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Marketing: Understanding Email Marketing

Welcome to Email Marketing 101! In a previous episode, the Bosses discussed email databases and the importance of building one to grow your business. This week the Bosses talk about how to communicate effectively with that database through email marketing. Find out how to target your email to get better ROI, connect emotionally to increase engagement, and level up your email marketing LIKE A BOSS.





Takeaways

Quick Concepts from Today’s Episode:

  1. We all get a lot of emails, how many do you open?

  2. Email is not dead, it’s how you do it that matters.

  3. Email is one of the best ways to communicate with our database.

  4. Communicating with your list once a month isn’t necessarily spammy. It can lead to people remembering who you are and what you offer.

  5. It only takes one email with the wrong verbiage or wrong attitude to turn a potential client off.

  6. If you’re sending the wrong message to the wrong list or segment, it can be really off-putting and impact your bottom line.

  7. When you provide value to your mailing list, you give people an incentive to stay.

  8. I produce content on my blog, providing valuable information to my audience, instead of only sending marketing emails.

  9. With a VO BOSS Blast, we are generating custom lists for each client that are segmented and targeted towards geographical regions and genres.

  10. Email Service Providers have ways of segmenting your lists. Learn about your software to make sure your lists are properly targeted.

  11. There are lots of tools to help you to segment your lists, including a simple spreadsheet.

  12. Remember to give your client the option to opt-out of your list.

  13. There are different ways to send out your email to clients. You can have an email newsletter, a monthly blog post, etc, but make sure that content is something your audience is interested in.

  14. If you’re going to email valuable content to your list, make it consistent.

  15. You can email without a hard sell, just to give clients a smile. We all need this right now.

  16. Being able to ‘market without marketing’, through fun content can be incredibly effective.

  17. It’s a nice way to connect and engage with your audience.

  18. The more you know, the more the conversation flows.

  19. Email statistics are an opportunity to learn about your clients and develop a ‘buyer persona’.

  20. Marketing is not a simple process. Be dedicated and consistent – and you will find more success.

  21. Your database is gold. It’s your lifeline!

  22. You need to have solid intention and understanding of how email is used, and what you want that email to actually do!

  23. Keeping your database engaged is a challenge.

  24. Email is how you can communicate with and “own” your audience.

  25. You have to give your email list solid content, so they will stay on your list.

  26. Social media platforms may change at any time. Your email database is critical because you have total control of the list.

  27. Email isn’t just a contact tactic, it’s a content marketing opportunity.

  28. Segment your email list into categories based on client needs.

  29. Email segmentation is an advanced marketing tool that can help you fine-tune and target content to your list.

  30. Take the extra effort to treat your database like the multiple audiences that it really is, and provide custom content for each audience.

  31. Don’t forget that your intent is to put the right information in front of the right person.

  32. What if every single email we received, was something personalized and had valuable information that we are interested in?

  33. Your emails should be just as specific as the delivery of your reads.

  34. Whenever you can create a process with an end goal in mind, do so! It will lead to fewer headaches down the road.

  35. If you have an idea of how you want to segment your list, you can create content in a targeted way.

  36. Some contacts will be in multiple segments, and that’s ok.

  37. Stay on top of your database, it is your life-blood.

  38. Consistency in email marketing will outperform creativity.

  39. Keep your emails about your audience, not about you.

  40. Marketing is based on emotional reactions.

  41. The emotions I feel when I read an email are what lead to purchases.

  42. A common drip campaign is a ‘welcome campaign’. You receive an email after you subscribe, and then receive follow-ups with more information.

  43. Nurture your email list by sending information and education, not just ‘sell’ emails.

  44. As your email data provides information, you can pivot or modify your campaigns.

  45. When you know the person you’re talking to, your marketing becomes more energetic.

  46. Marketing is not a thing you do, it should be part of your business DNA.

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Referenced in this Episode

Direct links to things we brought up ++


Get a customized VO BOSS Blast for custom target-marketed emails.
Read Anne’s advice for long-term email marketing
Visit Pamela Muldoon’s Website
Recorded on ipDTL
BadAss Editing by Carl Bahner

Transcript

>> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS. Now let’s welcome your host Anne Ganguzza.

Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I’m your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I’m here with the most amazing content marketing maven Pamela Muldoon. Hey Pamela, how are you today?

Pamela: Hello, Anne. I’m fantastic. How are you? It’s good to hear your voice.

Anne: I’m doing good. I know! Pamela, we’ve had some great response from our past episodes talking about content marketing and buyer personas, and last episode, we started talking about creating a database and how to build that database.

Pamela: Yes.

Anne: So this week I’d like to talk about how to actually communicate with that database and maybe start chatting a little bit about email and being able to communicate with the database that we’ve just built up.

Pamela: Fantastic, let’s do it.

Anne: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s talk about, I guess, communication and email, which comes to mind first of course. I think that that’s just the logical next step, once we have a database, to really be able to communicate with the database that has now expressed interest in our content.

Pamela: Yes, yes. Your database is gold, right? That’s your lifeline. Communicating to them, and email is not dead, it’s absolutely not dead. It’s still very alive and well. It’s just how you do it. Right? There has got to be some solid intention, and understanding of the different ways that email could be used, and then of course what you want that email to actually do. So there’s a lot to talk about.

Anne: I like that you said email is not dead, because I think some people might say or contest that. Because how much email do we get on a daily basis, and how much email do we open? I know from my BOSS Blast customers, we’re always explaining open rates and you know what to expect, because we all get email. A lot of times we don’t open that email. I’m glad to hear you say, email is not dead. I do believe that that’s probably still the first, foremost, best way to communicate with our database is through email. However I don’t think it’s a reality to expect that 100% of the time, people are going to open your email.

Pamela: No, it’s, you still have to do the work, right? [laughs] Getting the database is one challenge, right? Now actually keeping your database engaged is a whole other conversation. So it, not only is it not dead, it really is the way that you can communicate and for lack of a better word, own your audience. Right? So doesn’t mean that because you own the audience, ie the database, that they’re just going to stick around. You have to give them solid, valuable information. We can talk a little bit about different ways you can do that, but it’s also really important when we think about what we call inbound marketing or outbound marketing, we have all of these social platforms and ways to communicate, but we don’t own those platforms. Those platforms can change or modify or edit [laughs] at any time, so that’s one of the reasons the email database or the database is so critical, and then of course just getting really smart and doing some of your own homework around email marketing –

Anne: This is true.

Pamela: – I think is a really smart move for folks that are in that self-employed, independent, freelance, because it really is a great way to stay engaged.

Anne: I know out there, there is going to be questions. So what do I email? Like what would I use to communicate to my audience, how often should I communicate with my database, what should I say? Do I write an email and say hey, I’m available for voiceover? What do you, I mean, what are we talking here?

Pamela: Well, I think a really great place to start, you know, I look at email marketing, there’s a lot to unpackage in what you just said, right, Anne? Each one of those in and of itself could be its own episode. [laughs]

Anne: Yeah.

Pamela: And perhaps that’s how we need to do this because [laughs] there is a lot. And of course, I think I’ve said this before, and I jokingly but seriously say it again. I’m in marketing, so my answer needs to be, it depends [laughs] –

Anne: Well also –

Pamela: – all the time.

Anne: In terms of how often do we communicate with our list, I will say for the Blast subscribers, we actually have a monthly communication with the list. Or our clients have monthly communication. I think in the grand scheme of things, communicating with your list once a month is really not spammy at all. It’s not a whole lot. You hope that it leads to top of mind, people remembering who you are and what you have to offer. A lot of times I’ll be explaining once a month is really nothing. When I think of my subscription to, I don’t know, Old Navy or something like that, I’ll get emails every other day from them.

Pamela: Right.

Anne: You know, how much is too much? And especially for our industry, how much is too much for us to be communicating? I’ll have somebody send me an email, and it only takes one email with the wrong verbiage or just the wrong attitude that will just set me off, and I’ll be like that’s it, unsubscribe. Boom, done.

Pamela: Yeah. Well, and what you’re talking about too with like an example of Old Navy or retail, or real consumer, more spontaneous driven purchase, right, getting more of those emails tend to, we tend to accept that, right, because even though as we talked earlier, the customer journey, those stages are still happening. They’re just happening kind of lightning fast. Right? We all of a sudden clicked on the link, we’re like “oo cute jeans,” and the next thing we know –

Anne: And then we’re on the list.

Pamela: – putting it in the shopping cart, and you know. [laughs]

Anne: After we buy, and then we’re on a list.

Pamela: And this is something interesting to pay attention to. Retail, anything really customer centric is going to, that B to C model, business to consumer model is going to provide email in a very different way.

Anne: Great point.

Pamela: Yeah, I mean, in voiceover, we’re actually marketing ourselves to other business people.

Anne: Right.

Pamela: This is why that persona work was so critical, when we talked about it, right, really understanding your business person is going to help you decide that cadence of how much or what, or what they’re interested in. What I like to remind folks is email is not just a tactic, right? It’s another contest marketing opportunity. It really is. The email is just a distribution of your content. That’s all it is. And so you have to think of what you put in that email as another way to put content in front of your audience. Sometimes it might be promotional like you mentioned, right Anne? Sometimes it might be informative. Sometimes it might be just for entertainment, whatever that case is, but it’s about being very intentional about what you want to send and knowing your audience, how they want to receive information, how often, those things start to come from data, right, when we talk about the click through rates and the open rates and things like that, which I think we’re going to spend an entire episode just around some of the ways to stay on top of your data around this. But if you don’t really know your audience, you’re just kind of being treated by a retail brand which is very different, if that makes sense.

Anne: Well, I think when you put forth the vehicle for having people sign up, you have a decent idea as to why they joined, because you’ve put something out, hopefully of value to them. They’re interested in that. You have a great place to start from when you’re trying to figure out, well, what am I going to put in that email? In my website, when I post a blog, it automatically sends email to anybody who is signed up to my list. And so knowing this, I produce the content on my blog, knowing who it’s going to, and it will send the email out automatically. And that in and of itself is not a direct sales sort of thing to my list. It’s just, here I am. Here is some information that you might find interesting, and oh yeah, by the way, we all know that Anne Ganguzza does voiceover, or Anne Ganguzza coaches or whatever it is.

Pamela: It’s a classic content marketing play. Right? It’s basically marketing with your content, through the power of what’s part of the awareness, right, awareness of information. They need, when you have a problem, you want to make sure you can provide information, education, best practices, just good stuff, right? And that’s why blog posts can be really powerful for that kind of thing. Another thing that you’re doing, Anne, that I just want to touch on is the segmentation. So you’ve segmented this part of the database into an area called blog subscribers, right?

Anne: Correct.

Pamela: Now that’s going to be a catch-all of perhaps multiple personas, but you know that they’re interested because they provided that either email, you know, subscription process to you. I’m interested in staying on top of Anne’s blog, right?

Anne: Exactly. That’s a different subscription than let’s say somebody who signs into my website.

Pamela: Segmentation I think is not talked enough about in our industry, and there is so much power in that. Here’s kind of the rhetorical question. What would it mean to your audience to segment all of your, you know, e-learning titles, and then segment all of your agent titles, and segment all of your production house titles, right?

Anne: Right.

Pamela: Something to — as example. And then be able to create three different messages in your newsletter process, or your promotional process.

Anne: Absolutely. Yeah.

Pamela: It’s really about taking that extra effort to really treat your database like the multiple audiences it really is. But give each segment the love that they should be receiving. Right?

Anne: Absolutely. And that’s, like I said, it only takes one email that’s off, that’s not necessarily caring about me as a person or – look, why would you send me an email about skincare when I was nowhere near that website, or why would you send me an email about SEO services when I don’t even know who you are, that kind of thing? So yeah, if you’re sending the wrong message to the wrong list or segment, right, it can be really off-putting, and it can really I think impact your bottom line and your potential clients.

Pamela: Absolutely. And it’s kind of forgetting that our intent sometimes is to really put the right information in front of the right person. So even in our world, an example is that, let’s say you have a medical narration company or production house or even just instructional designer that you’re working with, or you’ve worked with them in the past. You just add that medical instructional designer to your commercial list. Or you know, they’re now getting your commercial demo, or your political demo. For them, it’s just not the same. They may not unsubscribe, but it does not make sense.

Anne: Right, it doesn’t.

Pamela: It’s kind of off the mark. And when you talk about, you know, all the emails we receive, what if, and this is a big what if, what if every single email we received actually was somewhat personalized and had valuable information that we were interested in? Like think about that. How many times do you go through – I do this on my phone. I start going, delete, delete, delete. I just start, but I don’t want to unsubscribe because I might get something, right?

Anne: Exactly. Exactly.

Pamela: What a horrible reason to stay, I might get something sometime, someday. [laughs]

Anne: That’s the whole process too again where we’re sending out the Blasts. We’re generating lists that are segmented and targeted towards specific geographical regions with specific genres in place. So for the Blast, it wouldn’t send out, like you mentioned, it would not send out a promo demo to necessarily a commercial list. In the same vein, when it comes to marketing yourself in general, when I create demos, I’m creating very target specific demos to a particular audience, and it works very well in terms of getting potential clients coming your way because it aligns with what they do on a day-to-day basis. I mean that’s something that’s of interest, and you’re not necessaily putting people off by sending them something they have nothing to do with or have no interest in.

Pamela: Absolutely. And think about that, you invest that much time and money and resources into creating an amazing demo, and then you just start sending it to everybody.

Anne: Yeah.

Pamela: Yeah, wrong audience. So you go through that entire process of being very specific in the delivery and scripting, all of these things, and then you aren’t doing the same with your promotional piece, so it’s the next logical step.

Anne: The next question is going to be, how do you segment your list? Is there a software that allows you to do that? And I guess, it pretty much, I’m going to say that it depends on the software that you’re using. I believe we had talked about in our last episode about different services such as like ActiveCampaign or MailChimp, and they all have their own ways of being able to segment a list. Even if you’re creating a database of people that opt in to your website, you can inadvertently through that pop up window that says subscribe, you can create segmented lists that way. And on the back end of your website, it will keep those segmented. I know that there is a plug-in that I used for VO BOSS WordPress, that allows you to create different lists based upon what page they’re on, if they decide they want to opt into this particular content, then that means they’re going to be on this list, versus another page which might have a different opt in. There are lots of ways to segment your list, and sometimes really, it can be your own spreadsheet.

Pamela: Yeah.

Anne: I mean, it can be as simple as that, right?

Pamela: Oh yes.

Anne: Where you have an Excel spreadsheet of particular clients, and you know, okay they, they’re a client that I did an explainer video for. Or they’re somebody who I did a regional commercial for. So those could be ways that you can segment even just as simple as a spreadsheet and keeping that extra data or CRM and then filtering email to those particular lists.

Pamela: Yes, yes, and I think you touched on something that’s really important. We don’t always think about because we’re busy with our day to day, but whenever you can create a process with the end in mind, as you’re developing it, is going to cause less heartache and headache later down the road. So a great example of that is segmentation. If you have an idea of how you want to segment your list, and you set up to your point the either the opt-in choices based on that, but you’re putting thought through that the end result is I want this person to be in the right list segment, then you’re going to create content or you’re going to be communicating out in a very specific way to attract that. Right? So it really goes hand-in-hand kind of knowing, working with the end in mind. And another piece to that is you will have some folks on your list that will be in more than one segmentation, and that’s okay too, but I mean it really forces you to know who is in your database and really stay on top of your database. And this is your lifeblood. So you should be doing that anyway.

Anne: And I’m going to recap little bit about what we talked about when we were building the database is always remembering to make sure that you give your client the option to opt out of that list, and so that’s always super important. And I think, you know, in regards to talking about, how often do I send, or you know, we talked about segmenting, but now there are different ways to send out your email other than just, you know, click send to a group of people, or a list. You can, you know, you can have like a monthly, like  I have a monthly blog post or a weekly blog post or an email newsletter. If you’re putting out the newsletter to your list, make sure that content is something they’re obviously interested in, and I would say really important is for consistency. If you’re going to do it, make it consistent, and that I think is what will reap big rewards, consistency in general, for you know potential clients to buy.

Pamela: Especially with the digital marketing as it has come up over the past couple of decades, 10, 15 years especially is consistency will outdo creativity every day of the week. That email newsletter concept is one that most of us can wrap our brains around. I think the challenge some of us have, I know I’ve had this in the past, what am I going to put in it? Well, if you’ve done some great work on your audience, right, then you – again, it’s all about them. It’s not about you. This is not necessarily an opportunity to just push your promotional stuff. Right, of course you’re going to have a call to action somewhere or to your website or you know, where your demos are located. That’s fine. But what is it that your audience would find valuable in terms of like a blog article? Or maybe you’re using Google Alerts or things that can scrape the web for interesting information that they care about and you’re sharing it and putting it in front of them.

Anne: Even entertainment, especially during –

Pamela: Absolutely.

Anne: – these times, where, I think, we need to have a smile once in a while, or some sort of entertainment can be marketing without necessarily hard-sell in-your-face marketing. That’s also important to push out to your list because I think it’s something that as a society we all kind of need that right now.

Pamela: Let’s not forget that marketing is an emotional reaction for the most part.

Anne: Yeah, absolutely.

Pamela: It’s very emotional. How I continue to receive from you and the emotions I get when I think about you is critical. To your point, if I think, oh I get funny emails from that person, or they’re very heartfelt, or a combination, a lot of this stuff happens subconsciously, but there is a reason that we keep certain people in our database, because we know we’re going to feel a certain way when we open that email. There is something to be said about that, and that has absolutely nothing to do with a direct sale and everything to be with top of mind.

Anne: Yeah, we have some great Blast clients that will market without marketing. One particular instance that I can think of right now is “here is my quarantine haircut.” And you know, just something as simple as that and “how are you doing, and here is my quarantine haircut,” and by the way at the very end it’s just a link to the website, “keep me in mind for those auditions.” And it’s just a nice way to make that connection and engagement with your audience without necessarily saying “hey, here’s a new demo” and stuff like that, but it’s not always that.

Pamela: Right, good point. Love it.

Anne: So there is also something, Pamela, that you can put into place on one of my websites is the capability to do something called a drip campaign.

Pamela: Yes.

Anne: Let’s talk a little bit about drip campaigns and what they’re useful for.

Pamela: Yeah. Drip campaigns, something a lot of folks have heard of but have not really thought about it. A drip campaign, we have all been recipients of these.

Anne: We have.

Pamela: We don’t realize, but we are. The most common scenario is to opt in through the content process, right, so I’ll say I download, there’s a checklist out there, this is really cool. I’ll opt in to receive the checklist. Now I’m into the database. And so an example of a very common drip campaign is called a welcome campaign. And this is when you receive – there could be a series of two, three or four emails. This is just an example. I always say the number of emails is dependent on the information that you think is important to your audience at that time, but a welcome email is when you usually receive an email shortly after you subscribe that literally says welcome. [laughs] “Welcome to my community,” and most often the first email explains kind of the rules of the game. What that means is they’ll outline, the person will outline how they’re going to communicate, like “I send out a monthly newsletter and I do this,” and that kind of thing. Kind of just “here’s what to expect now that you’re here.” And another way to keep those conversations going is to provide additional information or education on the topic or the reason they opt in to begin with.

Anne: Right. Right.

Pamela: So it is a great way to stay engaged initially because then people don’t get what we sometimes refer to as buyer’s remorse.

Anne: Absolutely.

Pamela: [laughs] Right? When you opt in, and it also allows you to engage with a little more personality and something right away versus waiting for the monthly newsletter which maybe just went out yesterday, and now you’ve got to wait another 30 days, right? So that’s kind of a, I guess, the most common drip campaign that we see, or that we’ve been participants of.

Anne: Yep.

Pamela: And then there is just simply the idea of what I like to call the lead nurture campaign, and this is where you’re really going to nurture the lead process. And so you might involve a little bit more of some social media. It’s multichannel. It might be multichannel, so you’ve got some social media elements that drive into your database. And again, you just want to nurture with information and education. You’re not trying to sell anything.

Anne: Right, absolutely.

Pamela: But it’s about keeping them engaged. And I know we’re going to talk about data and stats in a future episode, because that’s part of what drives the decision, right, Anne, is how you do things today, when you first start, is based on a great educated – I call it the educated guess part. [laughs] Right?

Anne: Yes.

Pamela: You do the best you can with what you have when you get started, and then as your data provides information, a story starts to come from there, and you can pivot or you can modify your campaigns because of how the interaction has been taking place for say six months or 12 months or something like that.

Anne: I think it’s also a great opportunity to learn more about your audience.

Pamela: Yes.

Anne: And further develop that buyer persona that we spoke about earlier. I think they all go hand-in-hand.

Pamela: Absolutely. Everything, I always say, if you want all of your marketing to improve, you’ve got to work on the persona.

Anne: Yeah.

Pamela: Once you feel really confident, you know your persona super well, inside and out, here is the thing, folks. As soon as you know the person you’re talking to, your marketing becomes more energetic. Like ideas just start popping. Right? Like all of a sudden, like I got so much stuff because you understand them.

Anne: Yeah, isn’t that just so simple, right? The more you know who you’re talking to, the more the conversation flows. Right? And it’s easier.

Pamela: It sounds so simple.

Anne: So simple. It’s so simple, BOSSes, but we get it, this is not easy stuff, like Pamela said earlier. If it were easy, we would all be, you know, we would all be [laughs]

Pamela: Yeah, hitting it out of the park every day.

Anne: Exactly.

Pamela: That’s a piece to this as well. I’ve been doing this as a practice with a lot of clients over the past few years, but –

Anne: You do this full time.

Pamela: I have to know it – that doesn’t mean I do it 100%. Like there is a constant learning that has to be a part of this, and you have to embrace. I think I happen to love the art and science of marketing as an industry and topic which is why I work in it, and I think a lot of us that are in different things such as voiceover, we look at marketing sometimes as this thing we’ve got to do.

Anne: Yup.

Pamela: And I really, really hope that in this series, that you realize that marketing, it’s not a thing you do, it’s part of your business DNA.

Anne: Oh yeah.

Pamela: It’s part of your lifestyle. It just becomes a part of what you need to become as a business owner to really engage with the right audience, and then of course get those conversions, just skyrocket them, right, into your bank account. [laughs]

Anne: Good stuff, Pamela. Wow. We could talk all day about this, and I think we’ll continue the conversation in a future episode, but yeah. Great stuff. Thanks so much for sharing all of that, Pamela. And BOSSes out there, keep in mind that, you know, it’s not a simple process, but if, I think if you’re dedicated and you’re consistent with it, you can really start to see some positive results in your efforts. And so, go out there and be email marketing BOSSes, and yeah. I’d like to give a great, big shout-out to the BOSS of our communication, and that’s ipDTL, which allows Pamela and I to talk to you guys about all of this great stuff. I love ipDTL, and we thank Kevin over there for everything he does in support of this podcast. And if you want to find out more, you can go to ipdtl.com. All right, guys. Have a great week, and we’ll see you next week.

Pamela: Bye!

Anne: Bye!

>> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via ipDTL.