Business Boom: The Email Advantage Using Convertkit

Wondering how to propel your business to greater heights? Imagine having an entire community in your inbox, interested in your products and services, ready to engage with your brand. Promise us you're ready to leave the summer mode behind and buckle up for some serious business action because we're taking you on a deep dive into the power of email lists. With our recommended tool ConvertKit, we'll show you how to manage this tool to your advantage and avoid pitfalls, like the ‘newsletter’ trap.

However, it's more than just gathering emails. It's about creating a structured, organized list where your customers can choose their journey and engage with what interests them. We'll show you how to create personalized email sequences for these diverse interests and how to keep the conversation warm, personal, and engaging. But remember, even emails have risks - we'll talk about the importance of backups and offer some tips to protect your precious list. No matter where you are in your business journey, jump on board for this episode and unlock the power of emails for your business success. Spoiler alert: you might even find yourself looking forward to the holiday season rush!

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Transcript

Brenda Eckhardt: 0:01

Okay, so today we're going to talk about email lists. Email is probably the most important tool in your toolbox that you either have or can have at your fingertips when there is a time that you need to grow, that you want to keep people interested or that you really just need to kick things into high gear. Now that everybody's back to school and in routines and summer craziness is done, we're all kind of settling in and feeling a little overwhelmed about what do we do first in our business? What is the most important thing and most impactful thing that you can do as a first step to just start to tighten things up and get a little more serious again and get out of summer mode and into a little bit more of I'm going to grow this thing mode. So email is where it's at for that purpose, and I recommend ConvertKit. I don't have an affiliation with them other than I use them for all of the consulting businesses that I consult for with digital marketing and it's amazing. It has all the features that I need. It's user friendly and if I can do it, you can do it. It's super simple. So if you don't have a list to start with, that is something that I would begin with, and ConvertKit does have the ability to create popups on like a WordPress site, squarespace, all of those more popular website types, website platforms so you can set it up that it will pop up and say would you like to join our email community?

Brenda Eckhardt: 1:43

I do not recommend using the word newsletter ever. In my experience with businesses that I've worked with, when the word newsletter is used, the amount of unsubscribes skyrockets. People jump ship. They don't want anything to do with an old fashioned newsletter. They want to be a part of something. So I always refer to it as the email community, my email community, or title it something email community. It can be birdwatchers email community, whatever the case, whatever business industry you're in. So start gathering your email list and getting it organized by category. In ConvertKit you can create categories based on the customer type, the type of interest that they might have in your business, and that can be done through the very first email. If you want a full walkthrough of a welcome sequence or a welcome email, let me know in the comments and I'm happy to create a podcast based on wording for that and how I set that up for businesses and you can just use it for your own. It's totally fine.

Brenda Eckhardt: 2:59

But basically the first email that you send out is kind of a choose your adventure. If you've ever read those books as a kid where, based on the choice you make at this point, the whole book changes, well, that's how it can be for email and you can have even though it sounds overwhelming, it's not. You can have multiple sequences based on what people are interested in. So if you're an interior designer and they're only interested in, let's say, kitchen design, you can put them in that sequence or they can self-choose in that first email oh, I'm interested in kitchens and I'm also interested in decorating my front porch every season, but I'm not interested in staging my bathroom. So they only click on what they're interested in and that puts them in that bucket. It's pretty slick and it's really nice because then when you go back to your email and you want to send out an email specific to people that are interested in kitchen design, they're right there in that bucket. So that first email is super important in structuring it so that people can choose their adventure of what they're interested in. And once you do that, you are golden. You have the ability to reach people in an instant for a certain product type or service type and it's all right there. So I would focus on email to really kickstart your business at this stage.

Brenda Eckhardt: 4:29

If you're, if you kind of let things go on autopilot, or if you're new without an email list, you are building your business on borrowed ground, meaning social media. Even your website can get hacked. Yes, email can get hacked, as far as you know, whatever platform you use. But the chances are so small and the chances are you'll have that whole spreadsheet on your computer of all of your email list anyway as a backup. So email is the way to go for your first step to stay connected, especially going into the holiday season, if you have any sales products, services that you want to really promote.

Brenda Eckhardt: 5:16

People are very responsive to email when it's written in a personal way, not in a canned business way with all of the pictures, but in a conversational, personal way, like hey, I'm sitting down with you having a cup of coffee once every two weeks. This is the email that you're going to receive while we're doing that. It should feel very much like that, like they're a part of something and they're having coffee with a friend. So I don't recommend using more than a couple of images in your emails and I don't recommend using highly stylized emails that look obviously from a corporation or business. The goal is to have that personal touch, personal connection. Otherwise you will get tons of unsubscribes.

Brenda Eckhardt: 6:05

So I believe that that covers email for today. If you have specific questions about email convert kit, anything specific that you want to know, please let me know in the comments. I'm happy to create a new podcast or message you personally to answer your questions and help guide you through, but again, I look forward to helping you grow your business. I do believe email is the very first big step to either reboot, kickstart, get started, no matter what stage you're in and I look forward to hearing your feedback and if email has worked for you well, I'd love to talk a little bit with you about how you're doing it and I will talk to you in the next episode. Thanks so much.