Is Email Marketing Your Most Powerful Sales Tool?

Caleb Agee 0:00
This all goes back to the the basic response we have for almost everybody who asks about frequency and email marketing, it’s the same that’s true for social posting

Brandon Welch 0:10
or any piece of content or ad or anything you decide to do, yeah, the

Caleb Agee 0:15
answer, the answer is, How often should I do it? And it is as often as you have something important enough to say there’s

Brandon Welch 0:23
no such thing as too often, there’s just such thing as too boring. Truthfully, that’s it. The big question we ask around all ads and all content is, are you connecting with a human and offering them a better life?

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon, Welch, I’m here with the irreplaceable Caleb Agee, and we are having an awesome time. Yes, we are episode 13, one, three on a Friday. Friday the 13th. What could go wrong? It’s not the Friday the 13th. Friday would you shoot? It’s Friday and it is episode 13. As far as you know, it’s Monday. Yeah, we’re on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, getting 1000s of views, I would say, per week. Now it’s like really ramping up. And yeah, the algorithms are taking us high. So thank you to all of you who have subscribed and liked if you haven’t, let’s hit this iron while it’s hot. Yes, and now we are on Tiktok.

Caleb Agee 1:24
Tiktok, yeah, yeah.

Brandon Welch 1:27
It took a little while, but now we’re the talk of the town.

Caleb Agee 1:31
Don’t talk about it. Talk about

Brandon Welch 1:33
exciting. Yeah. This is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions to help you eliminate waste and advertising, grow your business, and to help you achieve the big dream. And what are the big dreamers up to this week, we’ve had some reach out. Oh yeah.

Caleb Agee 1:46
So this week, today’s questions come from Peter, who was struggling with something that most business owners we’ve talked to, especially in the early years, they really deal with and the questions revolve around, how often should I send email marketing to my list?

Brandon Welch 2:07
Email marketing? And

Caleb Agee 2:11
usually their secondary thing is, I don’t want to spam them, but I know I need to do it. I need to keep up the frequency. How much is too much? How much is too much? Too little? Yeah, I don’t want to be annoying, but I also want to be making sales, being in their lives. You know, this

Brandon Welch 2:25
is a great tactical, practical question. Like you said, We hear it all the time. Gosh, I’m going to say we’ve sent in the in the neighborhood, for or with or on behalf of our clients, over 10,000 emails, and in our tenure, easily, easily, yeah. So we’ve been around this. We’ve used all the platforms, and we’re going to give you some for the for the first time, I’ve been challenged to answer the dadgum question as asked before giving you the philosophy. Let’s do it philosophy. And I have a powdered forehead today, so I just, I just feel like this is the right moment to just go ahead and answer the question as asked right away.

Caleb Agee 2:59
What should we tell Peter. We should tell Peter.

Brandon Welch 3:04
It depends. Okay, first thing we ask, we’re gonna give you this sequentially. Afterwards, we actually have a ton of like practical processes. Shortly after, we just tell you how we answer Peter’s question. Tell us who Peter is, real quick. So

Caleb Agee 3:21
Peter actually has, he has founded an organization called kinsman. It started with what’s called the kinsman journal, nominal organization. Such a cool thing. They’ve started that here in our town. I promise you it will be in your town in the next five years, yes, no doubt, worldwide,

Brandon Welch 3:41
cause it’s all, it’s all for men, strengthening faith, fatherhood and work, yes, and the whole thing. He is just a man with an incredible heart and has this vision that men in their, you know, middle ages and beyond, kind of lose this community, and we lose sort of the awareness and maybe the urgency to have strong connections with other people, other strong people that can pull us up. Yeah, and so he produced this journal, and when I got my hands on one of them, I could not believe that this was produced on a local level. It was like some of the highest quality art and production I’ve ever seen, gorgeous. Let’s say it’s a journal. It’s a collection of stories.

Caleb Agee 4:27
It’s like a coffee table book almost. I don’t know how it’s hard to describe. You

Brandon Welch 4:32
go to Barnes and Noble, turn this thing over and expect to pay $200 for it. It’s that good, yep. And so he, he’s successful and, you know, on his own regard, in a totally different industry, but he’s starting this cause. And so the first question we asked Peter is, what is your goal? What are you trying to make happen? And he’s trying to inspire people and give them value and add inspiration to their lives to do the thing that he has a vision for. Yep. And so he does have a journal to sell. Mm, hmm. And in a roundabout way, he does need and want support for his organization. But otherwise, the content of these emails and the content of his you know brand is that it’s all value. It’s all about making your life better. Yep, making my life better. Yeah, making Nathan camera guy’s life, and

Caleb Agee 5:21
it’s really his list. We asked him this, you know, was comprised mostly of previous sales. Yeah, so we would call that a yesterday customer. And so they, these are people probably who bought a journal or attended some sort of event. They’ve been added to his list because they opted in along that path somewhere. And so they are yesterday customers. And

Brandon Welch 5:45
Peter was getting a 60% open rate on his list, yes. And he’s going, I don’t want to email people more than like, once a month. And we’re like, dude, 60% email rate. You’re doing just fine. You can do them every day, twice a day, yeah. So short answer Peter’s question was, two times a week is not too many, and you could get away with more. But let’s break that down. Why does Peter have a 60% open rate? What is an open rate? What does that mean? And more importantly, if you’re listening to this and you’re a small business owner, or you’re an E commerce retailer, or you’re another nonprofit cause, how do you decide what your balance should be. Yeah.

Caleb Agee 6:21
I think this all goes back to the the basic response we have for almost everybody who asks about frequency and email marketing, it’s the same that’s true for social posting

Brandon Welch 6:33
or any piece of content or ad or anything you decide to do. Yeah, the

Caleb Agee 6:37
answer, the answer is, How often should I do it, and it is as often as you have something important enough to say, as often as you have something worth reading, as often as you have something that is valuable to that customer. Yep,

Brandon Welch 6:51
there’s no such thing as too often. There’s just such thing as too boring. Truthfully, that’s it. The big question we ask around all ads and all content is, are you connecting with a human and offering them a better life? Are you connecting with a human and offering them a better life? And so that’s why we said two times a week for him is not too many, because he’s very, really connecting with humans and offering him better lives. Yeah, and but let’s break that down. First of all, we’re going to do another episode on if you’re, if you’re like, not even at this point yet, and you’re going, how do I even build an email list like, the first place to start is your past customer list. And that’s all around the Maven method yesterday. Customer, which is the most profitable customer, the most valuable customer, yes, and the most overlooked customer in the marketing of today, for sure, of you know, small

Caleb Agee 7:42
business, 1000s of dollars untapped, I promise you, actually

Brandon Welch 7:46
millions. Yeah, I’m gonna tell this full story in our next episode, when we do the how to build an email list. But we had a client that had never done email, and they had been probably an active business for 10 or so years, and they were like, we don’t think we have anything good to say an email. We sent one email, one, the very first one, and it resulted in $2 million of the business. Come on, $2 million in the business. And this was like a $8 million company, probably Wow, the $2 million in new business. And so let’s talk about that yesterday. Customer, it’s the most overlooked, because, frankly, there’s nobody that’s making a bunch of money off of it. Usually marketing people are driving that marketing conversation, and you talk about it the most when you’re spending money on it. And so if you’re if you’re a small business, or if you’re even a medium to large sized business, everything tends to focus around new customers, new customers got to spend money. What’s our cost per acquisition? How many leads are we getting? What’s our close rate? All that stuff. And we’re sitting here going, Dude, I don’t care what business you’re in, but you’ve got past customers, and they are willing to hear and listen from you, even if you you know, even if you’re in a one time sales type transaction environment. So principles of the today customer, or, sorry, the yesterday customer, is they want their decision to be justified. If I’ve spent money with somebody, it feels nice to keep being reminded of what a good decision that is. I don’t care if that was a car, I don’t care if that was a home repair. I don’t care if that was a legal plan or a medical procedure or insurance or anything. It feels good to know that I have support and that my dollar meant something more than that day, every human being is alike in that. Yep, it’s kind of that tribal marketing thing we talked about an episode or

Caleb Agee 9:31
two ago. And you, you combat buyers remorse at the same time Absolutely. You know, if you want to go to the dark side of that, you you also, yeah, at the very least, they’re reminded of why they bought that. And they don’t, they don’t walk away saying, Oh, was that a good choice? Yes, yes, yes, customer, it was. Let me tell you why.

Brandon Welch 9:47
So and So, while you’re capitalizing on that, and they’re going, wow, wow, wow. You know, Laurie is such an awesome person. I can’t I knew I made the right decision at the time, but I can’t believe how awesome she continues to be here. This company continues to be, yeah, do stuff people didn’t ask of you. Not only will they come back, they’ll find other reasons to buy from you. And maybe you’re a realtor, and maybe you’re, you know, waiting seven or eight years for that person to buy their next home, but maybe because they like and trust you, and you’re bringing them back to that euphoria of making a good decision and reminding of all the great things you did for them. Maybe you kick it up a year, or maybe they go out of their way to use you to find a home for one of their friends or their family or somebody else, and that’s really the biggest thing, regardless of your product purchase cycle, when you are demonstrating over and over and over, you actually are one of the good guys, and you’re one of the great guys, they will go out of their way to be an advocate for you, yes, so stoking that fire of referral business. So I don’t care what business you’re in. I really don’t care if you’re selling industrial stainless steel bolts. Yep, talk to a guy that does that. We

Caleb Agee 10:58
We talked to a guy who repairs wheel sets on locomotive engines? Yeah? He sends, he sends emails, and oh my gosh, he’s getting, he’s getting hundreds of $1,000 in jobs when he sends an email,

Brandon Welch 11:13
yeah, what do you what do you suppose a set of wheels for a locomotive is worth? It’s

Caleb Agee 11:17
more, more than you. It’s crazy, yeah. And so

Brandon Welch 11:21
there’s no end to this. So here’s a couple realities on email marketing, and we’re gonna get into frequency and what you should be saying. We’re gonna give you, like, at least 100 ideas before this podcast is over. Yeah, but the average radio station, just think about media. We deal. We spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars a month on TV and radio, if not millions. And we have all these people that are, you know, always trying to find the best station, the best next platform. How do we reach a bunch of people? Just think about this. Now, a radio station might reach in a small or a medium sized town, might reach 50,000 people in a week. That’s pretty standard cumulative audience. But every spot, every time a spot plays, it’s probably reaching two to 3000 people. So if you’ve been in business long enough to have a couple few 1000 people on your list, you have your own freaking radio station. Yeah, think about that. That’s powerful, and it’s not that you can blast them 40 times a day with ads, but at your own radio station, it’s you and they’re captive. Which leads me to the second point, email seems old fashioned. It seems like I don’t like getting emails, but guess what are we going on? 30 years of where emails been mainstream? Yeah. I mean, started in the 90s, and here we are, right. Yeah, so and it’s not going away.

Caleb Agee 12:45
Yes, we had a stat from HubSpot. I think it was, there are 4 billion, I’m gonna say that one more time, 4 billion users on email. So you want to talk about what you want to talk about, what platform has the most users available for you it is the email has and, yeah, the average person, I think it’s daily users. By the way, 4 billion daily users, and the average person

Brandon Welch 13:11
is spending two and a half hours per day in and around their email. Think about that compared to, you know, even some of the other really widely used medias. Yeah, my favorite thing is that it will deliver to 100% of your audience, as long as you aren’t doing something completely reckless. So if I send an email to everybody who just opened a frank and Maven email, I send it to you know, couple 1000 people and a couple 1000 of you got it right? Yeah? By the way,

Caleb Agee 13:41
if you’re not subscribed, you should hop on Frank and maven.com uh, you’ll see our weekly email. Yeah, you’ll see we send, I’ll just tell you, we send two a week. Frank and

Brandon Welch 13:50
maven.com is about to get a huge overhaul. Yeah, is gonna be so cool. We’re gonna have all these in topics. We’re gonna have guides. Each one of these episodes going to be pulled down to a text level where you can copy and take all of the notes and make them yours. So, oh, yeah. So delivers 200% of people. If I have a Facebook audience, a couple 1000 people and I make a post, and let’s just say it’s even a good post, what percentage of them will see it will receive that it’s

Caleb Agee 14:16
less than five, probably 330, 5% especially if we’re talking about a business page, because your business page automatically is hindered by the by Facebook’s algorithm. Absolutely so.

Brandon Welch 14:28
And guess what else who’s in control of who sees that Facebook, not you meta or whatever you want to call them, and I don’t care, yeah, could be YouTube, could be Tiktok, could be any of the platforms. And you think, Oh, I’ve got all these followers. Great. Happy for you. There’s a way to use those, but it does not compare to the deliverability and the potency of email. Because

Caleb Agee 14:47
I could, I could let you know something. You could have all of those followers, and Elon or Zuckerberg could shut it down tomorrow. Yep, and you don’t own them anymore. They’re gone. Yep. That is, that is. Terrifying, but true. But when you have an email list, you own that list. It is yours forever, and you can email them until, obviously, until they have unsubscribe. But

Brandon Welch 15:10
Gmail and iCloud and Hotmail and Yahoo and all the email services only have one agenda, and that’s to get you the emails that you’re supposed to get, yep. So think about that. That’s why it’s powerful. And we’re really inside the envelope of yesterday customers. There’s a lot of ways you can love on your yesterday customers. Email is the easiest, cheapest, most effective on the regular. So you can read all about that in chapter 15 of the Maven marketer. Um, so you should do email and you should do email a certain way if you want to get the best result out of it. Here are the five questions you should be asking before you do email marketing. What is your goal? What is your open rate, what is your unsubscribe rate, what is your click through rate, and are you having fun as a rewarding we’re gonna go into each of those talk. Talk about your goal first. If you’re about to do email, your goal should be to add value, just sheer non apologetic, non reciprocal value, like I’m not, it’s not quid pro quo. I’m not trying to get something from asking for the sale. Probably, yeah, maybe a very subtle call to something called action, but the purpose of the email is to add value. You need to be doing that at least twice as often as you’re asking for a sale. I prefer the more you do that, frankly, the better. The stronger email content is. But some industries or some categories are inherently more transactional. Yeah, I can think of a client we have that their their audience could legitimately, and probably does legitimately need something they sell every couple of weeks. And so if you’re on that scale of people buy your stuff more often, yeah, either accessories or some sort of commodity. You’re in

Caleb Agee 16:53
retail, retail and E commerce, you definitely would send more, and they would definitely be more actively in, you know, selling,

Brandon Welch 17:02
yep, we’ve had clients that we sent as much as five or six emails a week for that, yep. But within that, even though five or six of those emails could have led to something sales, we were always producing some sort of value tip, trick, insight or enthusiast, yes, feel good and but on the whole, you should be using your email list to add value at least twice as often as you are asking for the sale. That’s good. What’s your open rate after you’ve done this for a while? I’m going to say if you have a 20% or greater open rate, you really don’t have a whole lot to worry about. That’s pretty dang good. Ours is like approaching 50, 50% I was gonna say 40 or 50. Oh, if you’re listening, you haven’t opened our email. Go do that. It would help us. Yeah, click on something nice. Go, click on Make Caleb feel good. Yeah. I need it. Yeah. He needs it. It’s, it’s, uh, good for all of us. But um, so Peter had a 60% open rate, pure value. Oh, yeah, super awesome. We when we work with clients 20% or greater tells us our list is healthy, and you can probably send more than once a week and not feel bad about it. Yeah. But what you want to do, which leads us to point three, is, what is your unsubscribe rate if you’re lower than two tenths of a percent, and your email platform will tell you this, and we’re gonna talk about email platforms in a minute, which is like meaning 99.8% of people got the email and weren’t mad about it. That’s effectively what you’re telling they’re telling you, yeah, if you were gonna unsubscribe here and there, don’t freak out, as long as it doesn’t get over the threshold of half a percent and like, ascend, yeah, you’re doing the right thing. Yeah? You know when you do something wrong because you have unsubscribes? Yeah?

Caleb Agee 18:51
And that’s the signal is, obviously, if you have your content is in one way, if it’s very helpful, and then you go, you start badgering people on a hard sale, you may end up seeing that unsubscribe rate go bad. You just want to pay attention to that. Or another big problem is people let their list get cold. So if you don’t send for a long time, and then people have forgotten why that value is important, they may all of a sudden get an email from you. You may have a more higher influx of unsubscribes because you just batched them all together, yep,

Brandon Welch 19:24
but generally, in that point 2.5% you’re probably fine, just make sure it’s not a trend. Yeah. And when you’re

Caleb Agee 19:32
getting above that point 5% your your tool, your email sending platform, will probably start warning you, yep.

Brandon Welch 19:39
And your email, your email platform makes that easy, like this should go without saying, but you should be using a service to do this for you. Yeah, the softwares are relatively cheap, sometimes free, but it’ll have this little report that said, how many people unsubscribed from your last email send that leads to another metric that is important. Kind of let you know how well you’re doing. If you’re getting a 1% or better click through rate on your content, I think you’re golden. That’s good, something you can’t do better, but like, that’s pretty dang good. Yeah, it depends on what the nature of your product is. Like the frankly, Friday email for us, there’s really nothing you can click on except for to listen to it, yeah, but you can also read it because we give it all away right there in the email. It’s all designed to be value, encouraging, inspiring, all that stuff. But if you’re, if you’re sending something and it has a clear call to action, and you’re getting less than 1% you’re going, Yeah, I could have done something better. Yeah, the value wasn’t clear. And you can just try better with copy, right?

Caleb Agee 20:43
Yeah, and I think that’s important to in any marketing, we’re always watching the sequence of the customer. So you want to think about this from their perspective. You sent an email, your open rate is dictated by really specifically your subject line. They can’t see much more than that, maybe the preview texts are the first line of your email. So how’s your open rate? You also, you want to pay attention to that. As far as are your subject lines compelling, interesting? Do they leave them kind of wanting a little bit more? Do they leave them asking questions? You leave them on a cliffhanger. You’re going to get that that open, but then the next level, obviously, they read it, hopefully, yep, and then that’s that click. Are they going to go to your page and buy something, fill out a form, call you? What are they going to do? So there’s a

Brandon Welch 21:27
great tool called Subject line.com you can just go paste your subject line in, and it’ll give you a score. Yeah, it’s judging on how brief like there’s a character limit that most email platforms cut off. It’s just or it’s sorry, it’s grading you on how enticing. There’s certain words like, how to is a really good thing, the promise of value, like last chance, like some some more urgent type languages will get you a score, but it’ll tell you, Hey, this is what your subject line is scoring. And you know, here’s what you can do to make it better. So it’s good, great tool. So there’s some nerdy things like, those are just like, check, am I good? And you’re probably good if you’re a good business, yeah, if you’ve done a good job for somebody, they don’t mind hearing from you, because it’s a relationship, and you want to carry that relationship forward. And email marketing is the most underutilized tool for keeping past customers going, Yeah, and, by the way, for new customer acquisition. So yeah, here’s the last question. Are you having fun if you are trying to, you know, check a box and get an email out every week and saying, Ooh, I’ve got to do this because I’ve on a certain schedule, because I read this blog post that said I should be sending one email a week, and you’re just forcing it, and you’re going, Oh, what am I going to say next? And you’re not going for coming from a place of relationship or enthusiasm, or looking into your customer’s life and saying, I’m excited for you, and I’m excited to be your partner and your repeat business person, and just a general value add to your life. If you’re not coming for that place, you’re going to fail. Yep, you’re going to make content that is ugly, boring, transactional, slimy, and what you’re going to actually do is make people feel less excited about doing business with you, instead of more excited. Yeah,

Caleb Agee 23:15
or, or, God forbid, you heard on the Maven marketing podcast that Caleb and Brandon told Peter to send two a week. They mentioned that they send two a week, so I must send two a week. Yeah, don’t. Don’t do it if you don’t have something nice to say, no, just kidding. Starts to sound like mama always say, Yeah,

Brandon Welch 23:34
ain’t got something good to say, don’t say it at all. Right? And that’s really the good rule. Your mama taught you how to do email marketing. That’s right. Ain’t got something good to say, it at all. And so what you’re wanting to do is add value. You want to look into life your customer, encourage them, remind them of why it was a good partnership with you. Yeah. Give them new ideas. And we’re going to get to value, or, sorry, ideas you can send Marta what? No matter what type of business you are, here just second. And here’s the four part formula. Who are you talking to? Like, what’s going on their life? What do they find exciting? Like, really think of this person. Give her a name. Give him a name. What are their needs, pains, hopes and fears? Sometimes they have a legit need, sometimes they have a legit pain. Sometimes they just need to be reminded of their hope. They just need to be reminded of something cool and exciting, which is entertainment. How can you satisfy them? Entertain them make their day better. How can you otherwise be interesting? Roy says it offer them a thought more interest in the one they were previously thinking. You start there with that goal. You’re going to add value. And then what’s a reasonable next step? It could just be a simple encouragement. That’s what ours are designed to do. We have, like, zero transactional intent for these emails. Our mission and our vision is to make the lives of business owners better. So we do these podcasts, and we have literally, a guy that’s almost working full time just to help us pull all this together, and a whole team that does the ground. Fix and writes the text and finds other interesting things. And so ours is just, hey, take this with you, use it to help yourself. That’s our reasonable next step. But sometimes you’re going to say, download this guide, or this product will help you, or you can buy this or that, and it will help you along your way. And that’s there’s no harm in that, as long as you’re positioning it as a betterment of their life, that’s good. Yeah, right. Nate the camera guy,

Caleb Agee 25:29
he nods silently, okay,

Brandon Welch 25:31
so we do emails two times a week. I think we can get away with three. We probably will be doing three here this fall, because we’re going to have a separate segment interviewing ultra successful business owners and having them share their insights that’ll be called Wisdom Wednesday. That’s the announcement and but if you’re let’s just say you’re not one of these companies that just has a ton of you know, inherent value or excitement around your product, because sometimes you’re in a B to B world, or you’re in a really slow purchase cycle. What can you do outside of talking about your product or your space?

Caleb Agee 26:13
Yeah, I think, I think a lot of times what you want to do is focus on things that are one step, you know, one or two steps away from the thing you’re selling. Yeah, and they’re related. So I used to work with a realtor the best, by the way, any emails you send that you’ve taken the time that are in this in this category, you should post them on your website as a blog post. Oh, yeah, if you have a WordPress site or something like that, throw them up there, and then when you send the email, maybe link to that blog post, they might, yeah, who knows? They might go, go to your site and get shopping

Brandon Welch 26:50
or and if it’s also in your Facebook feed or in your Instagram feed, somebody’s like, on the path of choosing a company like yours, and they go search, and they go, Oh, I wonder what this company’s up to, and they see, like, months and years worth of just really helpful good stuff. Yeah, that is a feel good. That is a proof that you are doing something good in the world and that will attract trust and relationship and preference to you. Yes.

Caleb Agee 27:15
Oh, yeah, yeah. So I got off topic there. The question was, how do you bring that content that’s that’s really helpful for their lives. If you are in home improvement, you should be talking about, let’s say you sell windows. Talk about how to clean your windows. Yeah, make a little article about how to keep them clean when you got toddlers in the house trying to make them all grubby. Yep,

Brandon Welch 27:37
you’re reminding them of you’re taking them back literally, to a physical interaction of that product that you sold them. Yep, you’re saying, Here’s how to take care of it, yeah, if not windows, or if not cleaning windows, the next one could be four ways you can save energy in your home this winter. Yeah, they’ve already bought the windows, but you’re continuing. It’s proving your mission that you run something more you

Caleb Agee 27:58
could. You could literally be telling them to buy energy efficient bulbs. That’s not what you sold, but what you sell as a window supply company. The outcome, right? Which is a lower utility bill. Yep. So you want to think about, what are you what are you bringing to them? If you’re in real estate, you might be talking about just enjoying your home, living life inside of your home, recipes. We’ve seen recipes. We’ve seen decoration ideas, renovation ideas for

Brandon Welch 28:26
the trendiest new trinkets for fall. Yes, five home stereo systems you should consider what, you know, the five most valuable home improvements you can make, and that’s like two steps away. You’re not talking about buying a house. You’re but you’re but you’re being their partner in that moment. What about things? What if you’re just like, this so boring of a product, I’m thinking of some of our industrial people, that the average person is like, Yeah, I’ll buy it when I need it, and otherwise it’s not interesting to me. Yeah, good lifestyle.

Caleb Agee 28:56
I think, yeah, I think it does go straight to lifestyle you talk about. That’s when you say, Who am I talking to, and what are they thinking about? And when you understand that guy or gal on the other end that you’re talking to, even if it’s B to B, you’re selling industrial fans, or we talked about locomotive wheels, if you can go into their shoes and sit there for a second. Say, what are they thinking about today? And just speak to that.

Brandon Welch 29:24
If it’s business owners, talk about leadership, yeah. If it’s you know, decision makers inside a business, or any you know b to b type thing, talk about how to have better conversations in your business. Talk about how to write better emails. Talk about three ways to make your work environment more fun. You could talk about how to plan your Christmas party budgeting.

Caleb Agee 29:45
You could talk about how to make, how to make a more effective decision. You could, you could lead. You’re really leading these people, and hopefully, like we said, offering them a better life. One of my

Brandon Welch 29:57
favorite examples is Craig Groeschel, yeah, he’s you. Uh, one of the most well known pastors of our generation, probably, and obviously as a church and obviously as an organization that keeps growing. But he is extremely dedicated to teaching people inside and outside of ministry, and probably largely his audience is outside of ministry leadership. Yeah, and he sends this super value packed email. It helps me and countless other people. Caleb and I are big fans of it, and that is a means of influence, but it’s also like you’re as you get to know and trust him. It might take you to ask him more about his church, right? And I’m not sure that that’s his agenda. He just has a vision for making people’s lives better. Let’s, let’s fast fire on just some other really, you know, practical subject lines. So it could be guides for tips and tricks, how to get more out of their purchase. Talk about Alec last week in the guitars, yeah, four tips for rip your face off guitar solos, yeah. Or how to get Jimi Hendrix tone Yes? Or three things that so and so did in the studio to get this iconic sound. Or, How often should you replace your guitar strings or something like that? Right? Yep. So guides, tips or tricks, uh, free things they can do to save time and save money. One thing we haven’t talked about, if you’re a local business and you’re you serve a community, get obsessed with your community. Get people to local community events, bring them out to this or that charity, do calls to action to help them. Help you support a cause. If you do that once a month for a different cause, yeah, all the people in that cause will think you’re the best person ever. Yeah, you are for doing that. Yeah? But also the community, even if they don’t do a thing about it, they’ll see, they’ll, they’ll have that assumption and that association with you doing good in the world? Yeah, we talked about tips for the product that you already sold them. Couple ideas we had there. Say you’re a attorney. How about three rights you should know about before you have surgery? Or three things you should ask your doctor before they do anything on you, or how to negotiate the lowest insurance rate for yourself, right? Yeah. How about a mechanic? Four noises you should know about when you hear them in your car. This one sounds like thud, that, or it kind of sounds like steering wheels doing this, yeah. What have you just sent that out? Like? How much value add is that that takes the worry away from everybody when they see that. You know, check engine light, right? Yeah, eight Halloween costume ideas that will make you the life of the party. Anybody could send that? Anybody? Anybody? Yeah, three healthy Halloween candy. Halloween candy ideas about four signs, your dog is depressed. Everybody loves pets. Everybody loves their dog. Find universal topics. The world’s best Margarita recipe for Cinco de Mayo, or Virgin margaritas that the whole family can enjoy, just something that’s just feel good. Yeah, one of my favorite examples I’ve ever seen this company we worked with real estate brokerage, did this whole play on nostalgia, and so they would have things like, 10 signs, you were a kid in the 90s, Oh, that’s good. And they knew who their audience was. They were obviously talking to second time home buyers, like people that were just growing up, right? Yep. And they would get 1000s and 1000s of shares on this content. And they would even go to like, you know, four things that only Ozark original members would know, like, yeah, founders of Ozark or legacy families that would have these little corners of their community. Last one, just throwing a totally another random thing here, five ways to squeeze an extra fan of the vacation in your budget. Yeah, you’re helping people, right? Yeah, adding value so you can you can find interesting email content. You don’t have to be a perfect marketer. You don’t have to have a super interesting product. All you need to do is add value to your customers lives. Yes, they will see it. They will help their friends see it. The world will see it, and you will do better, and it will contribute to all the great things in business. Better close rates, better return customers, better repeat customers, higher profit margins. People liking you for you, more reviews, and it’s just good love on them. Give them value. Keep being who you hopefully already are, but help them see it

Caleb Agee 34:21
often. Yeah. Speaking of helping people see things. If you haven’t already subscribed to our YouTube channel, to our podcast, please, you haven’t rated or reviewed, stop right now. Just stop right now. You can you’re driving in your car. You can multitask. It’s gonna be okay. Maybe pull over if you’re not feeling flavor. You’re on a job. Claim or Frank and Maven is in no way liable for any No, I’m just kidding, accidents. Yeah, pull over and hit that five stars. Write a little something in there. If you’re on a jog, you can hit five stars. You can type something. They call that multitasking. You can put it on your next resume. You can put it on your LinkedIn skills.

Brandon Welch 34:56
You will identify yourself in any way that. We can, like, know who you are, even if we know you or don’t know you, like, just some first name, last name, or I work at this company, or even email us, yeah, and you leave a review or subscription, I will hook you up with a wack, a whack. It wicked cool. Swag pack wicked cool. We’ll give you a FM mug. Get you a copy of the book, and we’ve got a yeah,

Caleb Agee 35:19
we’ll make it easy, send us a screenshot, email it to Maven Monday at frankon, maven.com and we will. We’ll make sure you get it okay. Any final questions? I don’t think so. I think, though, the last question would just be, what tools people need to use to get started? I think it’s really important. We’re gonna we’re gonna spend another episode digging into that to how to build your list. How does how to start you haven’t done email marketing ever. What do I do? Yeah, so. But real quick, you can use, we’ve used them all. MailChimp, Constant Contact, clavio, that’s spelled with a, K, L, A, V, i, y, O, very that’s actually what we use if you got our email, if you have, like, a CRM, that’s more of a marketing CRM, like HubSpot. Those are a little more expensive, but you get the secondary sales and marketing. What I would say about

Brandon Welch 36:15
this is, you want to use one of these because it’s going to make it easy for your content to look good. Yeah, it’s gonna make it easy for you to understand what’s working and what’s not. My favorite, if you have less than 20,000 emails, is MailChimp. It’s probably still the cheapest. There’s a free option if it’s under, like, 1000 emails or something Constant Contact, not my favorite, but if you use it and you’ve already got a list there, there’s no big reason to change it. It’s getting better. Klaviyo, if you have any amount of sophistication, or list segmentation, or you want to do automation. It’s probably my favorite. But I would say those, those three, MailChimp Klaviyo, would be my first and second Constant Contact, if you have to, but probably don’t spend a ton of time worrying about that. Get a list, upload it, and start adding value to your people’s lives. Yep. Hey, what is Forrest? Gumps, email password? I like chocolates, one, forest, one. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.