I have had the great pleasure of becoming good friends with Maisha Walker, email marketing expert. She’s been in the digital marketing game since before Facebook and Google were even a thought in their founders’ minds. Maisha has blessed the She Runs It Community with her digital marketing masterclass to craft your digital marketing action plan. I have never seen anyone wield so much digital marketing knowledge to really help people refine and understand what strategy and which tools are right for them as they’re growing their business.
We had our second digital marketing masterclass with Maisha this past week. And then she joined me for an interview during Wednesday’s Facebook Live at Lunch. Here are the crib notes from what she shared in that interview. The focus of our conversation was email marketing.
What software do you need to use to get started with email marketing?
The biggest takeaway about marketing for your business you absolutely should not be using your personal email address. An important benefit of using automated email software is that you can automate much of the communication with your audience. This means that you can set up sequences when people first join your list to help keep in contact with them without you having to think about sitting down to draft each message yourself. Automating these processes saves you time.
Market while you sleep? Yes please.
Why is it so important to build your email list?
When we’re thinking about how you’re building your business, it’s important to remember the old marketing adage: Second money is easier than first money. Which means that it’s much easier to sell your products and services to someone who’s already developed a relationship with you than from cold traffic. Once you have engagement with someone on your list, you can then continue the dialogue with automated email marketing campaigns.
The other benefit of growing your list is that it allows you to better understand your audience.
You can use the demographics data from those people on your list to create targeted marketing campaigns on social media. Facebook allows you to upload your email list and create a custom target audience. That should then match the interest of the people who are already following you. This means the marketing that you are having to pay for is going to be much more effective. (Price per lead goes down and visibility goes up).
What should I be tracking in my email?
There are a ton of metrics that you can track to see how effective your emails are performing. One of the two key areas are your open rate and click through rate. How often you should be looking at those things will depend on your marketing goals. Other metrics that you might want to consider are looking at sales and conversions from the emails that you’re sending.
As you get more and more familiar with how to leverage your email marketing software you can start to get more sophisticated with some of the tracking which can then allow you to actually send targeted emails based on how members of your audience are responding to you. Do you want to send an email to the people who bought the last five items? Do you want to exclude people who didn’t open the previous email? This level of specificity means that even though your emails are now automated they’re actually speaking specifically to your audience and to their interests and needs in the moment. Which means no more sounding fake-scripted in your mass email communications.
Finally I asked Maisha the most important question of all:
How much email is too much email and how often should you be contacting your list?
According to the expert, most often people are not sending email enough. If you’re just getting started with email marketing start with a welcome sequence of emails, and a nurture sequence for after someone takes action with you. Itching to send a newsletter? There’s no need to jump into newsletters quite yet (if you are just starting out).
For regular newsletter communication, consider what you can consistently do in order to stay top-of-mind for your audience.
Content for newsletters can be anything from upcoming events, press that you’ve received, product launches or just redirecting people to some of the content that you have on your website. But the most important thing is to be providing resources that are relevant and frequent enough so that in the moment that someone is ready to purchase your products or services you’re right there.
Sign up for the next Email Marketing Class
Maisha had so much more to share about email marketing. If you are dying to dig in and learn more you can find her teaching at her upcoming three-week email marketing class. In this small group setting of no more than 20 participants Maisha will do a deep dive on how to set up your email marketing software, start creating those welcome and nurture sequences (templates and examples included) and also be doing some laser coaching sessions to make sure you’re using the software in a way that best suits your business (what about data and analytics?).
You can sign up for the next email marketing class here. After enrolling make sure to message Maisha and let her know you heard about the class right here on the High Tides blog in order to receive a special $50 rebate off of your tuition price.
