SPI 422: Email Marketing Audit: Which of These Email Marketing Strategies Are You Actually Doing?

SPI 422: Email Marketing Audit: Which of these email marketing strategies are you actually doing?

Pat Flynn:
In this podcast episode I want to test you, and there is actually a grade that you can get on the other end of this podcast. So what is this about exactly? This is about email marketing. And if you do not have an email list yet, well you failed. You scored a zero because I’m going to go over ten things that you should actually be doing when you are building an email list and you have email marketing as a part of your business. And I don’t know what you’re going to score, but as we go along, try to keep track of what your score is.

Pat:
If you get a 10 out of 10, fantastic. You’re setting yourself up for the best success possible for your online business with email. Maybe you’re a five out of ten, in which case we have a few things to do or maybe you’re on the very lower end which hopefully means you’re just getting started. But if not, you’ve got some catching up to do. Whatever the case is, stick around because I’m going to go over the ten things you should actually be doing when email marketing to succeed in your online business. So stick around. Here we go.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, if he wasn’t online right now, he’d be fishing on a lake with you, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to session 422 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. My name is Pat Flynn here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too. And one of the best ways you can do all of those things is with your emails—the emails that you send to people and how you collect these emails. And we’re going to go over ten things you should actually be doing to best set yourself up for success and your online business up for success in this world right now.

Pat:
And it doesn’t matter when you’re listening to this. If you have an email list, awesome. Let’s maximize the opportunities. If you don’t have an email list well you, like I said earlier, failed. But what’s great is you can come in now with this knowledge ahead of time and blast through the competition and get a little bit more of a head start when you actually start your email list. So, qualifier, you need an email list. If you haven’t yet started an email list, a couple of things I can offer for you right now.

Pat:
Number one, I recommend checking out 100emails.com. This is a free challenge that team SPI and I have put together for you to help you get your first 100 emails within three days. It’s a zero to seventy two-hour email marketing challenge and tens of thousands of people have used it already to success to start their email list. And no, you do not need to buy anything. Literally you just sign up, every day for three days I send you an email with some instructions and then I’ll tell you what to do with it. And it works. I swear it works. So 100emails.com.

Pat:
Now, if you are ready for an email service provider, I’ll be mentioning one throughout this episode here that has a lot of the capabilities that I’m going to be talking about, but honestly it doesn’t really matter what email service provider you’re using to be honest, just do it. But if you aren’t on one yet, an email service provider and you want to get into one that I’ve recommended, definitely get involved with ConvertKit, that’s ConvertKit. I’ve been with them since 2014 after starting with AWeber and then moving to Infusionsoft and then finding my home in ConvertKit.

Pat:
And not only am I an affiliate for ConvertKit, which means if you go through my affiliate link at smartpassiveincome.com/ConvertKit, I do get a little bit of a kickback for that. And thank you so much for that. There’s a special sort of offer there for you if you want to check it out. But I am an adviser for the company now. I love it so much that I’m an adviser. So literally I fly to Boise, Idaho, which is where their stationed Nathan Barry, the founder’s been on the podcast before and he’s bootstrapped the company and he really cares about his creators and I love company so much.

Pat:
I wanted to come on and help out even more. And it’s great. A lot of people love it. A lot of SPI users love it too. And if that’s what you choose to use, then awesome, if not, no worries, no worries. Because we’re going to get into this checklist/audit right now. And each of these things is worth one point. So we’re going to make the math very simple here so you don’t need to write things down. Just kind of memorize over time as we go along what your score is. Each of these ten things are worth one point. And again, we’re shooting for 10 out of 10 here.

Pat:
So we’re going to play this little game and let’s just start right at the top. Number one, again, worth one point. You have opt in forms on your most popular pages, right? Opt in forms on your most popular pages. Now, how do you know what your most popular pages are? There’s likely an idea in your mind of what those things are. However, here’s a hint. Don’t guess. Use your analytics to understand what the most popular posts are on your website. A lot of times, yes, it’s going to be your homepage, but other than that, what else is it?

Pat:
Maybe it’s one post that seems to get a lot of Google love. Well, are you proactively collecting emails in the middle of that post? And I’m not just talking about opt in forums on your sidebar or at the bottom of your posts either. On these popular posts, sprinkle them throughout the post. People are showing up there. Maybe even put it up top or perhaps you might want to use some of the features that a lot of email service providers have, which is a timed pop up.

Pat:
I would not—Let me repeat—I would not have an immediate pop-up show up, but I would explore the option of either a popup that shows up maybe halfway down the page, which means it’s still a screen takeover, but it’s not going to interrupt a person as soon as they get there. That can actually reduce the SEO because people might leave right away once they get interrupted. We don’t want to interrupt the conversation, but we want to start the conversation and then once they scroll down a little bit or after a certain amount of time, I’d say maybe a minute at least, you can then go, “By the way, did you know that I have this lead magnet?” Or this freebie here or this amazing newsletter with a community behind it that I think you should get involved with.

Pat:
So that’s what I would want you to do. Put opt in forms on that page using either a popup form or embedded forms, maybe one or two throughout the middle of that page. Or you can use sort of the happy medium there, which is the slider or the toaster pop-up, which is not one that does a full screen takeover, but it can pop up sort of on the bottom, in the corner, like bread coming out of a toaster. Whether it’s gluten free or not, it doesn’t matter, right? You have a little pop up show up, it captures people’s attention, but it doesn’t interrupt people in their flow just like a pop up would.

Pat:
So number one, did you get a point? Opt in forms on your most popular pages? Have you checked your analytics lately to see what your most popular pages and blog posts and podcast episodes are? Now, if we’re talking podcast episodes, then it’s going to be a little bit more tricky. You might, however, benefit from re-uploading really popular episodes with something that you’ve added on at the end. And if you use a host like Buzzsprout or Libsyn, when you replace those old files with new ones, it’s not going to mess up your analytics. It’ll still track the number of downloads that you had and just add on with the new ones.

Pat:
And what I would like you to do is maybe in the beginning of that episode, because it’s a popular one, or at the end or both, have essentially your own ad for signing up to your email list. Preferably what’s called a content upgrade, which is going to be something specifically and mmm, just mouthwatering—I don’t know why I went, mmm, that’s kind of weird via audio—. But something that people would get excited about offering their email for, like a checklist or a quick start guide or something related to that particular episode itself.

Pat:
So opt-in forms or call to action at least on your most popular pieces of content. That’s number one. So did you get a point? Hopefully you got a point there. If not, that’s okay. This is a learning experience and that’s why we’re here. Number two, a two-step opt in process. Now this works most of the time to increase your conversion rates. It doesn’t always, and it doesn’t have to be every single time you ask for an email. But first let me define what a two step opt in process is.

Pat:
And this was actually defined back in the early days of the podcast with Clay Collins who is sort of the creator of this. I helped him through building of a tool called Leadpages. I was the advisor for that company as well. And he and I together created the two-step opt in process, which is pretty cool. And so what that means is instead of on your page, when a person lands on it, it shows a name field and an email field, it does very traditionally. Instead, it shows a button and the button when a person clicks on it, that step one, shows a popup that then step two requires them to put their name and email.

Pat:
Now, why would a two step opt in process work better than a one-step opt in process? Meaning they don’t have to click a button, it’s just right there. It’s because when you have a two-step opt in process, all you want a person to see and do is just click a button. So let’s say you’re offering a lead magnet for example, and you’d say, click here to get your lead magnet. This has the impression of a giving suggestion versus a, hey, could I take your name and email?

Pat:
This is more of a, hey, I’d love to offer this free lead magnet to you. Or hey, I’d love for you to join the community, click here and then step two, here’s how you go about joining. Or here’s how you go about getting access to your free guide or your lead magnet or whatever it might be. So the two-step opt in process has this more of a giving field and also it asks for a really quick yes. And that yes says, “Hey, click here if you’re interested.” A very small yes before, the bigger yes which is, okay, now you have to put your name and email. Simply asking for the name and email upfront can, for some people, be a little bit too, I don’t know, you’re kind of rushing into the relationship a little bit, right?

Pat:
We want to go, “Hey, do you want to go on a date?” Okay. Okay, cool. “What’s your number? I’ll call you,” kind of thing. So I don’t know if that analogy makes sense in this. I think that makes sense. I think that makes sense. It’s been a while since I’ve dated. I’ve been happily married for over a decade, so I don’t know. I don’t know what the young kids are doing these days, but that’s step number two, a two-step opt in process. Now, I don’t know if you’ve scored one point or two points so far or zero points, it doesn’t really matter. This is a learning process, right?

Pat:
Number three, point number three out of ten is a custom thank you page. A customized thank you page which shows up after a person clicks subscribe or yes, I’ll join the newsletter or yes, hand me that freebie they put in their name and email, they click, they go to a custom thank you page. A lot of times on these email service providers, they give you a default landing page that’s neatly designed, often very minimal, but it just takes them off the website and then it goes like, “Hey, well, okay, awesome. Thanks for subscribing. You’ll get an email very shortly to confirm your subscription,” et cetera.

Pat:
And that’s it, doesn’t matter if it’s a two step or a one step opt in process, that’s the normal default thank you page. However, in every email service provider you can easily, instead of driving them to a built-in thank you page from that email service provider, you can instead send them to a customized thank you page that’s on your own website. And the beauty of this is kind of two fold. Number one, it keeps people on your website, but number two, you can customize that experience a little bit more.

Pat:
And a thank you page is actually a really amazing opportunity to do a number of things. Number one, you can ask a person to go, “Hey, make sure you get the email to click on your subscription so you can get your freebie. And if you can’t find it, check your promotional tab, check your spam folder just in case.” And we’re not going to get into deliverability here, that’s for another episode. But that’s stuff that I talk about in my email marketing course, Email Marketing Magic. Deliverability is a whole chapter in that course.

Pat:
But to go back to what I was talking about, having a person know where to find your email is a great thing obviously if it happens to land in those spam folders or promotional tabs. Secondly, you can let a person know that they can white list your email address or click on that star icon in Gmail, which signals to Gmail to never put it anywhere but in the primary tab. Thirdly, this is a great opportunity for you to have some other customized messaging that is more in your voice so it continues the conversation versus it’s end the conversation after you subscribe, goes to another webpage and it’s controlled by somebody else, right? You get to continue that conversation in your own style.

Pat:
Number four benefit of having the thank you page is you’re able to add even other things that they could do, write then and there. This is a great moment in that conversation that you’re having from however they found you, to reading on your blog, to then subscribing to then thank you page. I mean, they’re warm right now so you can offer some other things. A couple of things that I’ve learned over the past number of years to do on a thank you page is share other relevant content that may be helpful to them in that moment.

Pat:
“Hey, an email is going to be sent your way, but in the meantime, check out these really popular posts on the webpage that I think can help you right now.” Number two, you could even put some products or other freebies that are on there. I know a lot of people who go, “Hey, by the way, if you like how this email service thing is set up that you’re experiencing right now, why don’t you sign up to ConvertKit?” And if you’re teaching people how to do online business, it’s going to matter more. But I do that sometimes as well too.

Pat:
When a person lands on a thank you page, I go, “By the way, if you like this process that I’m taking you through, it’s all run through ConvertKit, you can sign up here through my affiliate link.” So that’s number three. A custom thank you page or a please confirm page. There’s a lot of things you could do there for sure to have a person confirm and all that stuff. Number four, how are you scoring so far? Maybe three out of three, two out of three, doesn’t matter. This is all a learning experience. Point number four, a custom thank you success page.

Pat:
Now this is different than after they subscribe and they’re waiting for that email to confirm if it’s a double opt-in process meaning they need to confirm that email to make sure it’s real and get their freebie. The thank you page I’m talking about now is a success page that’s shown after they click on that link in that email. This is like a secondary thank you page. And very similarly, you can add a lot of the similar things on there like, “Here’s some more content that can help you. Here’s a download to the freebie in case you didn’t get it in the email. Here are some other things you can do. You can subscribe to my podcast, you can subscribe to me on Instagram. You could subscribe to me on Twitter,” whatever you want to put there.

Pat:
Again, that’s five, six levels deep now in the experience that this person has had with you. I mean normally by default, a page like this might just go, “Your subscription has been confirmed, please check your email.” Another dead page. We don’t want conversations to end. If at any point in time, in the journey that a person has on your website, they come to a dead end, you’re doing it dead wrong. You got to keep that conversation going. Even if it’s just a few links that they could go to get some other stuff on your website or to, “Hey, now that you’ve done that awesome, step two, subscribe to my podcast, click here to get it on Spotify. Click here to get it on Apple. Click here to get it on Stitcher,” all that great stuff.

Pat:
So that’s number four, custom thank you success page for after they receive that initial email. After they subscribe and they click, yes, I’m a human being, I want my free thing. Awesome. And that thank you page can be really, really great. I would also make sure to include some images in there and speak in your language like, “Hey, thanks again, you’re awesome. Appreciate you and look out for some more emails coming your way very soon, including one about X, Y, and Z. By the way, since you’re here, check out these posts and if you’d like, subscribe to the podcast here. Here’s what you can learn,” and always just keep selling the next call to action from there.

Pat:
All right. So that is four points, perhaps, potentially four points up to that point. All right, number five. Sometimes your subscribers forget that they’re already subscribed to your list and then they try to subscribe again. So when they do that, what happens? Now by default, your email service provider will typically send them to a page that might say something like you’re already subscribed or it might not do anything at all. It might just take them through the process again, which isn’t terrible. It’s at least letting them know what to do next or giving them access to the thing that they’re subscribing to if they forgot they were subscribed already.

Pat:
But oftentimes in these email service providers, you can have a page that might say something like, “Hey, you’re already subscribed and you’re awesome because of that. So here are all the things that you probably wanted to get access to,” or what have you. So this one’s a little bit less. From the test that I’ve run with a number of my students, this one here is not often talked about but it is worth sort of paying attention to because this does happen sometimes. A big question that a lot of people have is, “Pat, what if a person’s on my email list already and I’m giving away a lead magnet, but they have to subscribe to get it?”

Pat:
So there’s a couple of things that you can do here because I think what the worry is, well, you’re going to continue to ask a person who’s already subscribed to subscribe again to get the thing. So if you are, for example, creating a second lead magnet, something new to share with your audience to build your email list in the future, well these people who are on your email list already, wouldn’t it be great for them to get access to this first? What an incredible benefit! What an amazing way to go, “I’m so glad I’m on this list.”

Pat:
So if you are creating something new as opposed to letting them go, “There’s a new thing, I have to go to this page and re-register,” why not just from the goodness of your heart, send it out to everybody like a free gift? And have it sent out early before anybody else gets access to it because they’re already subscribed to your list. Make them feel special. That’s what I would do. That’s what I would do. So if you’re doing any of that kind of stuff, I would out count that as a point for number five because that’s some Ninja stuff that you can do.

Pat:
All right. Let’s go to point number six. Point number six. How’s your score doing? Looking okay? If not, that’s all right. Like I said, this is just a learning experience, but hopefully you’ll take action on these things too. Number six, you need a killer first email, right? So here check this out: New visitor lands on your website and they like what they see. A few yeses later, they’re now subscribed to your email list. A minute later, that first followup email arrives, this is after they’ve clicked the confirmation, they’ve gotten to the success page on your website. They’re like, “Okay, cool, I can’t wait for the next emails.”

Pat:
And then you send that first follow up email that now is for people who are subscribed to your list and you hopefully know a lot about them so you can really drive home that message and really impress them. I mean, this email better be good. Now, actually it better be the best. You can have your best tip there. One hopefully that would include, for example, a quick actionable tip. And that means something that doesn’t take too much time but can produce an immediate result. So according to Charles Duhigg, this is real life podcast and I’m not going to edit it because it forces me to get better. But also I want you to know I make mistakes too. So it’s all good.

Pat:
Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, small, quick wins were a whole chapter in that book because they start a habit of reward in people’s minds. And if you’re the one providing that quick reward, those people will have a habit to want to continually come back to you for more. So first email equals small quick win. And the smaller and quicker, the better. Show that you have value to add. So we did this one for a while on the email list when people subscribed, but then everybody started knowing about this because we started sharing it with everybody that we took this off and we have a different first email now.

Pat:
But our first email a while back, especially when it was just a blog before the podcast came, before the YouTube channel came, it was just all about blogging, right? And I had accumulated a large number of bloggers following me and learning how to blog from me too. So content creation was a big struggle. So I knew I wanted to create something that would tie into who I knew my audience was, bloggers, and a big struggle that they had, which was finding out what content to create that would be helpful for their audience, that would create viral content that would go wild.

Pat:
And so I gave them a little trick in that first email that they got after they subscribed. And again, I don’t do this anymore. And of course you’re learning this tip right now so you don’t have to subscribe to get it. I’m just giving it to you as a listener. But if you’re looking to understand exactly what kinds of content you should be writing about or podcasting about or YouTubing about within your niche, here’s a little secret. Go to Amazon and go to the books, type in a keyword related to your industry or market and find the top books that show up.

Pat:
And within those books, look inside the cover because you can do that. You click on the picture and you can look inside the cover and see the table of contents. And that’s what you want, the table of contents. Because on the table of contents you’re going to find the thing that the author probably spent the most time on while writing this book, is making sure that they’ve covered everything that they needed to cover. Now mind you, I’m not telling you and please don’t copy what they’ve done. You are not copying anything.

Pat:
You’re getting inspiration from the topics that they have hand picked to put in their book to take even further. Meaning—let’s say for example, you look up a fly fishing because your niche is fly fishing and you see that there’s a chapter about tying flies that you totally didn’t even think about because you’re a fly fisherman, but you don’t tie your own flies. You buy your own flies, but now you realize there’s a whole category of fly fishing that I didn’t even discover called tying flies where you hand tie them and you tie feathers and little string around them to hopefully attract fish when you go fly fishing. And there’s all different types too.

Pat:
So you might do the research to figure out how to write a post called Top 10 Ways to Start Learning How to Tie a Fly. And maybe you crowdsource that from people who tie flies. Maybe it’s, ties flies, it rhymes so it’s hard for me to say. Three kinds of flies you can tie within ten minutes, or all the materials you need to tie your very first fly. Is your fly up? Just kidding. It would hopefully be up because if it was down that wouldn’t be good. All right, it’s late at night everybody. It’s late at night right now but I’m creating this for you because email marketing is really important, right?

Pat:
I do, however, have a course called Email Marketing Magic. It went through a beta programmer earlier in the year, very successful by the way. Hundreds of people got in, lots of people getting results building their email list of thousands, but more so actually automating their email list and turning a profit from it as well, which is what the course is about. If you’d like to check that out, it’s sort of a little sponsorship portion in the middle here of the show, but it’s my own course.

Pat:
If you go to smartpassiveincome.com/magic, smartpassiveincome.com/magic you’ll see that course and we may be in the middle of a launch by the time you’re listening to this. And if so, you’ll see the page there and the discount, the bonus. If not, you’ll see it there. However, it is being offered right now. Smartpassiveincome.com/magic is where I’d like you to go. But anyway, again, the tying flies thing, don’t copy. Use that as an inspiration, right? Go find people who are influencers in that little tiny niche within that bigger niche and connect with them and just use those book covers as inspiration or looking inside the book cover as inspiration. Cool? We’re cool, so that was our first tip for a while.

Pat:
Now actually, our killer first email is one that helps us stand out in the audience, which is we actually ask often for replies. It actually depends on where people get in, because now and you’ll see this later in the checklist here, there’s some more advanced things that you can do with email to understand a little bit more about your audience and your subscribers even before they’ve actually replied back or even received an email from you. You can learn so much from them. But anyway, we’ll get into that in a little bit.

Pat:
But yes, a killer first email, but now I actually recommend also using email marketing, whether it’s your first email, second or fifth or tenth, whatever as a way to communicate. This is sort of a bonus tip for you. Use email to communicate. And communication happens in a two-way street. You sending messages to them, your audience, your subscribers, but asking for messages to come back the other way. What if you were to ask a question like, “What are you struggling with right now? Hit reply and I’ll do my best to see what I can do to help you out.”

Pat:
Can you imagine just how personal that feels, even though it might be an automated autoresponder email? Incredible. And what are you going to get? You’re going to get your own audience giving you, probably if you get new subscribers every day, every day you will get emails from your target audience in their own voice using their own language about what they need help with. Imagine what you can do with that information. You could create more blog posts, you can create more lead magnets, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, courses, books. Definitely keep track of those answers and try to see if you can understand if there’s any patterns in there too.

Pat:
So that was point number six, kind of went off a little tangent there, but I’m going to bring it back to course here. That was a killer first email. So that was number six. So what have we got so far? We started with opt-in forms on your most popular pages, use your analytics to understand. Number two, a two step opt in process, number three, a custom thank you page or a please confirm the email that was sent to you page and then the success page thank you page, which is where they go after they click a link on that email. Making sure those are custom, making sure they’re on your website, making sure that they have all the things on there that you want to use to continue that conversation with people.

Pat:
Number five, an already subscribed page or at least a plan for people who are already subscribed, especially when it comes to lead magnets and things like that. Number six, a killer first email. Here’s the next new one. Number seven, point number seven, let’s see if you get a point here, scannable content and isolated links. I cluster these together because really what this is all about is the design of your emails. And I’m not talking about design in terms of the colors and pictures, layout, framing, images and spacing horizontally and all that stuff, I’m more talking about how’s the spacing vertically.

Pat:
And when I mean scannable content, I want it to be scannable, you actually have headlines in there and sub headlines. When it talks about isolated links, I mean your links that you mentioned in your email. And I drive this home in my email marketing course because it’s so important, especially for mobile users. Think about that. At least on my website now, I think it’s 60 to 65 percent of people are viewing my content mobile. And I’d be curious to what your answer is. You can check that in analytics as well.

Pat:
But either way for mobile or desktop, we can’t control how people read our emails or where people read our emails, but we can control how easy it is to read, meaning very clear subject line obviously. Subject line, very important. You want to have a killer subject line or else all the stuff in the email doesn’t matter at all. Number two, you want to have that first sentence of the email be really, really curiosity driven so much that they have to continue to read and then you got them, right? So you need a good hook in the beginning as well.

Pat:
But as you go along, especially if this is longer content, which usually in auto responders, it can be quite longer because you’re teaching versus a broadcast which is more timely and things you need to do now, you need to have some comfort, some breathing room for the eye as they come down. If it’s just one giant paragraph, and even if the paragraphs are spaced out without headers in between, people are going to get lost, it’s going to get tiresome. They’re not going to know where they’re at. And then with links, having them be on their own line is key, especially for the fat thumbers like me, I got what I like to call…

Pat:
If you ever see me in person, ask me to see my thumbs. I have Nintendo thumbs as they call them or club thumbs. I don’t like them. I don’t like them at all, but that’s just who I am. I’m a person with club thumbs where literally the nail is wider than it is taller. It’s so strange. I’m very embarrassed. If you see me, I’m often holding my thumb in my fist because I’m like, “I don’t want people to see it.” No, it’s not that bad. But yeah, look at my thumbs next time we meet. Hopefully we get to meet again sometime because, hey, we’re in isolation right now. We are in quarantine. I mean, maybe in my live stream you can ask me.

Pat:
If you check me live every morning, 8:00 a.m. Pacific, 11:00 a.m. Eastern on YouTube. If you catch me live there and you’ve listened to this episode, that’ll be a little fun. Easter egg. If you catch me live at patflynn.com/theincomestream, again every morning at 8:00 a.m. As long as we’re quarantined. Do me a favor, ask me to see my thumbs and that’s how I’ll know you’ll have listened to this episode. I’m not going to tell anybody else about that. So that’s a little gift for you.

Pat:
Anyway, scannable content and isolated links. So for the fat thumbers like me out there, make sure that when you put a link in your emails, you essentially set it up by saying, “And if you want to get Email Marketing Magic, click on the link below.” Colon, space and then a fat link, a link that’s a hyperlink that says click here to get access to Email Marketing Magic and your special bonuses. That whole sentence will link because it’ll be double lined on mobile to be nice and bold and it’ll be underlined and it’ll be a different color, you can’t miss it. You absolutely can’t miss it.

Pat:
Sometimes, especially when it’s blue text underline versus black text and it’s just on a mobile device with people’s eyes and you’re scrolling through really fast, you’re going to miss the link, especially if it’s within a paragraph. So scannable content, easy to read, and isolated links. That’s point number seven. Point number eight. Here we go. Remind people when and why they subscribed. Now the why is more important than when. Oftentimes you can even include special code within your email and remind people when they subscribed.

Pat:
And why is that important? Because a couple of things you can do. Number one, it just reminds them how long they’ve been on your list. And if they’re new, awesome. They can hopefully see that, I haven’t even been here that long and I’m getting some great information. Because everybody gets tons of emails every day. It’s nice to sort of remind people where they came from and what they’re doing there. And then for those who have been subscribed for a while, it’ll remind them that they’ve been on this for a good amount of time and they’re still getting value from it.

Pat:
And of course, a preface to this is make sure you send valuable emails that are worthwhile to read, but having the timestamp in there can be really useful. It depends on your email service provider, but that’s a fun thing to add sort of at the bottom or maybe the around the signature of the email. I know a lot of people who put it in at the top actually because it’s just as a quick thing like, “Hey, you subscribed to this email list on this date,” which makes people go, “I did? Okay, cool.” But I think the most important thing is whether you say directly or indirectly through the content that you share in your email, have something that reminds them why they subscribed.

Pat:
And I often in my email list at least say, “Hey, thank you for subscribing. The real reason why I work so hard to make these emails this way is because I want to make sure that you get the value that you deserve being here. Thank you for trusting me with your email. Look out for the next email so that you can do X, Y, and Z.” So just kind of reminding people every once in a while. It doesn’t have to be in every single email, but if you have an autoresponder sequence and let’s say it comes out every week, I would say every once a month. Just kind of remind people at the bottom of those autoresponder emails, check in with them.

Pat:
Just kind of “Hey, content aside, how are you doing? I just want to make sure you’re cool here. What we do, we try to help you make more time, make more money, help more people. And hopefully this email proves that we’re upholding our end of the bargain. And again, thank you for subscribing, looking forward to sending you the next email.” Sweet. Next. Number nine. This is probably my favorite tip of them all because, and I’m really excited, ConvertKit, which is the email service provider that I use, recently added this feature and it is my most requested or was my most requested feature because it’s just so powerful.

Pat:
So imagine you send an email and it’s an autoresponder email so a person gets it eight weeks after. But at the bottom of that email, somehow there’s a call to action to go and subscribe to the webinar that you are holding next week or to get tickets to the live event that finally opened up that you are selling, or to check you out live tomorrow morning because you just decided to do it last night. How can you potentially do that? Well, you could go into every single email and insert and copy and paste that link in that call to action at the end of every email.

Pat:
But then after that, you got to change it because somebody is going to get that same email a week later because they subscribed a week before or a week after. And so that’s not easy to do. But you can use something called a text snippet or global text snippet. And what this does is it allows you to, in your emails, just insert a little code that is master controlled on the backend for you to change whenever you want. So no matter what emails people are getting or when they’re getting them, it’ll always say what you put in the global snippet at that time.

Pat:
Now, you don’t have to include the global snippet in every single email, but putting it in your auto responder emails, for example, in a PS at the bottom of every single one that just says, “Hey, PS, by the way, next week I’m going to be conducting my first live webinar. I’d love for you to be there and check it out.” Whatever the direct call to action is for something timely like that. I mean, that is a huge deal because you’re likely sending out hundreds, potentially even thousands of emails a day without you even knowing it because it’s all autoresponder based, right?

Pat:
An auto responder, once again, is people who subscribe to your list and if you choose to send an email now and you send it to them, that’s called a broadcast. It’s not an autoresponder. An autoresponder email is one that you wrote two months ago that is the first one they get a week after they subscribe. And somebody who subscribes next week, well, they’re going to get that email first a week later. So they were pre-written. But it’s so powerful to be able to control a global snippet that you can include as a PS or in the middle, sort of a mid roll inside your email call to action sort of situation.

Pat:
I mean, man, how powerful is that? It’s totally ninja and I can’t wait to utilize that more because it literally just came out with ConvertKit. So you should try that out. Number ten, we’ve sort of brushed along this already so I kind of gave it away, but I’m going to give you a point for this if you do this, if you encourage replies, I want you to encourage replies. That’s point number ten. If at any moment in the first four or five emails that you send out with your autoresponder, you encourage a reply, bonus point for you or a point for you. Not bonus point, because that’s ten.

Pat:
We get really selfish with our email list, right? Not just because we don’t want to share it with others, which is totally understandable, but because we are always having a one sided conversation. We tell, we share, we promote and that’s awesome, but we don’t ask. We don’t wonder, we’re not curious. We don’t encourage a reply. And in several emails I’ve sent in the past, I’ve actually asked my subscribers for a reply and you should too. You can ask things like, what are you struggling with? Which we went over earlier. What would you like to see me write a blog post about? Or who would you like to see me interview on a podcast?

Pat:
What was your first impression when you visited my website? Please tell me how can I improve to better serve you? What’s one thing that bothers you about your online business or blog or what’s one thing that bothers you about the niche that you’re in? I’d love to know. Hit reply. I want to answer back. And if you’re just starting out and you’re like, “I guess I do have the time to reply,” that’s great. That’s your huge advantage. If you’re just starting out, you have the advantage of being able to see all the answers that come in and reply personally to every single one.

Pat:
And no, this is not passive at all, but it shouldn’t be passive. This is not scalable. This is relationship building and when you’re just starting out, that’s going to be your big differentiator that allows you to compete with the big guys. Because those bigger brands are not going to have the time to be as personable as you can. So if you’re just starting out, yes, encourage reply and then see if you can reply back and have a conversation. Get to know them. Pay attention to the language that they use. Pay attention and keep track of all the answers because that’s just going to tell you what direction to go next.

Pat:
So, what’s your score, right? Let’s go over this one more time. Number one, opt in forms on your most popular posts. Point number two, a two-step opt in process. Number three, a custom thank you/please confirm page, so right after they hit subscribe. Number four, a custom thank you after confirmation page. So after they click the email that they got to confirm, where do they go after that? Is that custom? That’s number four. Number five, a custom already subscribed, I’m going to call it experience, not just a page. Because you can kind of do that however you want.

Pat:
I just want you to think about the people who are already subscribed and how they need to either resubscribe to get something or are you giving them that thing early. Number six, a killer first email. Number seven, scannable content and isolated links. Number eight, remind people when and most importantly why they subscribed. Number nine, apply a global text snippet. And number ten, welcome and encourage replies. So what was your score? We didn’t go over a lot of the traditional stuff that I would hopefully hope that you’re doing if you’re doing email marketing, such as writing great subject lines, such as purging your email list maybe once a quarter, once every six months perhaps to keep it clean, you’re paying attention to your deliverability, segmenting, tagging and automation strategies.

Pat:
And again, this is the kind of stuff that I teach in my online course, Email Marketing Magic, which at the time that this goes out is available. And you’ll see the page at smartpassiveincome.com/magic and it was our most successful beta course that we’ve ever run. We had over 300 people join, which is amazing. We’re looking to see how many people we can help with email because it’s so important. And I’ve talked about email before. I’ll link to some other shows that we’ve done about email marketing and just how important it is and what you could do with your email list in your business.

Pat:
But we’ll also link to some other helpful resources as well. But the most helpful one being our premium course, which just came out this year, Email Marketing Magic at smartpassiveincome.com/magic. I mean, there’s so much to unpack there, which is why actually this course was the number one requested one that we’ve had out of everything that we’ve done. And it’s very relevant whether you are podcasting, blogging, doing YouTube, email marketing is so important because our other means of reaching our audiences like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, other social media platforms—I mean, these platforms are getting in the way. The algorithms are messing with our audience finding our stuff.

Pat:
And even if you have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, I guarantee you, not even 10 percent of those people are going to see when you come out with a new video. And when you have a Facebook post or an Instagram post, I guarantee you a majority of the people who have said, “Yes, I want to follow your stuff,” are not seeing your stuff. But you still control your email list. That’s the thing. There are these sandboxes that we keep playing in and that other people own. But your email list, you own.

Pat:
And that to me is also the best business insurance possible because if something were to happen to your website or all your social media accounts were to go away for whatever reason, guess what you still have at the end of the day, your email list. And I remember my website was hacked in 2013 and I lost access to everything except my email list. And that allowed me to continue to not only stay in communication with everybody and let them know what was happening, but number two, we were still able to drive traffic to our podcast episodes and actually still make sales during that time period when the entire website was down.

Pat:
Got to build an email list; and if you haven’t done that yet, I’d recommend checking out again, 100emails.com or subscribing to and getting access to ConvertKit, which you can do for free at the start. If you go to smartpassiveincome.com/ConvertKit, that’s where you can go and that is an affiliate link, just FYI. And then if you’re interested in diving even deeper into this, you’ve been doing email marketing or you know you’re just getting started, whether you have a business already or not and you want to do it the right way, smartpassiveincome.com/magic from this episode will take you to the Email Marketing Magic course and I hope you enjoy that. And if not, if you’re not ready for that or you cannot afford it, if it’ll put you in debt, don’t, please do not buy it.

Pat:
This is an investment and there are a lot of free things that you can use to work your way through email marketing. But if you want the convenient and clean and step-by-step way to go about it, well then this would be a great investment and hopefully provide an amazing ROI in the future for you. So again, smartpassiveincome.com/magic. And the show notes for this episode can be found at smartpassiveincome.com/session422. Once again, smartpassiveincome.com/session422.

Pat:
Thank you so much #TeamFlynn, I appreciate you. Hope to see you live on my morning show The Income Stream. Yes, that is the name of the show, The Income Stream, 8:00 a.m. Pacific, 11:00 a.m. Eastern. I think that’s 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. UK ish. If you go to patflynn.com/theincomestream, you’ll see the next waiting room available and the next time it is there. But until then, I hope you’re staying safe. Hope you’re staying well and I just appreciate you for your time and attention and look forward to serving you even more in upcoming episodes. Hit subscribe if you haven’t already. Thank you in advance for all those amazing reviews that are coming in on Apple. And as always, #TeamFlynnforthewin. Appreciate you. Bye.

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