Rev & Reach Episode 31 Transcript
“Build Your List, Save Your Business”

Lori Jo Vest

[00:05] Hello! Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev and Reach, where
those of us at PopSpeed Digital share our secrets for success and the things that we do to
get results for our marketing clients. This episode is called “Build Your List, Save Your
Business,” and what we’re talking about is why your email list should never be deprioritized. Basically, you own your list. You do not own your social followers. You do not own a lot of the properties that we use for marketing. Your email, however, is yours. Unlike social platforms, your email is an asset that you control, not one that is gated by an algorithm. What we see with our clients — and we do a lot of emails. We do newsletters. We do promotion of events. We do fundraising through email. We do all kinds of things on mail, and there is a direct correlation every time between the sends and the action of our prospects and our current customers. Every single campaign that we send to a client list produces a measurable spike in clicks, replies, donations, bookings. The list is a demand lever, not just a newsletter. An email list isn’t a broadcast tool; it’s a revenue tool. And if you don’t have a list, start one today. When we started PopSpeed, I think we had 41 people on our list. That’s okay. Those 41 people were meaningful, valuable contacts for us. One of the things that you want to think about is what platform you would use for your email. We are big on Constant Contact because we are an agency partner with them, and we are also big on Mailchimp because we work in Mailchimp for some of our clients that had a pre-existing email setup that we kind of fell into and started managing for them. Both platforms are fantastic in that they authenticate the sender identity in ways that cut down on emails landing in spam or getting flagged as phishing, by verifying the authenticity of the user’s emails. You won’t get flagged if you use either of these two platforms, and I’ll tell you why.

They are so particular about the lists that they maintain for you. I’ll tell you a story. We were working for Brain Cancer Center for a while, and they decided to start doing email. They took the list off of their internal email system — they were part of a large healthcare system — and they gave it to me, and I put it on Constant Contact. They had permission to email that list. Unfortunately, because the email looked different to them, a lot of people saw it come through and weren’t real sure. They marked it as spam. Constant Contact shut down the send within maybe 1,000 people, and I had to call and beg them to allow us to continue. And the guy said, “Well, you know, this is normal. This happens when you move your email list from an internal email provider, something inside your company, to a platform like Constant Contact or Mailchimp.” He suggested that we add a little line to the top of all of our emails that says, “You are receiving this email as a member of our community. If you would like to unsubscribe, scroll to the bottom, and there’s a button that makes it really easy,” or something like that. We put that on the top of the email, we resent it, and it was fine. But they are picky, and honestly, they need to be picky, because as a company that does email, they need to make sure that their reputation is solid. One of the ways they do that — Mailchimp automatically scans campaigns to catch likely abuse before it even goes out, and Constant Contact runs permission-based mailing with great unsubscribe tools, domain authentication, which is huge, and two-factor authentication to protect contact data. Those kinds of things are really important, and security isn’t just IT hygiene.

[03:10] If you get flagged as a spam-sending email, it’s really hard to get that credibility
back in the email system, because you’ll get labeled in all kinds of internal systems because
you were flagged as spam by the larger ecosystem. So it’s something to think about. If
you’re using your current internal email to send promotional emails to your customer and
prospect base, rethink that and consider going with Mailchimp or Constant Contact for
sendability and for credibility. It makes you look more credible, and it actually is more
credible, because you’ve got systems in place at those two email platforms that make sure
the things that you’re doing are not going to get you tagged. So something to think about:
consider going with Constant Contact or Mailchimp. Now let’s talk about newsletters versus
one-topic promotions. What we say is they both work, but they do different jobs. For
example, a newsletter — we do a lot of those. One we do is for a grief support group that
we manage digital marketing for. We send an e-newsletter out every month. There’s an
address from the director of the group that kind of introduces it, and there’s her photo. So there’s a real personal touch to it, and it builds relationship and trust over time and keeps you top of mind in between customer and prospect contacts. It’s one of those things that we
really recommend, because it’s a way of keeping in touch and providing valuable content.
You don’t just want to promote, promote, promote in your newsletter. You want to make sure that you’re providing good content that helps them. For example, we will pull a valuable bit of information out of this podcast, drop that into a story in our monthly newsletter, and add a link that goes to the episode we’re pulling from. That allows people to read it and see great information, or read it, see great information and go deeper by clicking on the link and listening to the whole episode. Those are the kinds of things that you want to do with a newsletter. The other option is one-topic promos, and we do a lot of those as well. Those drive a specific action. It’s a sale. It’s a webinar sign-up. It’s a limited offer. It’s a particular one-topic thing. The best practice is to mix those up a little bit. Maybe you have a newsletter that comes out every month, and then when you have a special promotion or something really unusual, new or different to say, you send out a one-topic promotion. Those are the kinds of things that you can send to your clients. It’s not hard to figure out what to say, because every single day in your business, you are creating content.
The things that you do for your clients and the way that you do it can be used to create helpful, useful information, and that is what you want to send with your email, just like it’s what you want to use on social media. Helpful, useful information causes people to come to you, see you as credible, know they can trust you, and also follow your advice. And good advice for free is what develops relationships that lead to business. It’s just how it works.

The last thing I want to touch on here is cadence. One email per week is the ceiling we recommend for most small businesses. More than that, and you’re going to start getting unsubscribes. You’re going to start getting spam complaints, because we all get too many emails. Make sure yours is valuable, and make sure yours comes at a cadence that makes sense for your prospect or customer. The fix for cadence anxiety, if you think that you’re sending too many, isn’t to send less. It’s making sure that each send is funny, it’s useful, it’s valuable. That’s the kind of information that you want to send, and don’t send it every two or three days. Nobody wants that. One email per week is the top limit for what you want to
send.

[09:07] We send one email a month, but we also do a podcast. We’re also very heavy on social media. If we have something special to say, we’ll send an extra. But maybe two a month is what I would recommend for a small business. One a week is a high-end limit. That’s the top of what you want to do. One to two a month is really more typical, and that will get you the results. And I’m telling you, every time we send an email out on behalf of a client, we bring action. It causes clicks to their website, blogs to be read, downloads and downloads of materials that you’ve put up, lead magnets. And I always encourage people to
share the email. Put a little line in there that says, “If you know anyone that can benefit from what we’re sharing, please share this with them, because we want to help as many people as we can.” And that should be what you’re trying to do with your email: help as many people as you can. So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Short and sweet. Email is really important. If you’re not doing it yet, start doing it, even if your list is small. Again, I’m Lori Jo Vest with PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC. We’re located in Troy, Michigan, and we do this podcast to help you improve your digital marketing to get more ROI. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you again in a few weeks.