are some people listening where you hit this place of burnout.

7:36You maybe achieved this level of success, And yet you are so burnt to a crisp that you can't imagine doing the same thing for years from now. That's where I was at. And so I had hit six figures. I was so grateful for that goal. But when I reached it, I felt empty and I knew something had to change. Jenna realized that she was a lot happier when she was making less. So she decided to book half the number of weddings the following year. I cut back my salary in half. But the one thing that I got back was my time. And when I got back my time, I started getting curious about other areas of business, other ways of running businesses.

8:13And that curiosity led Jenna to hire her first business coach. And on the first coaching call, I show up. I am so proud of myself. I have 10 ,000 followers on Instagram. I thought he was going to be like so excited. And we get on the call and he asked me, he says, how big is your list? and I legitimately thought he was talking about my to-do list. And I was like, well, I'm writing blogs. I'm posting to Facebook. I'm creating content for Instagram. My list is long. And he was like, no, no, no. How big is your email list? And I was like, well, I have a following on social media. And all of a sudden he's like, no, an email list is an asset that you own.

8:52And that day he pointed me to a podcast about email list building. And I felt this feeling deep in my gut of like, I was already doing all the things. I couldn't imagine adding on one more thing, but it clicked for me that I was building my business on space. I didn't own space. I couldn't control social media. I had no control over that. And so that was a day that I started growing my email list and that was many, many years ago. And so I am so grateful that he wasn't duped by what I was doing on social and challenged me to think a little bit bigger because that started the whole email list building journey that I've been on ever since.

9:31At the time, Jenna was starting to pivot into other areas of business. So there were a few barriers she had to overcome before she started building her email list. I was trying to figure out like, who am I even serving? What do I say to them? And how do I get them to sign up? What does this all look like? I was also really afraid of the tech. It is amazing that I know how to plug in my microphone and turn my camera on these days because I am not that comfortable with tech. And And I think that's a limiting mindset belief, but also just something that is a reality. Like I could write and speak all day, but when I go to link up softwares, I start to panic.

10:08And so tech really scared me. And the last thing was, is that when I was thinking about time, let me be honest, that social media felt sexy to me, right? It's a number that people can see. It's this badge of honor, so to speak. Growing an email list is kind of unsexy. No one is actually peeking under the hood to see how many subscribers you have. And so I really had to kind of let my ego die in a way to focus on why this mattered and where I was going to get that time from, which ultimately was coming from social media. I love that you said mindset because our next episode is with Amy Porterfield and she's like my best friend.

10:46Oh, really? Literally my best friend in the whole world. Well, look at that. We didn't do that on purpose, listeners. But you brought up two points that we really dig into in episode 57 with Amy, how to figure out who you're serving and how to manage your mindset and the importance of staying positive. So I'm wondering, once you figured out who you were serving, what was the first thing you did? I created this freebie and it was like five ways to grow your Instagram following. And it was a downloadable PDF. I don't even think I knew how to make things pretty at the time. I'm pretty sure I made it in Microsoft Word and exported it as a PDF.

11:28And so I just had a little signup form and I absolutely did leverage the audience that I had, but I was also savvy enough to go to other audiences. So Facebook groups that I was a part of, I started sharing about my freebie there. I later on learned the power of Pinterest. That is a huge way that we grow our email list. And it doesn't necessarily matter how many followers you have on Pinterest. And so I always start with who's already there, but expand out and think about how you can reach other people. And that's exactly what we've done in our list building process. Jenna was also dipping her toes into the education space and was using her freebies to test out different ideas before she created a program about it.

12:10One thing I think people don't realize is that starting an email list and creating different freebies is the perfect low risk sampling ground to see what people actually find valuable. A lot of people create an offer because maybe once they did a poll on Instagram or they asked five of their friends, hey, would you actually buy this thing? And people said yes. And then when they went to collect their credit card information, everybody balked and backed out. And so starting your email list and thinking through this value exchange, it allows for people to really put some stake in the game and give you something of value in exchange to get what you've created.

12:46So over my career, we have used different freebies and PDFs and ideas as a testing ground to say, does this have legs? Like, will people actually find this valuable? Or is this just an idea that lives in my head that shouldn't go any further than that? And so I think that a lot of people get intimidated by email list building. But the truth is, is it's a beautiful place to experiment and to really get your audience to take action with you. Action beyond just liking and commenting on social media. That's such a creative way of using an email list. You get to see the demand on the products or services you want to offer your customers.

13:21And it gives you the opportunity to pivot before you invest too much time or money into your idea. And an email list also gives you the opportunity to sell your products or services without sounding too salesy. I think that one of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs face is one, they hate selling, right? I've never really met a lot of people that raise their hand and they're like, I love to sell my thing. This gives you an opportunity to serve people before you ever go to sell to them. And I think this is so important. If you're going to get somebody results for free, they are going to be far more likely to pay you for whatever it is that you have to sell.

14:04If we've managed to convince you that you need to start and grow an email list, you might be getting overwhelmed at the idea of maintaining it and creating content consistently, especially if you're already doing the same for your social media. But I'm going to let you guys in on a secret. So I believe that there are only two things you have to focus on as an entrepreneur in order to drive results. Two things. I think we get so caught up in the million things that we could do. The first priority has to be growing your email list. The email list is an asset that you own. It's something you can control.

14:39It is virtually algorithm proof. The second thing that you need to focus on is any other efforts that you are putting forth in your business. The goal of those efforts should be to grow your email list. That's it. So the goal of my podcast is to convert listeners into email subscribers. The goal of my Instagram is to get people off of Instagram onto my email list. The goal of Pinterest is to show my pins to get people to land on my website and opt in for my email list. Every effort that I put forth on the Internet and I have a complex system, all of those efforts, the number one goal and the number one way we measure success is not on those platforms themselves, but in how effective they are at getting people off of those platforms and into a place that we own and can control, which is our email list.

15:23So you might want to completely distill your marketing efforts into two things. One, prioritize growing your email list and serving your audience there. And two, the goal and objective of other content you produce should be to grow your email list. Whenever we work on an episode, we are always thinking, do we have some sort of value offer that is a logical next step for our listener? Because here's the thing, real marketing has no dead ends. Real true marketing always has the next invitation. Now, not everyone's going to RSVP yes to that invitation, but you have to keep putting it out there. You never want to end any piece of content, whether it's a blog post, a podcast episode, anything with somebody asking themselves, okay, great.

16:09But now what? You always want to extend that invite. And so even yesterday, I was recording an episode for the Gold Digger podcast. And inside of that episode, there were multiple mentions of different ways that people could sign up for my email list through value ads that made entire sense based on the topic that I was teaching on. And so you can either start with that email list building thing as the goal and the objective of that episode, or you can incorporate it organically into the content. Either way, we can't even access who our listeners are. so we can't be in touch with them to let them know what we have going on.

16:44And so if we don't actually try to get people off of the platforms, we're doing them a disservice because we're not actually able to reach out to them when we have important information to communicate.

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18:56Visit spectrum.com forward slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply services not available in all areas. So Jenna, we've talked about having freebies to get people to sign up for your email list, but what actually goes into the emails you send out? I lead with the idea of the jab, jab, jab, right hook of serve, serve, serve, serve, and then sell. And honestly, I don't even like using the word sell. It's more like an invitation for an offer. And so when we look at what we're sending out in a month, we're sending people additional resources.

19:33We're pointing to the podcast. We're sending just straight up encouragement with no links. We're letting people in behind the scenes. We're sharing about exclusive offers. It's just this rhythm that we've created this life force in our business. My email list is the number one way that I drive sales and results in my business. If somebody told me everything's going to disappear tomorrow, but you get to choose one thing, it would be my email list. It has been said in the marketing world, if you want to double your business, just double your email list. And I have seen that to be true time and time again.

20:06The same is not true for social media. Like I love social media. I worked so hard on social media, but I am not as confident that I could even make a sale on social media because social media is not built for us to sell. We're all seeing that right now with the algorithm and people are like running their heads into the wall. Why is this not working? Social media is meant to be the handshake. Email is meant to be where you sell. When people go into their inboxes, they are much more poised for purchase than when they're on social media. People are on social media to be distracted, to be entertained, to be educated.

20:41They're not there thinking, I'm going to pull out my wallet. And so it's just so interesting to me because people are getting so frustrated with the systems and the platforms they're on, but they're not actually pausing to ask themselves, what is the intent of this? And how do I play the game well so that the system works? And I think that's where people get frustrated. And so my email list is the hands down number one way we drive results. And I think people are missing out on this opportunity to do the same. Again, you're reaching people who are already interested and curious in what you're selling versus trying to convince the masses who are probably not even hearing you.

21:18But what if as a small business owner, I don't have time to write an email every week? I'm going to ask you a question. Are you writing emails every day? I certainly am. Yes. Okay. So what would it look like if you were able to write one email and reach a bunch of people? I think the average entrepreneur spends hours in their inbox every single week, hours. So what would it look like to add a tiny bit of strategy to work you're already doing? And instead of going one-to-one, you're able to go one-to-many. It's actually not that much work. This is actually going to save you so much time because you are going to learn how to anticipate people's questions before they can ask them.

22:01You're going to learn to serve them before you can ever go to sell to them. And you're going to get insights and information into what people actually want so that your offers actually sell. It's actually not that hard. And one of the things that I really love to teach is like, what would it look like if you sat down and just mapped out the next month of whatever that is. So whether it's one email a week or one email a month, I'd argue that it's going to take you one to two hours. You're already spending that time going back and forth with one people when you could actually make something that reaches more than one person with a goal and an intent and an ability to drive a real result.

22:40But there's two mistakes that you might want to look out for when you're starting an email list. The number one mistake that people make when they go to start an email list is they bury a little thing at the very bottom of their website that says, join my newsletter. Who wants to join a newsletter these days? I already get so many emails in my inbox. I don't need another one if I don't know what value you're providing me. And so growing an email list is actually way easier than you're making it out to be because you just need to find something that your audience will think is valuable, valuable enough for them to exchange your email address for.

23:14And the second mistake is only using your email list when you're trying to sell something. And I've seen this happen in so many entrepreneurs lives where all of a sudden they haven't posted in two months and now they're on and they're talking about this thing that they've got to sell. And so I think that the mistake that I made in the past and that other people tend to make is that they forget the power of serving. Even yesterday, we sent out an email and it was just about encouraging. Like I have been in seasons of burnout and I was just talking about it to my audience and like letting people in.

23:48And there's so much power in allowing somebody to say, me too. I'm not alone. Oh my gosh. And it connects you. And so when you create a rhythm around your marketing, you will be showing up regardless of if you have something to sell and you'll be serving people so that when you go to sell, you have this list that is ready to be launch to. And I think that it shifts again, that feeling of selling. Selling now becomes a service because these people are like, what is the next step? The next step is to invest in whatever that is, whether it's a product, a service or an offer. And so when you're serving so well, people are ready and excited for what it is that you're launching.

24:26And so I think that a lot of times we as business owners, we're like, I've got nothing to say on the everyday life front. And then all of a sudden we're like, I've got something to sell. And we miss this opportunity to serve and connect in the middle. It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technologies' biggest sale of the year. That's right, you'll find huge savings on select Dell PCs like the Dell 16 Plus with Intel Core Ultra processors. And with built-in advanced AI features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster. From smarter multitasking to extended battery life, these PCs get the busy work done so you can focus on what matters most to you.