THIS MAMA MEANS BUSINESS EPISODE 136
Today’s episode is all about the power of email marketing. Now, I know what you’re thinking – “Email marketing, really? Why should I focus on that when there are so many sexy & fun social media platforms out there?” Well, I’m here to tell you that email marketing is the real game-changer for your business.
This is a value packed episode with practical tips & insights…
Click play to listen below:
The limitations of relying solely on social media platforms for marketing
Social media is undeniably noisy. As entrepreneurs, especially as solopreneurs, the pressure to maintain a presence on every platform can be overwhelming. With the allure of Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms, it’s easy to believe that the real secret to success lies in the one thing we’re not doing.
However, email marketing offers a more intimate and direct connection with our audience. Unlike social media, where our content gets lost in the sea of posts, emails land directly in our subscribers’ inboxes, ensuring higher visibility and fostering a deeper connection.
The ever-changing algorithms of social media platforms can significantly impact our visibility and reach. However, with email marketing, we own our audience. This distinction is crucial. Your email list is an asset to your business, and it remains stable amidst the ever-changing landscape of social media platforms. Owning your platform provides peace of mind and a sense of security, knowing that your hard-earned connections won’t disappear overnight due to an algorithm change or policy update.
Driving engagement and trust with your subscribers
Engagement is essential for nurturing relationships with our audience. While social media provides engagement, email marketing presents a unique opportunity for higher interaction. The ability to send personalized, targeted content to our subscribers fosters a deeper level of engagement and trust. It allows us to provide value, share stories, and have direct conversations with our audience, building authentic connections that are the cornerstone of a successful business.
Segmenting and personalizing your email list is a powerful strategy. By tailoring content based on subscribers’ interests and behaviors, we can create a deeper level of connection. However, it’s essential to find a balance. Segmenting your list to a reasonable extent, such as tagging buyers and leads, allows for personalized communication without overcomplicating your email marketing efforts. The goal is to foster valued relationships and tailor content without overwhelming your strategy with excessive segmentation.
Consistency is key when it comes to email marketing. Weekly emails keep you on your audience’s radar, ensuring that they remember and remain engaged with your brand. By consistently providing value and nurturing relationships, you establish trust and credibility. Trust is the foundation of any successful business, and email marketing offers an authentic and direct channel to build trust over time.
Create a balanced marketing strategy
While I believe in the power of email marketing, I also recognize the value of a balanced approach. It’s essential to find the sweet spot between email marketing and social media. Leverage platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest for visibility and lead generation, but understand that your email list is the true powerhouse of your business. By prioritizing email marketing and balancing it with your preferred social media platforms, you can create a sustainable and successful strategy that aligns with your strengths and preferences.
Email marketing is not just about growing your list; it’s about cultivating meaningful connections and nurturing those relationships to drive business growth. It’s about leveraging a stable and direct channel to engage with your audience and build a community that trusts and values your brand.
So, take a moment to reflect on your current marketing strategies. Consider how you can amplify your email marketing efforts and use your preferred social media platforms to complement your email strategy. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules; you make the rules in your business. Let’s build our businesses on stable ground with email marketing as the cornerstone, striving for sustainable and long-term success.
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Full Transcript
Kylie Kelly [00:00:37]:
Hi, friends, and welcome back to another episode of this mama means business, episode a 136. Now, firstly, before we get into today’s episode, I just wanna say a heartfelt thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. This is honestly my favorite space to be, and I love sitting down and just sharing the real, the messy, the ugly, the crazy, the uncertain journey that is entrepreneurship.
Kylie Kelly [00:01:10]:
Right? And today, I’ve got a really practical episode all about the power of email marketing, which I know you hear me talk about a lot. But I wanted to talk to you about why I believe it’s better than anything else. Why you need to actually focus on this instead of all the shiny social media things that you might see out there. Right? So I know for a lot of you, you’re solopreneurs just like me. It’s It’s just you in your business doing all the things. And yet there’s still this pressure that we often feel to be everywhere. Right? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, you know, writing blog posts, being on Pinterest. What about LinkedIn? Have you thought about YouTube Shorts? Like, there’s just so much.
Kylie Kelly [00:01:46]:
And it’s easy for us to think that the thing that we’re not doing is, like, the secret ingredient. To success. And I also know that there are a lot of coaches and a lot of business owners out there that are really good at marketing and that will tell you that their way is the secret, that their way is the only way to get to 6 figures to 7 figures, that their way and waking up at 6 AM and don’t forget to have that juice and work out before the kids get up and yada yada yada is the way that you need to do it to be successful. Now, I bring this up because it is so not true and I really want you to understand that as unsexy as email marketing is, as unsexy as it is to grow your email list, there are so many benefits that it’s crazy. And I honestly think that you could do this one thing. You could focus on this one thing and push everything else to the side, and you would be successful. Your business would grow. You would start to make money. You could stop feeling so spread thin. Right? You could let go of the pressure to be everywhere, and email marketing can do that for you. And I know this to be true because it’s happened for me. I’ve been growing my email list intentionally now for about 14 months, 16 months, something like that. And I have almost 5,000 subscribers. I can send an email and people buy things. I can send an email and announce something and people are interested. I can send my podcast out and people click it to listen.
Kylie Kelly [00:03:08]:
And yet, I can share on my Instagram stories that has almost the same amount of followers and a 100 people see it. Right? Now, I’m not here to totally shit all over Instagram. Like, if you love showing up on Instagram, if you love showing up on whatever you’re showing up on on social media, then I honestly believe it needs to feel good. I honestly believe that we need to feel excited. That if that is part of it for you, keep doing it. But let’s be intentional with email marketing, with growing our email list because unlike social media, we get to communicate directly with our email list. We get to talk to them directly and you probably have an open rate anywhere between 30 50%. 20% is industry average, but I think that’s kind of low. So I think, you know, anything between 30 50% is fantastic, which means that 30 to 50% of your email is to opening every single email. Do you know what the percentage is on Instagram or on social media for people to see it? It’s like 2 or 3%. Right? It’s tiny. So unlike social media, email marketing means that you’re not getting lost amongst thousands of others. The emails that you’re sending are landing directly in your ideal client’s inbox, ensuring that they’re probably gonna see it, ensuring higher visibility for you, your business, your brand, and what you’re trying to sell or what you’re trying to offer. So you get to communicate directly with your ideal client. The other thing that I love about email marketing is that you own it. You’re building your business on land that you own.
Kylie Kelly [00:04:30]:
Platforms, as we know, change all the time. Right? Their algorithms change and it affects who gets to see you. It affects your visibility so much. But with an email list, you own your audience. You own your email list. It is an asset in your business. You’ll often hear people talking about when they sell their business, their email list is one of the biggest assets that they have, especially for an online business. So it is seen as something of value. No algorithm can take it away. And then the other reason that I love email marketing and I am obsessed with my email list is the engagement factor. Now you might be thinking, yeah, Kylie, but what about Facebook groups? What about Instagram DMs? All of that, yes, of course is engagement, but data actually shows that an email has a higher engagement rate than social media. There was a report done by Campaign Monitor. And, yes, I’ve done my research before coming and doing this episode with you. But the average open rate for email across all industries is around 21%. Organic reach for Facebook posts can be as low as 5.2%. Right? So even if you are on the lower end of that average, if you are sitting at the 21% instead of my 30 to 50, right, even if you’re there, you’re still getting more engagement.
Kylie Kelly [00:05:36]:
You’re still getting more interaction from your ideal clients by sending that email than you are posting on Facebook than you are sharing to Instagram. So I just want you to sit with that. But I really feel that there is so much strength to be had when we intentionally grow our email list, full of the right people, of course, because then we’re building our business on ground that we own. We get to communicate with our ideal clients directly. We get to actually send them things that they open. We get to offer them things that we know they’re interested in, that they’re going to see. It is not this world of hoping and praying, posting and praying, hoping and wishing. It is not. It’s actually proven. It’s actually concrete. So let’s talk a little bit about social media. Now, as I said, I’m not here to shit all over Instagram. I’m back on Instagram and I’m actually loving it. For a little while, I had a 9th grade that did the job. I was feeling so much pressure to create content. You know, I wasn’t sure about my content buckets. I didn’t know what to share. I was unsure and it was just pressure and it took the focus away from me building my business. So I put up a 9 Grid. It was there for a good 6 months. And interestingly, my analytics never showed a massive dip. I didn’t grow my profile, but it didn’t disappear. There wasn’t a massive dip in it either, which was kind of cool. But now I’m back.
Kylie Kelly [00:06:46]:
I kinda wanna play. I’ve got some pretty not controversial, but I’ve got some pretty strong opinions about the coaching industry and about the way things are done now that I want a voice to the world. So I’m back on Instagram for now. Who knows if I’ll be there when you’re listening to this episode? But I wanted to and have opinions on things. But let’s talk about why these opinions exist and what the limitations of social actually are. So like I mentioned before, the changing algorithms is a massive one. So platforms like Instagram and Facebook often tweet their algorithms and it makes it difficult for us to even reach our audience unless we’re paying for ads. Now, I haven’t paid for an ad in my life.
Kylie Kelly [00:07:26]:
Well, that’s a lie, actually. When I was a wedding photographer, I played a little bit targeting engaged couples with ads. That worked quite well. But since I pivoted to an online business, I haven’t touched an ad. That’s like my next goal is to play with some lead generation ads, to play with some conversion ads, see if I can get people funneling into the spotlight club. So that will change. But all that said and done, if you don’t have the budget to pay to play, if you don’t have the budget to pay for ads, Instagram and Facebook are not gonna show your shit to many people. Right? You are not gonna get seen. And if you don’t get seen, how is anyone meant to know about you? Massive, massive limitation on social media. Unless you go viral, of course, but I have never been that popular, and I’m not one to actually put all my hopes and dreams on the slight chance that something I share will be cool enough to go viral. That’s just not how I roll. The other thing is that the content is really short lived. So if you post a tweet on Twitter, a thread on Instagram threads, a Facebook post on Facebook, it has a pretty short lifespan. Right? Whereas an email can sit in an inbox be flagged and reread a 100 times. Now I’ve had this conversation with one of my clubbers because she likes to talk like I do. She likes to write, so her weekly regular email content is quite lengthy.
Kylie Kelly [00:08:38]:
So we’ve worked together to kind of come up with a format that feels really good for her, that she can send to her entire list without sending different emails to different segments in a way that it feels really good and but they’re still long. They’re still long emails. And she was really worried about people not liking a long email. And I was like, well, if you think about your ideal client, if they are similar to you, you like long emails. I like long emails. There’s gonna be other people out there that like long emails. And more to this point. Right? Because we might send an email that is lengthy, that is jam packed full of value, has a beautiful update, a funny story, whatever it might be. It can sit in that inbox until we have time to actually read it or reread it a couple of times. Right? So it’s not this short lived content like the content that we share on social media. And the last thing here, which is a really big one, is that we don’t own that platform. Right? We are dependent on that platform’s terms, and we are dependent on that platform keeping our profile active. Social media platforms can ban, they can shadow ban, they can limit accounts without warning. With email, you have the control. We see stories all the time where people get taken down on Instagram specifically. And if you have built your business on Instagram, I can only imagine how stressful that is.
Kylie Kelly [00:09:43]:
I can only imagine how much money people lose when that is the only place that they have built their audience, where that is the only place that they sell. It scares the shit out of me. So thinking about how we control email, how we own email, how email is our own business asset, just provides a lot more peace of mind. Right? Just provides a lot more calm. We’re not going to go to bed one night and wake up with our email is gone, where that could happen with your social media accounts. The other thing that I wanted to speak to here was just the depth of a relationship that we can build through our email list. So it’s not just about growing our email list for the numbers’ sake. Right? We actually wanna grow our email list of people that we have a deep relationship with.
Kylie Kelly [00:10:22]:
Now how do we do this? So we do this by providing a lot of value. I’m definitely of the belief that we can never give too much away. So I think providing a lot of value that helps educate your list, it helps provide them with wins, it helps them and adds value to their life is paramount. But also, we can personalise and segment our list so that we can send hyper targeted content. So for example, if you are an e commerce business or you have digital courses or whatever it might be, you’re selling digital stuff online. Right? You can send special offers to those that have purchased before if you tag them through your email service provider, or you can tailor content to someone based on their browsing habits. You can send emails to people that have abandoned their cart. You can send emails to people that are students versus ones that haven’t bought from you.
Kylie Kelly [00:11:07]:
You can send emails to people that have found you in a bundle and might wanna know more about what you do. You can actually personalize and segment your list in a way that allows you to create a deeper relationship. Now a word of warning. Don’t go crazy with this. I have had clients that have had a 100 tags and all these segments, and it can just really complicate your email marketing efforts when you have funnels and all of this stuff set up when you don’t actually have an intention set behind it. Don’t get crazy with it. I would definitely recommend having at least a tag for buyers and a tag for people that haven’t bought from you yet because that way it allows you to see also the health of your list and how many people have actually converted over the time. Right? And, of course, if you wanna tag people when they come from a specific bundle or collaboration just so that you know how successful that bundle or summit was, I think that’s really smart as well.
Kylie Kelly [00:11:58]:
So don’t go crazy with this. But just think as your list grows, like, how can I personalize my emails? How can I segment my list so that I can communicate with them in an effective way? Now I do believe we need to be consistent with our email marketing, with our email list. I would encourage you to be sending at least 1 email a week because, trust me, if you send less than that, they’re not gonna really remember who you are. 2 weeks in an email inbox is a long 2 weeks. Right? So make sure you’re sending weekly emails, and I don’t think you need to segment those. I think you should be able to create a weekly email that goes out to your entire list all in one just to touch base and provide value. You don’t need to segment that. But what I’m talking about here is more when you do have an offer, when you do have a launch, when people are showing interest in something and not showing interest in others.
Kylie Kelly [00:12:40]:
Like, you should be able to personalize it so that you are sending specific content to people that are interested in specific things. Now show me how you do that on social media. And the other thing that I wanted to touch on, of course, is that email is this beautiful place to build trust and nurture the relationships that you have with your ideal clients that are on your email lists. You can structure your emails to tell stories. You can do an educational series. You can have direct conversations. You can ask them to reply to you. And trust me, when you reply to that reply, they’re gonna be like, what? This is actually a real person. And it starts to build this beautiful level of trust. Over time, this is where the magic happens. Again, like I said at the beginning, there’s no silver bullet. There’s no secret. It takes time. Regardless of what strategy that you do focus on, it always takes time. There is no such thing as an overnight success. As much as we might wish that there was, it always takes time.
Kylie Kelly [00:13:37]:
Like I said at the start, I do think that you could go all in on email marketing and email marketing alone and have a successful business without social media. But, of course, there’s the other side of the coin. We still need to be getting people on our email list. We still need to be doing lead generation and actually building that visibility plan around things that will get us seen by people that aren’t on our list yet, especially if your email list isn’t as big as you’d like it to be. So this is where things come into play that do create that awareness with people that don’t know you. So whether that is Instagram Reels, whether that is TikTok, whether that is YouTube, whether that is Pinterest, like whatever it might be, you do need to have a balanced marketing strategy that involves a bit of both. But I really hope that this episode has shown you that you don’t need to do all the things. You could pick 1 or 2 things to focus on, have a robust email marketing strategy, be sending out email has.
Kylie Kelly [00:14:32]:
So instead of building your business just on email has. So instead of building your business just on Instagram, instead of building your business just on Facebook, instead of just throwing everything into TikTok, having this balanced approach where you do have that visibility piece, where you are getting noticed, you are standing out and doing things that you enjoy, but building your business on something that’s stable. Building your business with an email list that is creating that deep relationship with you is the secret to it all. So I wanna leave you with this encouragement. I want you to look at your current marketing strategies and I want you to see where your email marketing efforts could be amplified, could be increased, what you’re actually doing. Are you sending consistent weekly emails? Do you know who is on your list? Is your email list full of your ideal clients? Think about how you’re using your email marketing and how you’re growing your list. And then on the flip side, I want you to think about the social media that you actually love doing. Do you love making reels? Does it give you joy? Then there is a place for them in your business.
Kylie Kelly [00:15:30]:
Right? If you hate creating them and the thought of it just fills you with dread, like, ditch it. You don’t have to do it. Remember that there are no rules. You make the rules. This is your business and you get to market it how ever feels good for you. So I hope you found that helpful. As always, I’m here for any questions and feedback that you might have. You can jump into my Instagram DMs. Bonus points if you send me a voice note. You know that is my love language. Ask any questions. I’m an open book with all of this stuff, but I hope that this has given you some things to think about when it comes to your email marketing and why it is so important that we build this into our business so that it can be sustainable, so that we’re here for the long term, so it can create the life that we wanna live. Right? The life that we dream of having for us and our families. So I love you loads. I’m always cheering you on, and I will speak to you again soon. Alright. Bye for now.
