Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Are you on my email list?
I hope so. I usually send out a newsletter every Tuesday to tell you about the newest episode of the podcast and I've been meaning to write more as well, which I will hopefully start doing soon. But when I started my list I had a couple of people on it and I didn't really know what was possible or how to do the tech and before knew it, it was all a big mess. Thankfully I found KPC and I've been in her community ever since. There is so much potential in having an email list and not using it to its full potential is a real shame. And there's so much to learn and there's so much you can do.
You're listening to sustainable photography, a podcast all about business tips, inspiration and confidence building. I'm Ingvild Kolnes, the host of this podcast and after over a decade as a photographer, I now help talented photographers run sustainable businesses. And for full transparency, you should know that I'm a mentor with paid offers and I will probably mention some of those in this episode.
Hi kay, I'm so excited to talk with you. We're going to talk about email marketing, which is something that I think is a little bit. It sounds a little bit scary to many people, so maybe it would help if they would get to know you a little bit better first.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Hi everyone. I'm so happy to be here. I elopement photographer. I love the work that you do in the world and I am so in awe of that skill set. It's incredible. So just first thing to say is anytime someone's talking about something like email marketing, where you're feeling like this is a bit scary, just remember that for the rest of us, photography is like wizardry and magic and so impressive in ways that email marketing often isn't. So trust me, you guys get all the glamour. So a little bit about me. I live in Cornwall in the UK. I am a very middle aged mum who does the school run and stuff like that. And I stumbled into email marketing and marketing automation via a friend who I met doing the school run called Melissa Love. And she just needed somebody who could work the tech and couldn't find anyone who knew how to work the tech. Very specifically, this is a tool called activecampaign and she was like, I can't find anyone who knows how to actually work this, but I can see it's amazing and I need to be emailing people more. So hey, you seem like a likely suspect. Okay, this is literally the conversation. Wow, you seem like a smart person, will you come? And you're not doing anything. Very much so would you come and learn how to do this?
So it was this incredible piece of serendipity where someone who came into my life, Melissa Love, saw an opportunity and rolled with it and led me to take a look at email marketing automation. And for me, it was like a little light bulb went off. I loved the technology.
I loved that it works with small businesses. I am so curious about small businesses. You guys are my heroes because of the way that you are in the world. And what Melissa didn't even know was that I had a really big background in teaching, in database administration, and in online learning.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Like I was in when online learning wasn't even a thing. I was doing project managing for the National Health Service in the UK, specifically about online learning. So it was like a constellation of stars all coming together. It was so unlikely to happen. Huge piece of serendipity. And I love email marketing. I love marketing automation, and I love making that happen more easily for small businesses like photographers.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: And. What a story. I feel like I have to mention that I'm actually in your membership.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Full disclosure.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Yeah, full disclosure. And I've been so for, I don't know, a couple of years at least.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think you were one of our founding members.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Oh, nice. And you have, in a way, introduced me to Melissa, which I didn't know your story, but I'm in both her memberships as well, and I love her. She's brilliant. So that is amazing.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: You can see the synchronicity now, right? We were friends long before I literally didn't understand what she did for a living. Wow. I had no idea.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: But, yeah, there's this huge synchronicity in what we do as marketing experts in the world, but also in how we are, how we conduct ourselves. Integrity, honesty, and also that desire to teach, to impart skills, not just doing it for you. It's always about helping people understand why this stuff is important, how it's going to make you money and help you support your family and keep a roof over your head, because that really is the bottom line here.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think when I first reached out to you, I did ask if you could just sort out my active campaign for me. That's my email marketing platform. Because you get started and then it grows and you don't really know what you're doing, and then you're like, yeah, I don't do that, but you can join the membership. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try that. And that has changed so much. I mean, there's still a lot for me to learn and to fix and improve, but just the things that I have have changed things so much. There's an endless amount of things you can do if you have a good email software provider.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so true for me. It makes me want to cry when people say that in a really good way because that's why I do what I do. I was doing it for people for quite a while. I was doing consultancy services, where you go and you clean it up, you fix it, you build some stuff, and then off you go and leave them to it. But it was just so clear to me that if the person who you've built stuff for doesn't have a really good understanding in that real light bulb way of, oh, that's what it's doing, and oh, hey, if it can do that, then it can also do this thing and fix this problem in my business and oh, look at this thing that this person over here is doing. I could do that and that's going to help me make more money. If you don't have that spark off and if you don't have that underlying understanding, people could build you a palace in there and you're probably going to break it, or at the very least, you're going to live in one room of it and hardly use it. And for me, that was just like profoundly unsatisfying and also not very good for the people I was doing it for.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: So, yeah, I'm invested in bringing that to more people.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Perfect. And I feel like we've kind of almost started in the wrong end because we're making it sound really scary and complicated. But what is email marketing all about? Why should someone go down that path?
[00:06:51] Speaker B: It's one of my favorite questions, really. This is pulling out one very specific aspect of activecampaign, which is the tech tool that I'm a specialist in. There are others. There's Mailchimp, there's convertkit, there's tons of things that send emails. They also often do automation stuff as well, which Activecampaign is really good at. But let's talk about just the email marketing bit. Why bother doing emails? Email is the only one to one channel that you have with your customers, other than picking up a phone, which, let's face it, we don't really do anymore. It's a one to one channel that you own, that you are completely in control of, and that enables you to have completely private connection conversation and relationship with the human on the other end of it. Right. So it's human to human connection. There isn't another channel that gives you that in the same way as email, and there certainly isn't anything close to it that you actually have ownership of. Whenever we're on social media, we do not own that tech. We do not control who gets shown what at any given time, you could be shouting into the black hole and putting a lot of effort into that. And it's not even going to get shown to someone. How depressing.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: I know.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: I'd much rather invest my time, and I'd much rather people invested their time in sending an email which lands in the inbox and which you can tell if it gets read, right? Yeah.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: And not to mention what if something happens to your Instagram, for example, and I've seen so many examples of that, then all your followers are gone.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
You have all heard the stories. You've all seen this play out to people you actually know. This happened to Melissa love. Not long ago. She lost access to her Facebook profile completely and potentially irrevocably. It was devastating. If you don't have email, you've lost your backup there.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: So I can't overemphasize how important it is to have an email list and to actually email them.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Because that was like the next bit. What do you actually use it for? Do you just send people information? Do you sell things?
Okay, I get that we should have it so that we have something that's ours, but what's the best way of using it?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, now that's too big a question, really. What's the best way to use it? Let's start with what is the first way you should use it?
Because trying to be the best, we're all going to come unstuck on that. I don't use my email marketing to the best that I could, and I'm like literally stone cold world class expert in it. Striving for the best. Probably not going to happen. So let's go with bare minimum. To start off with, the bare minimum is that you should actually email people. And that is probably the most challenging part of email marketing for most small businesses is just getting their foot over the threshold and finding the courage to start actually sending emails regularly. And I know this because I have been there. I was the world leading expert for a good two years, sitting tight on my lovely nest of email addresses to whom I was not sending anything. And Ingville, if you've been around a while. You probably were in my audience when I was doing this. I was not sending emails. It was maybe one every couple of months and it would be really timid and out of the blue. That doesn't work because that's not building a relationship with people.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Email.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: The most important things in email for me is trust and relationship building. You can't trust someone if you don't even recognize them when they turn up on your doorstep.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: That is not going to happen. I know it's really obvious when you put it in human terms. If you don't even recognize this other person, why would you hear what they have to say, open their email, let alone click on anything, and certainly not buy anything from them because they're a stranger.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very good point.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: It's very profound. Step number one, send some emails. And on its most basic level, the recipe that works for pretty much everyone is send two paragraphs of chitchat once a week.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: To me, that's the minimum requirement. If you have an email list, send to them one time a week and send just a couple of paragraphs of chitchat about you and your business and what you're seeing and thinking and doing in the world. And it really comes back to that human connection. If I were to bump into you on the street corner this week, what would we chat about?
What's going on in my world that I can tell you about or ask you about? It's a conversation. This is not a one way street, it's a conversation. And it's also a private conversation. On social media, if someone replies to you, that's in the public domain. However, if they reply to your email, that is to your inbox, it's private and it results in very different conversations. So talk to people, have a chitchat once a week and invite them to talk back to you. That's the starting point. Everything that happens after that is like levels of development.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: You make it sound really simple because I think a lot of people are overthinking this. Like, oh, I need to know what I'm supposed to sell. I need to add a lot of photos and I need to make it really pretty and I need to do all this stuff. And you don't really have to do that or even worrying about sending too many emails, which I think hardly anyone does.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Yeah, hardly anyone actually does that. To get to the two you're sending too many emails, you really need to be sending like daily. Then maybe people are going to think you're sending too many. Once a know, almost nobody's going to open and read all of them.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: It's the thing Melissa says the only person who sees all of your content is you.
And I have had in the entire time I've been sending emails, during which time sometimes I have been sending daily emails for quite long periods of time when we're on a sales push. I have had one person ever say that I'm sending too many emails. And frankly he was being unreasonable anyway because what he actually wanted was all the free stuff without me telling him what about the thing I sell? And I was like, dude, that's not how this works. If you want to get all of my lovely, amazing free content where I'm telling you things that are really interesting and useful about email marketing, the deal is I get to talk about the activecampaign academy because that's the thing I sell. If you're not willing to hear about that, then you can just unsubscribe, which is also totally fine. But what you don't get to do is complain that I'm sending you emails about the thing that I sell.
I'm sorry we went off down a little rabbit hole there because there's so many aspects to email marketing. I'm going to come back to what you said, which is that people worry and that's what stops them sending. And you're absolutely right. There's so much rhetoric, so much talk out there about funnels and lead magnets and automation, which I've already mentioned. Automation and too many text. Too much text, too much images. Oh, you need to have your button styled this particular way. There are so many things that could be better or done differently for any one person's email messaging. And I'm sure, I'm certain that if I bought in one of the email design specialists, they would rip mine to shred.
Okay, absolutely nobody's perfect on that front. But if you're not sending emails at all, that is the worst thing you could do because that literally cannot make you any money into your business.
So it's like you need to relax. Remember that you're not that special, but you are a human and it's just squidgy humans at the other end of the email. Just talk to them.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: I was given the advice when I started out to start sending out emails as soon as you even have one person on your email list.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Do you agree to that?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. Definitely. Because it's a muscle that you have to build and it sounds a bit cliche because I'm not very muscly, but I do send emails once a week and I vividly remember how hard it was to start doing that because the feeling is that we are being scrutinized and that someone's going to reply to it and say, yeah, you suck.
That doesn't actually happen in the real world. If you're a normal, nice human being, it just doesn't happen.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I've never had that happen.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Right? I've had it happen, like, once, and it was this guy telling me I emailed too much and I was like, dude, you're an idiot.
You don't get it. You don't get it and you're in no position to criticize me. I had someone tell me that I made a typo in something. I'm like, yeah, I'm fine with that. I don't care that I have a typo in my email. I'm a human typing stuff.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
But even when you have one or two or ten, you might feel like, I need to grow my list, I need to have more people on it. And that can also get a lot of people stuck because I think some people think that email marketing is just like an alternative to, for example, social media. But you need to get those people somehow. You can't just start an email list and then people will start signing up to it. You need to do some kind of an effort to have someone on there.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: I love that you've asked this, because, again, I relate to this very strongly because for a long time I had technically an email list, but I wasn't actually inviting anyone to join it or giving them any reason to join it. I mean, this went on for years, years of being too chicken. I was too scared of that scrutiny. I was scared of people not joining it. And this is a weird human thing. It's easier psychologically to just not offer it at all than to be rejected or to perceive that you're being rejected.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: And we just have to get over it, because if you don't have it on your website, nobody can sign up and you've just sabotaged yourself. So, yeah, there does come a point where you have to really get over yourself and put a sign up on your website. It really should be on every page of your website, even if it's just in the footer. And it doesn't have to be fancy, it does not have to be a lead magnet.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: I just want to make sure that people know you don't have to have a lead magnet. You can have an opt in that says, hey, would you like to hear from me a couple of times a week or once a week with some chitchat about what we're up to?
You don't have to promise stuff that you're not able to deliver. All right?
Right.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: And will you explain lead Magnet just before we move on?
[00:17:46] Speaker B: Lead magnets. If you want to use a lead magnet, that's great. And a lead magnet is basically baiting the hook. You are giving someone a promise of an exchange of value. That's much more concrete than just saying, I'm going to send you some emails that you're going to like. Instead of that, it's saying, if you give me your email and agree to receive emails from you, I will give you in exchange this very specific thing that you want right now. I'll give you that straight away up front.
And that baits the hook. It gives people a reason to choose to join your email list right now.
And a lead magnet can be pretty much anything that you have that is of value that they want. It could be an email with a poem in it. I don't know.
It depends so wildly on what your business is. Right? So my first lead magnet was a free training for activecampaign users that covered what I called the best cookies in the activecampaign jar. That's my main lead magnet. It's still my main lead magnet now because it really, really worked. And a key tip on making a really compelling lead magnet is they're often born out of frustration. What's the one thing you keep having to tell people in your audience before they're ready to buy from you? Or just because that's the question they always ask. Answer that question. Make it into a lead magnet.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Badaboom.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Badabing. Off you go. People want it. You already know they want it. So that's your lead magnet.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: That's an excellent tip because I think so many people, me included, absolutely overthink it so much. And then when I started out, I was like, I am not going to have just one lead magnet. I need to have at least five. And then I got stuck in that. I need to have one for this occasion, one for that occasion. And I didn't know my client well enough to know the one thing that I needed, so I just made way too many and confused things and complicated things.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that overcomplication, it makes life so much harder. Just start with just a straight up opt in. Would you like to hear from me? This is the sort of thing I write about if you, like me, join my email list.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: And that feels vulnerable, but it does work.
And then the next step is have a lead magnet. Just one nice and simple one. Yeah, just one. When you're getting more sophisticated and you have time and maybe some people on your team to help you with it and you've got enough control and knowledge of your email marketing platform, the tech that you're using, then you can start introducing an additional lead magnet. Maybe one day you'll have 20 lead magnets. I've got two right now.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: One of those is just a PDF.
It's nothing fancy.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: I think it's a little bit overrated. How many people you need on your list as well?
[00:20:45] Speaker B: Oh, definitely.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: Because it's like, oh, you need to have hundreds and thousands of people on your list and you really don't. If you have one person that could be the one person that ends up buying from you, you don't know that. So you need to just get on with it and just send those emails.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yeah. You have to connect with the people who are on your list right now because they're the people who are hearing you. They want to hear from you. You don't want to be ghosting them.
They're definitely not going to buy from you if you don't communicate with them and connect. So nurture the people that you do have on your list. And it really is as little as two paragraphs of chitchat once a week. So long as you're doing that, you're keeping the thread of connection open.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: What about when you feel ready to sell them something or when you have something that you are hoping that they would be interested in? Can you just send them an email and say, hey, I've got this thing. Do you want it or do you need to?
[00:21:46] Speaker B: Literally, that's it. That's it. And the advantage of having a connection already with people is that you will have been getting to know them this whole time. If you've been doing the two paragraphs of chitchat once a week and you're inviting people to reply to you and engaging conversation, you will learn so much. They are giving you a huge amount of value by connecting right back at you. And that means that when you do have something to sell, it's much more likely to be in line with what they need. And you have a couple of options at that point. You can hand pick people from your audience if you want to. When you have a new product that you're thinking about doing or that you've started creating as a minimum viable product, you can reach out to people individually and email them saying, hey, I'm doing this. Do you want to have it for a rock bottom price? Because I just need to see how it rolls.
And that's the strategy I used when we were creating my first course that was available, which was about deliverability. Very sexy subject for emails. And then when we launched the active campaign academy, we did personal invitation to, I think it was about twelve people that we knew needed it from the questions that they'd been asking. And actually three of them had been explicitly asking me and saying, please take my money, I need this.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Okay.
This is actually making me think that one problem when it comes to email marketing for a lot of people is that they're too impatient. That they think that as soon as someone is on their list that things should be happening. But you can email them for a long time and getting to know them and just wait for the right time. You don't have to make things happen right away because, like, what you were saying, you were emailing them before you had anything for them.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And the person that made me do that was Melissa. We're coming back to Melissa Love, who's the one who got me into all this in the first place. And she basically harassed me until I gave in and started emailing people. And I created a Facebook group at that point. Because Melissa knows. Absolutely. And by the way, if Melissa tells you anything about marketing, just do what she says because she knows what she's doing. She was very, very clear that you have to have that relationship because people will not buy from you if you just suddenly appear on their doorstep with something that requires them to part with money. And again, if we come back to that real world, if you were meeting human to human, you are not going to buy from me. If you've never met me before, it's not going to happen.
And again, I relate. I've been there, I feel it. Because every person out there in the world who you see doing this, flawless, oh, look at them, they're so amazing. They send emails all the time and their emails are fantastic and they sell, sell, sell. They all started out too scared to send an email.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: And not knowing what to talk about in an email. Everyone.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, because that's not what you think of people. You think everyone else has got it together except for me.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Very much for me. I tell you what I found when I started sending emails was it felt amazing. Once I'd got over that hurdle of fear of being judged, what I discovered was that actually what I was getting was a lot of validation. And this is going to sound really show offy, right? But what I found was that the replies I was getting and the way people were talking about my emails was making me feel like a million dollars. It illustrated the value of what I was doing in a way that I just did not see. I had not perceived the value in what I was doing and what I knew and what I could do once I started emailing people and people started replying to those. So the conversation was open, that one to one conversation, people started telling me how much they valued that and they started telling me the difference I'd made in their lives. This is like massive dopamine hits now. And then they started telling me they liked me and thought I was funny.
This is not my normal life experience in the real world. This sort of compliment is hard to come by in email land. It turns out it's really easy. It turned out that I thrived on the return that you get. So it's not like you're shouting into the void and the darkness and getting nothing back. It's a conversation and people will tell you when you're doing great. That's really nice. It feels great and it fuels you up to have the courage then to make something, to make them happy and then ask them to pay for it. Win win.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: That's really nice.
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You kind of touched on this before, but it's kind of like a scary part of it. The whole thing with deliverability and how you can't just email people and then expect them to actually see it in their inbox, you might end up in spam. How can you deal with that? Is that a problem from the start or does it happen later on when you have 1000 subscribers?
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it can happen in any time in your emailing journey. So let's talk about deliverability. Deliverability is the art of making sure that your emails actually get to the inbox. So we write them our email text, sends them. Some people in between do some processing and then hopefully they get delivered in front of the recipient's eyeballs at the inbox. But many things can go wrong on the way there. So I've got a ton of blogs about this on my website, which is sleepbusiness co blog. If you go to deliverabilitytopic, there's tons of stuff in there. But here's the gist of it.
Only send those emails to people who've asked you to send them emails.
That's like Duh 101. If they haven't asked you to send them emails, don't send them emails. If they've previously said yes and then they said no. I want you to stop sending me emails. Stop sending them emails?
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Really very simple.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: I think you sent an email about.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: This yesterday or something, emails about this a few times. So permission is hugely important. But again, don't overthink it. If someone's said to you verbally or via a form or in an email message, I want to be on your email list. In most cases, that's enough to mean that you're not going to get prosecuted for non compliance with GDPR. You just need to have some sort of a record that they've said yes. Please, I want to hear from you once that's happened. Send them stuff they want to hear about. Don't do a bait and switch where they signed up to hear about training their dog and you talk to them incessantly about guinea pigs. That's not going to work. I'm making it up as I go along. But you get the idea, the bait and switch and that does happen. Don't do that if you are about to change your business to be a different topic. Tell people that so that they have a chance to leave your list. Respect them if they unsubscribe. And then we get to the bit about authentication. So I'm going to be brief about this. Again, there's more stuff on our blog at Slipbusiness Co. Authentication is a technical thing where the people in charge of the mailboxes, like Google, the people who actually deliver your emails to people, they need to see some badges that say, this one is legit. They are not a skanky spammer. All right, technical stuff, email authentication, the great thing about it is usually you need to do it once and once only, but you do need to have some understanding of what it is and what it means.
And that's going to vary depending on the platform that you're sending from. So for us, we do a training that's all about authentication from activecampaign and those conditions are getting tighter and tighter as time goes on. Rightly so. Because if the mailbox providers weren't guarding our inboxes, we would just abandon our emails because they would be absolutely swamped completely.
More than 80% of all email traffic is spam globally. But your email inbox doesn't look like that because the mailbox providers are like little guards with their shields up, fighting off all the spam. So our job as email senders is to make sure that we have the right badges on our emails so that the inbox people know they're legit and we'll let them through. Okay. All right. That was a very long winded way of saying, just make sure you have your proper badges on, but also don't keep on and on and on sending to people who don't want to hear from you. And that's where it gets a little bit more subtle, because sometimes people don't unsubscribe or tell you they want you to stop. They just start ignoring you or putting you in the trash. And we do need to watch out for them. And one of the most important things you can watch for if you are sending emails is making sure that people are clicking on your emails. So give them something to click and then keep an eye on them. Make sure they're clicking now and again. It's like looking for signs of life. Are they still there? Are they still hearing you? And then if they stop responding, think about stopping emailing them, because otherwise what happens is the mailbox providers see them ignoring you and start to think, okay, he's not that interesting, which is sad because I am. Yeah, we all have interesting things to say, but if we keep banging on about stuff to people who aren't interested, it makes us sound like the boar at the party.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So to make them click, would you add links to your website or like a survey or anything and everything?
[00:31:44] Speaker B: A click is a click. Okay. A click to your website is better because then, especially with activecampaign, you can see everywhere they go. It's like this amazing benign spying on people. You can see where they go. You can use your Facebook tracking pixels and all sorts of clever stuff, but a click is a click. It's called engagement. If someone is engaging with your email, great. And it's about clicks, not opens.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: I also have another question that I feel is a little bit more advanced and it's something that I have not done, but something that I've been interested in. And that is a B testing. I have not tested anything that I send out. Should we test stuff or should we just send and not overthink it?
[00:32:28] Speaker B: I kind of want to ask what you think, because I think you might know the answer to this already.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Well, I think our main priority should definitely be to send, but when we want to maybe improve things and do a little bit better, it probably doesn't hurt to test.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: I think that's a really good summary of it. Okay, so absolutely go with your instincts on this. The sending is the most important thing, because if we're not sending, we're not going to get anywhere. It cannot help us. And one of the problems I see with a B testing and split testing is that it cripples people with decision making that they're not ready for and they don't have capacity for. So, cards on the table. I have never, ever split test an email.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: Okay, thank you for saying that because I've been feeling like, oh, no, I'm not doing this one thing right, but then you're not doing.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: I've never split test. I watch stuff. I watch. So we call it reaction ratings. So we do monitor stuff in a very ad hoc, very subjective, non scientific way, and we look for what causes a reaction in our world and we notice that and we do more of that thing.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: So we look for reaction spikes. You don't have to be looking at your analytics to do that because you're a human. And if you're a small business, you can see what's coming into your inbox. You can see what gets tons of reaction on social media. Just note it somehow, in whatever way that works for you. The problem with split testing. Problems plural, one decision paralysis. Split testing is actually quite scientific. You have to isolate one thing at a time to change and tweak and see if it makes a difference. That requires quite a lot of thinking ahead and planning. That alone is enough to stop people doing it. And if that stops you sending your email, it's just sabotaged you completely.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: The second thing is volume of email sending. If you are sending to a sample of 100 people and you do a split test, a large percentage of those are not even going to see the email. It may be a bad time to send that email. There are so many things that could prevent them interacting, that email that are nothing to do with the subject line. Or did you have an image versus text? Or did you offer them three calls to action instead of just one? You have to have quite a large sample size before that split test is going to tell you anything, even if it tells you something. And you can see there's a difference between these guys and these guys. You've then got to say, well, will that happen again? If we do the same thing again ten times, do we see the same impact?
Right. So this is coming from a very mathematical point of view. Split testing. Outside of big business that has an email department is generally speaking, and I'm not dissing it, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying if you're not doing it, don't beat yourself up. Because outside of big business that has a dedicated email team, it is usually not going to improve your email sending and is not a worthwhile way of spending your time.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: That was a great response.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: No one's ever asked me that question before. You're the first. Really? Wow. And I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it in the first place. You feel like you should, but actually you're pretty confident that it's more important that you actually are sending emails.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: I know it would take too long and I know it would just, yeah, exactly what you said.
But it does kind of, when you're sending stuff, you know, you should keep track of some things. Like you said, you're just paying attention to it. You're not really using a scientific approach, but is there some parameters that we should watch? Like is it the clicks? Is it the opens? Is it how many bookings you get?
What should we look at?
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Right, so the primary metric to follow for your emailing is actually how many are you sending? That's your first one. Because if you're not sending enough, you have no fuel for the tank. Okay, I see this a lot. I see people, they're looking at their click rates. I'm like, first tell me how much you're sending because if you don't tell me how much you're sending, this other number is completely meaningless. Second is the click rate. The click rate is really important. That's really the bit that tells you, is your email resonating enough with people and driving their curiosity enough to get them to take the next step on something?
Okay, opens are, well, the opens are problematic in so many ways. I see a lot of people talking about open rates. My advice is usually just look at your click rate, okay? And if you're not putting links in your emails, your click rate is going to be zero.
So you have to be putting links in your emails and sending them.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: So even when you're just doing that chitchat, telling them about your.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Yeah, give them some links in there, even if it's a link to, like, that email that I sent last week about it was about deliverability and someone who'd been a big company, who'd been naughty and been the skanky spammers, I put a link in there. It was actually to an external news site and it got a high number of clicks because people were curious, they wanted to hear the full story. What that did for me was it showed me who's still awake at their inbox.
It's not an accident that that link was in there, who is still awake at the inbox? And it showed all the mailbox providers. Oh, Kay sends emails that people like to click. Great.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, that's great.
Another scary thing, there's a lot of scary things with email marketing, unfortunately, and that is GDPR.
I feel like GDPR when it first started, when we first heard about it, it was like people were shutting down their blogs. It was like a big thing. And then now it's a bit like, but what's the difference, really? We can still get people on our email list and all that. So what do we have to make sure that we do or don't do to be GDPR compliant?
[00:38:32] Speaker B: I love this question. There's a funny story that goes with this. My first ever video online was one that I did. I was working with Melissa at the time. This is back in 2019, in May, when the GDPR first came out and exactly what you said, people were tanking their email lists. They were literally throwing everything out because they were so scared. And I made a video that was what you would have to actually do to get busted for GDPR non compliance. I'm going to find this video because I think it needs another Eric. It basically was along the lines of, if you were to actually get busted by the authorities and fined for GDPR non compliance, you would have to be an absolute douchebag. Skanky spammer. You have to work really hard at scale before anyone in authority is going to take any notice of what you are doing on your email list now. You should not be doing skanky spammer things anyway. I don't even care about GDPR regulations. You should not be doing that stuff as an email marketer, as a business person, you should not be emailing people who don't want to hear from you. The end.
But in terms of GDPR, in order to get busted, you have to work really hard. You have to keep emailing someone who has very clearly said, I don't want to hear from you. You have to keep doing it even when they complain to you specifically and say, I am not happy that you're still emailing me. Stop emailing me. Take me off your records. You have to keep going, and you have to keep going for quite a long period of time. And then they have to report you to the authorities, and then the authorities would need to put you at the top of their pile for attention.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:40:12] Speaker B: That ain't going to happen to small businesses in my experience. I said at the time, in May 2019, I said, I am not going to hold my breath for the first small business to get prosecuted under GDPR because it's going to be the big businesses that they go after. And actually, even in businesses, I have seen very, very few people that I've seen in the media get prosecuted or fined or anything for GDPR non compliance. And our story in our email last week was about helloFresh, who actually have been very naughty, skanky spammers and emailed literally millions, millions of people who didn't want to hear from them and sent them SMS texts and they got a fine, which was effectively a slap on the wrist for a company of that size.
Okay.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I remember it was like, should we have a check mark to say that they have understood?
Can we say, sign up to the email list? Can we send them this thing? Because it was like, oh, you're not allowed to send out a freebie in exchange for an email address anymore? And it was like, but that doesn't make any sense.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: And then there was so much misinformation and really wrong, harmful information going on out there at that time. And there still is. Now, I will say, though I am not a lawyer, I am not a GDPR specialist. And in certain european countries, particularly, the regulations are different. If you are concerned about it for your business, seek legal help or join one of the memberships that is specifically about that. Find someone who actually knows what they're talking about for your jurisdiction. Okay, I'm in the UK. We're all over the place on this stuff. We do different things to the rest of the european continent, but just don't panic and start throwing things out or making it impossible for people to join your list. That is not what the GDPR is about. GDPR in UK, it's their information commissioner's office. They're not interested in stopping you from asking people to join your list in exchange for something they want. They're not interested in that. They're interested in busting. Hello fresh. You've just sent literally millions of emails to people who didn't want to hear from them and then wouldn't stop when they asked them to stop. That's when you get busted.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really helpful because it can be when you're working by yourself and you don't have a team around you, you're stuck with all these decisions yourself and it just feels overwhelming and you don't really know and you hear about all these things and it's like, yeah, so it's easy to get stuck and it's just nice to hear that we shouldn't overthink things.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And the same thing is happening now. And the reason it all gets blown up out of proportion is because there are people who make money from making you scared about it so that you hire them to fix it or put your mind at rest somehow. But very frequently it's actually not a panic situation. The same thing is happening right now. There are some changes to how Google and Yahoo are handling email authentication checks. It is a change. You do need to do some stuff, but it is not panic stations. The timescale and the consequences are not like the email apocalypse. So you don't need to tank your list or get really stressed about it. You just need to find somebody who you actually trust to talk to you about it in a way that you can understand.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Perfect. So one thing that we talked about was how you can't do email marketing on its own. Like you need something else to support it. Like you need to mention it on your website, maybe mention it on social media, maybe run ads to have people join it. But one thing that I think is quite different from social media is the fact that it's really hard or I don't know if it's even possible to do email marketing for free. Does it always cost money? Is it an expensive way to do marketing?
[00:44:08] Speaker B: That's a really good question. Email marketing does require you to have some technology because you need something to do the sending for you and something to help you design emails quickly and manage all of the things. Like are they clicking? There is a real range of tech that you can buy to do that. So entry level would be something like Mailchimp, which I think maybe still has a free plan, but I can't quite remember. There are still some free, completely free services around with limited capability, but that will get you out of the door and sending some emails. As your business gets more sophisticated, you're going to find at some point as you grow that you want more bang for your buck, you need more space for more people or you want to do fancier things like delivering a lead magnet and tracking whether people are clicking okay. Within that range, there's so much choice. So just to talk about the platform that I specialize in, which is activecampaign, we have a free intro course on this called accelerated activecampaign that showcases it, and you can go and have a look and see if it's for you, because it's not always just about how much this thing costs. It's do I feel comfortable in there? Can I work it?
But even within a tool like Activecampaign or Mailchimp or convertkit, you've got different levels of what you are paying in exchange for the facilities that you get. Like am I staying in a caravan or am I staying in a swishy suite up in the mansion? Okay, what you pay for is what you get, and you can choose usually by the number of contacts that you have available.
So if you're very small, you've probably got fewer than 500 contacts. Those accounts are usually pretty low priced. If you need 500,000 contacts, that's a different story. It's going to cost you a lot more. And also, some of the platforms have different levels of features. So in Activecampaign, we've got light plus pro and enterprise, and there are quite big differences in what you get to play with between those different things. I think it's a great idea to have something like Activecampaign where you can get to know it while you're fairly small. And if you want to grow, this platform has the capacity to grow with you and you're going to pay more as you grow.
Is it worth paying for it? Yes, absolutely. Email is typically responsible for around 30% of the revenue to any given business. More, if you're doing it properly, it's going to be more than that. Wow. Take email out of the equation. You're losing a lot of potential revenue because you're not getting in front of people reliably. You're trusting the social media platforms to do that for you. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't feel a lot of trust for meta and Twitter, x, whatever, YouTube. I'm not going to trust them with my livelihood. I want to trust me in charge of my email account and that's worth paying for.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: That's very true, but can you just use your normal email, like your business email, and just start sending out emails using that?
[00:47:01] Speaker B: I mean, you can, but you can really only do that one to one.
You can do it with BCC, don't ever do it with a CC, because if you're using Cc then people are going to see each other's email addresses and immediately you're on the wrong side of confidentiality and it's going to annoy people. They might not report you for GDPR, but it is definitely going to annoy them and they're going to tell you to go away anyway. You could do that on a very small scale and many people do. You can also get some programs like Dub Sardo that allow you to send on a very small scale, but even those cost money. If you have a business where you are looking to make revenue, you need to have an email marketing platform.
To me, I mean, I know I'm biased because I'm in email, but I just don't see there being a viable business if you don't have that.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: No, I agree. I am very glad I have activecampaign and I've tried a couple of others beforehand because I didn't know anything and I didn't know what I was doing. And there are such limitations. If you use many of the free ones, they're so limited. There's so much you can't do and then you have to upgrade straight away anyway. So you might as well start with something that's really good.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: I think the risk with the free ones, I think the pattern I see repeatedly is people go in on a free plan, then they very quickly hit the fences around the edge of it and are then upsold. Quite. I don't want to use the word aggressive, but they're going to be upsold because that's how the company is going to make their money. So they're going to upsell you. And usually the product that they upsell you to is not as good value as if you had just paid for the entry level on an all paid product.
Yeah, that's my experience. I see so many people who are paying more for worse features in mailchimp than they would get in an equivalent platform like Activecampaign where it's just upfront, you got to pay for this platform. It ain't free.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: I think that's the same almost regardless of what you want to do, if you want something quality, something professional, you have to pay for it. That's just how it is. And it's not very professional to run your business with the basis of it being everything should be free or as low.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: I agree. And I also see people sabotaging their business to stay within the constraints of free plans. That's painful. That's painful. When there's growth potential and people are hobbling themselves because they're not prepared to pay for the facilities to do what they need to do to grow.
[00:49:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: And really, the businesses who rely on that freemium model, what they're relying on is that a certain number of those businesses are going to grow, are going to want to pay for more features, but because they've started on that platform, they're going to stay with it out of sort of not wanting to move.
[00:49:47] Speaker A: I remember from, like, years and years and years ago that the most important thing you can do in your business is to start an email list. But at the time, I was just a photographer and a wedding photographer at that. So it was like, once I've worked with someone, I've worked with them, I don't really understand why I need to have an email list. What would I ever use it for? Now, I don't really think that I was right in hesitating for so long because I can think of many things that I could have used my email list for. But what do you think? Do you think there are some businesses that are like, it's not worth it, or do you think all businesses should just start the list?
[00:50:28] Speaker B: I haven't yet come across with a business where I was not able to see a use case and a benefit to them having an email list.
I think the ones that are easiest to sort of look at and think, well, maybe there's not a good argument. Here are the ones where it's a transient thing, like it's a wedding or it's a, your child is newborn, you've got a puppy, and so on. Okay, so something that's a one time only event in someone's life. But what doesn't go away is the human connection that never goes away. If someone likes you and they like how you roll, they continue wanting to hear from you, even if they don't buy your service. So, for example, I'm activecampaign specialist. I do not do other email platforms. People who have long left activecampaign remain on my email list because I talk about email marketing strategy in general, and here's why that matters. And you can equate this to puppies, newborns, marriage, whatever. Here's why that matters, because when they then encounter someone who needs help with active campaign, I am absolutely on the top of their list. For people to say to their friend, I know exactly who you need.
[00:51:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: And that is powerful. That's powerful.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: Because these guys, they're your evangelists. They already know you. They liked you not only to buy your services, but they stayed on your email list because they like what you talk about and how you are in the world.
They are a superpower gold right there. And you can incentivize that in ways. You can have them join an affiliate program, you can have them give them a voucher and say, hey, send this voucher to three people you know, to see three people, you know who are getting married or about to get a puppy.
They're your network in the world. They're your eyes, your ears and your voice. They can help spread the word.
[00:52:13] Speaker A: Yeah, people should absolutely do that. So everyone needs an email list. We've established that.
Okay. So are there any mistakes that you keep seeing that you can kind of help people avoid making? If someone wants to get started with email marketing or if they have a list somewhere but they're not using it, what are some mistakes?
[00:52:36] Speaker B: So mistake number one, not sending emails, we've covered that. Why? That's not going to work. So job number one is get over yourself and start sending emails. I know it's painful, but you just have to do it and it does get easier, I promise. Number two is, I think, taking responsibility for the fact that you're in charge of sending some emails and of the tech that's doing that. You cannot completely advocate your responsibility, abdicate your responsibility here. You have to take charge and be the grown up and be responsible for things like making sure your email authentication is done. I know it sounds boring, but you just got to be the grown up here. You have to be responsible for understanding what you're paying for with your email tech.
Don't be paying for a Ferrari and leaving it parked on your driveway. That's not smart business. And you're the grown up in your business, so you have to take responsibility for knowing what your tech can do, making sure that it is doing it effectively, and then actually doing it strategically to grow your business, including email sending. And number three on my list is, oh, my God, please don't be boring in your emails. Please just be human, okay? Just be human. None of us is boring as a human being. We all have friends, relationships, neighbors. Be that person, turn up at the inbox and do that chitchat. And really closely tied into that is something that's a real bee under my bonnet right now is I feel quite strongly that we should not be using AI to compose our emails. I'm not saying don't use it at all. This is my caveat. Fine, if you want to use it for prompts and that, but I don't know if everyone else feels that way. But the last thing I want in my inbox is stuff that has been written by an AI bot and we're going to get swamped so badly with content that has been produced in that way. So my big mistake that I want people to avoid is being too scared to do it, not taking responsibility for it, and then thinking that you can do it by just saying buy my thing this week or by using an AI bot to write your emails. That's not going to create connection or context or choice about how they are with you. Be human.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to end with a question that I usually start with, but I forgot this time.
So this podcast is sustainable photography and I'm curious about your views on sustainability. What is a sustainable business to you?
[00:55:15] Speaker B: Okay, you can have a minute to think. Okay, I'm assuming we're talking about sustainability as in we can keep going and keep doing this rather than eco sustainability.
[00:55:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:26] Speaker B: Okay. Few.
I'm glad.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: Although I also think that is an important thing in the world, but that is not what.
[00:55:34] Speaker B: Yeah, there is some stuff around eco emailing and I don't know a ton about that, to be honest right now. Anyway, sustainability as a life thing, this I can speak to. I have quite a significant disability and limited resources in terms of my physical energy. And I'm a murm and I'm in my fifty s and I live in Cornwall. To make my business sustainable, I have to remind myself really frequently that I ain't a hustler and I don't want to be a hustler. I don't want to run an agency. I don't want to be a bajillion squillionaire. I want to have a business that makes me feel good about my life, where I know that I'm helping other people with something that they can't get anywhere else. That makes me feel amazing and where I'm making enough revenue to give my family the lifestyle that I think is nice for us, but without breaking me on the way.
That's really the key one for me, for us as a family. My husband, who's my business partner, literally has this calendar to remind me every Monday morning, don't break yourself.
You are enough.
You are enough. Just do what we're doing. Do it strategically.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Do it with intention.
Right. It's not a hobby, but don't break us on the way. We don't need to do that.
[00:56:57] Speaker A: That's lovely.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: We have these conversations very often.
[00:57:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people would need to have, or could use to have that kind of a conversation with someone because we tend to overdo things. So many of us, which again, is one of the reasons why I've called this podcast sustainable photography, because so many of us end up burnt out, exhausted, tired, doing too much, having no money. And we need to set some boundaries and we need to take care of ourselves.
[00:57:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. And coincidentally, that's literally in my email for I think the week after next is titled I am enough, you are enough.
You don't need to be the hustle.
[00:57:40] Speaker A: Yeah, but if someone wants to be on that email list and get those emails, where can they go to sign up? How can they get to know you better? Where should they.
[00:57:50] Speaker B: Lovely. Well, we have a very handy page on my website. So my business name is slick business because when you automate things, you get slick and things get easier. So Slickbusiness Co. If you go to forward slash links that has a set of useful links in our business to things like the blog where we have all lovely blog posts to sign up for our emails to our lovely Facebook group. We have a big open Facebook group for activecampaign users called automate. Your business with Facebook. We have a free training called Accelerated Activecampaign. It's brilliant. Like literally the staff at activecampaign do that course. That's how good it is. Yeah. And we have our Activecampaign academy, which is our paid service. It's a subscription where you pay and you get to basically rent my brain for a month at a time for all things email marketing and automation. So that's slash links will take you to all of those places and basically just know that you can trust me on things to do with email marketing and activecampaign. I'm actually on the customer advisory board for Activecampaign. So it's quite a high level knowledge. It is specific to that platform. If you're thinking about upgrading your email platform, come do accelerated activecampaign. It's really, really good and you'll come out of it knowing whether you're ready to move on from Mailchimp or Mailerlite or Convertkit or kajabi. It will answer that question for you and I would love to see you in there and I'll see you in the inbox.
[00:59:23] Speaker A: Perfect. I can definitely recommend Kay and all her resources. I'm a huge fan. So go check her out, be on her email list. Because you said it yourself in the beginning, your emails are really entertaining and fun to read.
[00:59:38] Speaker B: Oh, I'm told.
[00:59:40] Speaker A: Thank you so much. This was brilliant.
[00:59:42] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: You just listened to an episode of sustainable photography. Please share this episode with a photographer you care about.
