Lauren: Hey everyone, today I am joined by one of my lovely teammates here at Lulu. This is Laurie Shipley, our Email Marketing Manager. If you are subscribed to our email newsletters, you have been the recipient firsthand of her amazing work and content, and maybe even spoken to her directly. So, welcome. 

Laurie: Thank you. So excited to be here. 

Lauren: I'm so excited you're here. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: Thanks for joining me.  

Laurie: Talking about all things email marketing and who knows what else. Anything could happen. 

Lauren: All things email marketing. So we'll be here for eight hours. 

Laurie: Probably eighty hours. 

Lauren: Perfect. This podcast is now just an email marketing podcast. We've kicked Matt out. We just recorded an episode, or I just edited an episode, that he proposed changing this to the Direct Sales 101 podcast. 

Laurie: We shut that down. 

Lauren: We've rejected that idea, and now it's the email marketing podcast – 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: – with Laurie and Lauren.

Laurie: That sounds amazing. 

Lauren: It does actually, right? 

Laurie: I think Matt's like pounding on the door right now. 

Lauren: He can hear himself being replaced. This is it. 

Laurie: Okay. Don't go too far down that route. 

Lauren: Well. 

Laurie: Because it might happen. 

Lauren: I'm open to it. I think it'd be great. 

Laurie: It actually would be. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: It would be the thing that everyone's been asking for all this time. 

Lauren: I think so. Well, hopefully we have some really valuable insight and information, for you, in this episode. I do think that email marketing is an incredibly hot topic, all the time and always. It's one that we are always talking about on here, about the value of it. But as Matt and I – neither one of us are email marketers. We're just marketing adjacent when it comes to that. We – 

Laurie: You know a lot about it. 

Lauren: Well, thank you. That means a lot coming from you. But I thought it would be fun to bring in an actual pro. 

Laurie: Awesome. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Thanks for inviting me. 

Lauren: Oh my gosh, yeah.

[2:25] - Intro

Lauren: How long have you been involved in email marketing? 

Laurie: I was thinking about this on the way to work today. I was like, how long have I been doing this? I'd have to look at my LinkedIn profile to really know for sure, because it's like, been a wild ride, but I think it's been nine-ish years.

Lauren: Okay.

Laurie: And I have done it for companies that I've worked for, like Lulu. I've done it for small businesses, doing consulting and helping them get things off the ground and giving them advice. For maybe a year, year and a half, I ran a email 101 newsletter. I used that kind of like a lead magnet and a nurture tool to get these consultation bookings that I was selling. 

Lauren: Cool. 

Laurie: Yeah. I put that on pause after I started working with Lulu, because I love email but, you know, forty to fifty hours a week of email is probably the cap of anyone's – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: – sanity. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: It's so much fun. But…it's a lot. I mean, it is. It's true. I mean, it's as much work as you want to put into it. And when you're on like a marketing team and there's so many different hands in… Like, we'll send an email out, or I'll send an email out. You've proofed it. Paul's proofed it. There's somebody that wrote a blog post. There's so many different hands involved into it. When you try to go and do that yourself, it creates even more work. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: But on the other hand, the cool thing about email, it is accessible and platforms that are available for people make it so that pretty much anyone who is selling a product or service can get into email, and they can make it as little or as much work as they need to – 

Lauren: Right.

Laurie: – to work for them. And yeah, we can jump into that now unless you want to go back to that later? 

Lauren: You tell me you're the expert here. Do you feel like we need to lay some groundwork before we dive headfirst into the deep end? 

Laurie: So. We might want to. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Laurie: I mean, listeners of your podcast have probably listened to the previous email marketing episode, which was excellent. 

Lauren: Thanks. 

Laurie: So I definitely would recommend going back to listen to that one. 

Lauren: Yeah, I'll link it in the show notes if you haven't listened to it already. It's about a year old, so. 

Laurie: Yeah.

Lauren: I understand if you did not go back and listen to that one. 

Laurie: I will not understand. 

Lauren: No. How have you not listened to every single episode of this podcast? There are only 81 of them. It's not that many. 

Laurie:  And this is 82, so. 

Lauren: Yes, it is. 

[4:42] - What is Email Marketing?

Laurie: Just to step back for a minute, when people ask me what I do for my job, they're like, oh, what's email marketing? And to me, it's very obvious. But, you know, if someone puts their email in at the grocery store to get like, a ten percent off coupon. Or at their local bookstore to get invites to a special author event, all those ways are generating interest in the brand or you as an author. So one thing that you want to do when you're looking for the ESP or your email service provider is really to figure out like what's the goal of your email marketing? And I would recommend, kind of, going into it with a goal in mind. Ideally, you've got something to sell because, you know, you can have a newsletter all day long that you share your thoughts or give some tips,  but you're never gonna really maximize your email marketing resources if you leave it to that. Because you're paying for the platform–eventually. Sometimes you can start out with either no commitment or a very low commitment to your budget, like even $20 a month. But you really wanna find out like, okay, what's my goal? Do I want to nurture my audience? Like, if I don't have a product yet, if I'm still writing my book, but I know one day I'm gonna wanna bring people in. You could consider a paid subscription feature like Substack for example. If you are selling your book right now and you're selling it through your website, you definitely want to choose a platform that has automation features that are going to allow you to target those people who are purchasing your books, who are browsing on your website. Those are the flows and automations that you and Matt kind of touched on in the last email marketing episode. So it's really like, figuring out what your goal is. And then, of course, allowing yourself to like, think through how you're going to grow, what your end result is. 

Lauren: So before we dive too deep into all of this for our listeners, do you think that this content that is relevant to pretty much anybody at any stage in their brand building? Like you said, if people haven't published a book yet, but they're planning on it.  

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – but they're building their email list that they have an audience to sell that book to. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: But also people that already have a book and are looking for new, better practices to continue to grow their audience. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: So like really anybody that's listening? 

Laurie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the sooner you start building your list, the better. 

Lauren: For sure. 

Laurie: Is the short answer. 

Lauren: For sure. And this is why if I had a dollar for every time, on this podcast, that Matt and I have talked about how important it is to sell direct. And one of the first, if not the first things we say every time is that it gives you access to your customer data. And what we mean by that is email addresses. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: This is why it's so valuable to have access to those email addresses. All the things we're going to talk about.

Laurie: Exactly. Because whenever your customers are making a purchase on your site, you know, you can capture their email, you can give them an option to subscribe and then you've got that customer data. You can communicate to them. Whereas if you're not selling through your website, you're never going to see that information. You're never going to be able to have that one-on-one contact with them after they've made the purchase and they're gone again. 

Lauren: Right. Because they're not – at that point, they're not your customers. They're Amazon's customers – 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – or Bookshop.org customers or wherever the case may be. But that is not to say that it's impossible for you to grow an email – 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: – an email list if you're not selling direct. 

Laurie: Right. 

[8:08] - When and How to Start Growing Your Subscriber List

Lauren: So do you want to get into some of that a little bit? 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Ways grow your audience? 

Laurie: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of going back to what you were saying about when should I get started? I mean, you should start now. A lot of people are growing their social followings, and that's like a number one place that you can plug your email subscriber form. Even if you don't have a website you can… at least some ESPs will even give you a landing page, not all of them, but some of them will that you can start building that list right away, whether you're putting that link in your bio – link in bio, I don't think that Instagram likes it when you say that. But you put it in your bio somewhere, or your links that you've got on social media. And you can get on your Stories or in your posts and kind of talk about hey, I'm building an email list and kind of tease what it is that those people are going to get when they subscribe. If you're not really selling anything yet, like I said, you can incorporate teasers of your book that's going to come. You can even get your community involved and get your subscribers over to that email list so that you kind of own that domain, it's not going to go away. And once someone's subscribed, they can kind of be taken along that journey. 

Lauren: I feel like we should never, ever underestimate the value and power of a promise as simple as: I'm to share some exclusive content with you. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Even if it's not a published book yet. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I can't tell you how many author newsletters I've signed up for for the promise of…you will get a sneak peek at the opening pages of this book. 

Laurie: Yeah, I mean, and you can get so creative with it. That's what I love about email. There's really no limitation to what you can kind of use to entice your followers or your fans as you're building your list. And there's different places that you can be, kind of, presenting your email list to people. Yes, social media, definitely on your website. If you do have a website, you can get one started and have like even just one page and it's, your book coming soon or whatever this information is about you as an author. And have a box that's like subscribe to my email for, you know, whenever we launch the book or whenever the website goes live or to get first dibs on this or this coupon code or whatever it is. So you really can get started no matter what phase you're in. And then taking it offline if you're at events, you want to just be in the habit of plugging your email subscriber forms. And I would suggest having a URL that's like, really simple to remember. Even if you don't have like a QR code or something, you know, you can easily say like whatever your website is.com slash subscribe. And in this podcast, like I could say that and someone could just type it in really quickly. 

Lauren: Right. I think we also…I feel like the QR code thing was one of those things that we were all so resistant to for so long. 

Laurie: Oh yeah. 

Lauren: And then now it's like QR codes everywhere. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: It's easy. 

Laurie: Yeah. And I mean, the easy thing with that is, you know, you can change what that landing page looks like and the QR code is still going to go there and it's not going to be outdated. You can use it for a long term and yeah, it's a really good tool. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: The QR code. 

Lauren: Yeah, for sure. We've also talked a little bit about including prompt for email subscribers in your books. Obviously this is something that you can't do if you are not yet published, but it might be something to keep in mind. But yeah, to Laurie's point. You want to include that shout out everywhere you possibly can. 

Laurie: Right. Yeah. And then when you start building your list and you've got your lead magnets, all those ways that you're kind of drawing people into your email list. Like, don't just do one thing. You can test different versions. If you're a course creator or you're an author who's kind of putting out educational content, you can have some kind of lead magnet that accompanies the course or the book that you're selling and people can get it through your email list. And you can A B test these things and find out what really works. And then the more high quality, the more relevant, and the more value that your readers and your subscribers are going to get out of your emails that you send, you know, these very intentional emails that you're going to send, the higher your engagement, their clicks and the open rates, which is just going to contribute to a healthier email list and continue to help you build your list altogether. 

[12:21] - Getting Started with Email Automations 

Laurie: That kind of leads me into just…we were talking about like, every single possible path we could take with this podcast. And email is kind of a complicated topic and there's so many different wormholes you can go into. You know, remember, like – remembering not to spam your subscribers, and giving them that value and being consistent about it. You know, you really want to have that quality over quantity, but you also don't want to have your subscribers forget why they – 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: – subscribed to your email to begin with. 

Lauren: Right. You want to keep yourself relevant –  

Laurie: Right.

Lauren: – for sure. I also want to plug really quickly before we get too far away from it, BookFunnel. It's a great tool for indie authors that want to share their content in general, but it's also fantastic for email. Whether you're growing your list or you're using your email as a lead gen tool, and the promise that you're offering people is here's an exclusive short story, or a bonus chapter, or some content that is normally behind a paywall, but if you sign up for my email list, you'll get it for free. Book funnel is a great tool for you to use to distribute that content. We've definitely plugged them before they're awesome. I will link it in the show notes if you want to check them out. 

Laurie: I love that. 

Lauren: Yeah. Well, and that's a good point. Like, there's so many tools that you can incorporate with what you're doing with your email marketing. And something to kind of also keep in mind is if you are selling on your website, most email service provider is going to integrate with your ecommerce store, but that's also something just to keep in mind. Like, how simple do you want it to be? Do you want it to be literally like plug and play, it's already integrated? Or do you not mind doing a little bit of backend work to get those things communicating? So Shopify and WooCommerce and many other different ecommerce platforms can integrate very seamlessly with your ESP to make it a lot easier. Like, you're not having to go and code these things yourself.

Lauren: Right. Because that’s – 

Laurie: That's not going to happen for most of us. 

Lauren: I was just going to say that. No, thank you. 

Laurie: Yeah, there's only so many things we can do in a day. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Luckily, email platforms make it easy for all of us. 

Lauren: Well, and I think so much of this, so much of the stuff with email marketing… there's a lot of stuff that you can automate with your email marketing efforts, so that you can dedicate more time to your content, or to growing your business, or to writing, or other things. You know, it's going to take some work to get these automations set up –

Right.

Lauren: – and get your ESP set up the way you want it to and integrated with whatever different tools or platforms you're using, to figure out which different tools you're going to want with the ESP, and all of that. But the setup time that you're investing now, is going to just make the whole process so much more automated and so much smoother later down the road. 

Laurie: Exactly. 

Lauren: Which is really the goal of any of this stuff, right? 

Laurie: Yeah. Taking advantage of the automations, and most of the ESPs are going to have templates that you can choose from. So you're not completely starting from scratch for your actual email. But yeah, there's again, email is a complicated, but also simple, straightforward tool to get started, there's a low bar of access. Like, it's very much accessible to anyone listening to this podcast. 

Lauren: I think if you found this podcast, you're already halfway to the... I think email marketing might be more accessible than this podcast, honestly. I'm working on it, and I'm going to lean very heavily on Laurie and her email marketing skills and strategy to help make this podcast more accessible.

Laurie: Yes. Please sign up for Lulu emails and we'll let you know when the podcasts go live every single week. 

Lauren: I love that. Here for that. Yeah, we definitely should have said this at the top. But if you are not already subscribed to Lulu's emails, please do so. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: There is always a subscribe link in the show notes for every single episode. 

Laurie: Thank you. 

Lauren: You're welcome. You're going to get some really great content in there. And I'm definitely not biased as one of the people that is creating the content that goes in there. But they are really great emails and they always have some fun content and copy in there. And Laurie has done incredible work with them over the last year, and they look really cool, and they're fun. So please sign up for our emails. I promise we won't spam you. 

Laurie: I love that plug. That's amazing. Thank you. 

Lauren: Of course. 

Laurie: Yes, please. Please do. 

[16:34] - Making Money with Email Automations

Laurie: So yeah, do you want to talk about how to use email for things other than a newsletter? Lauren: Absolutely. 

Laurie: Are we ready for that? 

Lauren: I think it's time, because I think that is something that even in the first half of this episode, we kind of fell into the trap of still talking about email newsletters and content based emails. And there is so much more out there. So let's get into it. 

Laurie: Yeah. And I think ‘subscribe to my newsletter,’ that's also just kind of become a catch all word for your email list. A newsletter is great and a lot of people are creating these weekly or bi-weekly or monthly newsletters to share their knowledge. Even if you are creating a newsletter, you still want it to be purposeful and valuable to your reader. One way that I really wanted to talk about emails is you can use those to be making money and that's not to say that people who are writing newsletters aren't making money, but you can more directly make money off of your writing and off of your books. Through things that we've already kind of touched on with the automations. So if you're selling your book, you absolutely should be collecting email addresses and giving people an option to subscribe at checkout. Someone makes a purchase, you can kind of, on the backend, segment them and learn about who they are, their actions and behaviors on your website, so that you can follow up with them later. So a couple very important flows or automations that you want to consider outside of a newsletter is a product browse. So that's, if I'm on your website and I'm looking at, you know, various products that you're offering, and I start to navigate away from that website, like I might end up – and I've already given you my email address. It's not going to like, pull someone's email out of thin air.

Lauren: Right, because there are rules behind this kind of stuff, right? 

Laurie: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the thing about email. It's very kind of accessible and you can do so many things with it, but it's also very regulated and you don't want to just upload a list of your contacts, of your friends and family, be like, oh, I'm going to subscribe them to my email list. I've definitely seen that happen before. 

Lauren: Oh my gosh. 

Laurie: I've ended up on email lists that way. 

Lauren: What a great way to guarantee that you're going to get a strongly worded text message from me and – 

Laurie: Right? 

Lauren: – and then an unsubscribe.

Laurie: Its usually like friends of mine that are either creators themselves and they just kind of like, do the little… it's fine. I'm going to add these people to my list. Like, don't do that. That's, that's not a good look. It's actually also probably illegal. I mean, it's, it's regulated. You're not supposed to do that. 

Lauren: Right. People have to choose to opt in. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: People have to voluntarily give you their email address. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: Choose to opt in, potentially choose which version of emails they're opting in...

Laurie: Yeah. There's – of course there's a wormhole with that, but as far as people who have given you their email address, they want emails from you going into… putting time into those flows so you can kind of set them up. And then I wouldn't leave them forever. I'd like, watch their performance and come back later and adjust things and test and see how things are performing. But those product-led or service-led ways that you're using your ecommerce platform. If someone's adding to cart but they don't make a purchase, if you've got an email list, you can go back and target them and bring them back to the cart. Remind them, hey like, you were checking out. Go back to your cart and –

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Yeah like, a little nudge for them. 

Lauren: Did you forget about this? What happened here?  

Laurie: And the really cool thing is that you can A-B test things. So maybe one version of it is just gently nudging someone back to your cart. You know, that doesn't work, you can give them an offer, or change the copy, or a different color button, or just different ways that you can try to engage that subscriber again. 

Lauren: The number of times that I have been absolutely caught and trapped by a cart abandon email that was… here's 10% off or 15% off or here's free shipping. 

Laurie: I do the same thing, but also it doesn't have to be a discount. Like, it could be some kind of value prop or I mean, Lulu's a certified B Corp. You can put a plug that your books were produced by a B Corp, if you're printing through Lulu. So.

Lauren: Yep.

Laurie: Of course you are. There's like other ways that you can bring someone back in. And I think some people – outside of businesses who are doing this all the time – are a little bit hesitant to send these types of emails. But someone subscribed, they want to hear from you, they're interested in your product. I mean, email marketing works. It's usually one of the top drivers of revenue and sales for any of the marketing channels. So it's something to definitely consider. 

Lauren: So there was cart abandon and browsing products. Which I feel like we're all also familiar with, I've definitely gotten that before. Like hey, we saw you looking.  

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Even if I didn't add it to my cart.

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: We saw you looking at this thing. Did you want to come back for it? Or maybe you would like these other things – 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I get that all the time. Are there any other really common types of emails like that? Or are those like, the two main when it comes to like ecommerce? 

Laurie: Those are the two main but then also, once someone actually makes a purchase you can kind of trigger a post-purchase series. So, you know, maybe that's the first thing is going to be like, they're going to get an order confirmation. It depends on how your ecommerce set up, that might come through a different platform or within your email marketing platform. But you know, maybe a week or two later, you follow up with them and ask them for a review. Or you follow up with them and say, hey, I've got this special edition coming out. And you're able to kind of cross-sell based on something that – a behavior that someone's taken, they've made a purchase, they're very interested, clearly, because they have purchased your book or your product or your course or whatever it is. Yeah, the post purchase, cart recovery, browse abandonment. I didn't mention welcome email, because I also feel like that's kind of a given. Someone subscribes to your email, of course you want to send them at least one email if not, you know, a few in a series to introduce them to who you are, what the product is, what your brand is, what you do. Again, like, adding that value.

Lauren: Well, and especially if you've made any kind of promise – 

Laurie: Absolutely. 

Lauren: – to get them to sign up for it, whether it's a discount code or promised content or something like that. If I'm online shopping and a website says sign up for our email list and we'll send you 15% off, if I have to wait more than five minutes for that email with the 15% off code, I'm out. The whole point of me doing this is because I'm shopping right now, not because I'm shopping in an hour. 

Laurie: Give it to me now. Yes. 

Lauren: Right now.

Laurie: Yeah, no, exactly. Good point. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Thank you for bringing that up. Like, you want to deliver on that lead marketing, whatever it is that you've promised them. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Depending on your ESP, it might take five minutes to deliver. It might take ten. So. 

Lauren: I guess. Yeah. 

Laurie: Be a little bit patient. But the good thing is you can also on those forms that you've got, once someone submits their email, you can make the decision that you're only going to send that lead magnet through email or you can… The next step on that form is like, a link to download, or the coupon code. So they get that right away, even if it takes five or ten minutes – 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: – for the email to actually go through. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: And all that's automated. So. 

Lauren: Which is a vast improvement. When I used to work at the bookstore that I used to work at, we did have a newsletter list that was mostly just for updating people on events happening at the store. We had a lot of like, book signings and stuff like that. And the main way that people signed up for that was that we had literally clipboards at every register and you would hand write... I was usually the closing manager. And if it was a slow night, I would tackle those lists. Do you know how hard it is to read people's handwriting? 

Laurie: I was going to say.

Lauren: When it's also a word that you're not familiar with, because it's usually like their last name or something like that? 

Laurie: Oh my goodness. 

Lauren: And God forbid anybody think to themselves, oh, I'm going to write as clear as possible. Like, I'm going to really be careful. And then I'd have people come into the store and be like, I signed up for your email list like a month ago and I haven't gotten any emails and I missed this event because I didn't get the email about it. 

Laurie: It's like, chicken scratch. 

Lauren: Did you – Yeah. Like, can I tell the difference between like a J and an L in your handwriting?

Laurie: To be fair, that would be me because my handwriting, it's not great. If I try it is, but – 

Lauren: But I also – 

Laurie: It just depends on the mood. 

Lauren: I do feel like you could probably clearly write your name for an email sign up list…

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: But we don't have to worry about that. 

Laurie: Yeah, we've evolved. Like if you want to do that, like in person, sign up QR code. 

Lauren: Yup.

Laurie: It's a good way to go. I love that. 

Lauren: It was such a process. 

Laurie: Oh, my gosh. 

Lauren: Always. 

Laurie: And yeah, to that point, you might be subscribing someone that didn't actually subscribe, because you can't read it and you've typed in someone else's name. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: No good. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: Don’t do that. 

Lauren: It's not illegal if it's an accident. 

Laurie: I think that should be a T-shirt. 

Lauren: Matt, write that one down. Perfect. 

Laurie: Oh, my gosh. So just like to go back to that whole like, subscribers and personalization, like, of course, for automations, there's a million ways you can go about it. But those three that I mentioned are good places to start, and it doesn't take coding to put those together. You will have a template in your ESP that you can get that started. 

[25:37] - Segmenting Your Email Lists

Laurie: But on top of that, another way you can use email marketing that is not necessarily a newsletter – it can be related, but you want to kind of personalize those emails as much as you can. I mean, there's gonna be times that you have a message that's good for your entire list, or some set of your entire list, but that shouldn't be the norm. Like, you shouldn't send every single email to every single person on your list. 

Lauren: So to be clear, when you say personalize your emails, you don't mean have every single email say to Lauren – 

Laurie: From Laurie

Lauren: Which you can. I mean, you can. But that's not what you're talking about – 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Right now. 

Laurie: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's always nice to have a first name so that if it makes sense, you can address someone by their name. But that definitely is not like the end of the story with personalization. 

Lauren: Right.

Laurie: Yeah. You can collect first party data upfront. So if you've got your form and you know that you're a travel creator and you write books based on your travels and you specialize in like, three different parts of the world, you can collect information upfront about… Do you like to travel like in Ireland, or Mexico, or Africa, or wherever –

Lauren: Right.

Laurie: – Morocco. And you can collect this information upfront. And then on the backend, you can segment that and give your customers a personalized email about those particular preferences that they've selected. And that's one idea. Again, there's like many, many different ways to do that. 

Lauren: Can you also segment your lists based on the actions that they've taken on your website? So if you want to create a list of everybody that has purchased a book, versus everybody that has signed up for your email but not purchased a book?

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good point. And you're going to use those behaviors to inform automations that you have, but you also can kind of create a one-off campaign based on those parameters. And another thing you would want to build out – and some of these ESPs have it kind of auto built in for you, are these unengaged segments. So if you've got a group of people who are still subscribed, but it's been six months and they haven't opened an email, they haven't clicked an email, you want to kind of exclude them. You might include them in a major book launch or a teaser leading up to a book launch or a big sale, but for the most part, you might be excluding those people. And that is, in its own way, a form of personalization, because they're not engaging and you don't want to continue to email them every time. 

Lauren: Yeah. I do think about that a lot with my inbox too, where there are definitely emails that I get in my primary inbox on a daily basis that I look at and I'm like… This is a company that I made one purchase from eight years ago and I get daily email. I haven't opened a single one of these emails. I delete them every time. Don't ask me why I haven't unsubscribed. 

Laurie: I was going to ask you that question. 

Lauren: Lazy. I am lazy. 

Laurie: Or they maybe didn't like, make it easy for you to unsubscribe, which is absolutely something you don't want to do. 

Lauren: That too. Definitely for sure that too. But I judge those companies a little bit. 

Laurie: Yeah, they're not cleaning their email list. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: And keeping things… it’s the list hygiene that you wanna be mindful of. And again, that's a whole rabbit hole to go down into, but if you've got these segments that are targeting your engaged users, you can build out like, has clicked an email within the last three months or nine months or six months or however long it is, and kind of test out the content that you're sending to those different groups. 

Lauren: I think one of the things that I always thought was really interesting from the social media perspective that I came from is… I think there is actually a lot of overlap between best practices for social media and best practices for email, in ways that don't really seem super super obvious. But –

Laurie: Like, what? 

Lauren: One of the things that I think people have learned a lot more in the last few years with social is that idea of quality over quantity when it comes to followers and it comes to your audience. You can go look at somebody that has a million followers on Instagram and say, wow, they have a million followers. And then you look at their ten most recent posts and they all have twenty likes on them. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: And you're like, cool, okay. That…

Laurie: That's a little sus. 

Lauren: That's a little sus. And I don't believe those million followers. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: And even if you do have them, clearly they're not engaging with your content. They're not paying attention. They're not even seeing your content, probably. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: As opposed to going to see somebody and you say, though, they have a thousand followers on Instagram, but their ten most recent posts all have 800 likes on them. That is somebody who is… They have a dedicated audience. They're reaching their audience, their audience likes their content. And that quality is way more important than the quantity of followers. 
Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: I think that's become more and more true or maybe always been true for email, too. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Where you – blasting every single newsletter to every single person on your list –  

Laurie: Right.

Lauren: – is not providing quality content. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: And you're not engaging with a quality audience. You're just saying look at how many people I have on my newsletter list. 

Laurie: And you're also paying for all of those people, where on social media you're not, you're not paying for those millions of followers that are not engaging. In email you would be paying for them. And so that's just another reason to clean them out and target the people that are engaging with the emails that you do send out. Something that you said reminded me of another thing, and I've already forgot what it was.

Lauren: This is the story of every episode for me. 

Laurie: I know. Stay tuned for the next episode of Lauren and Laurie to find out what it was. I was going to say, that's okay, because there's a more to talk about. 

Lauren: There's so much more to talk about. I think it's very likely that this will not be Laurie's last appearance on this podcast. 

Lauren: Oh, yay, I can’t wait. 

Lauren: So now is also a great time to plug again. If you have any questions or interest in any of the things we're talking about here, or you want us to dive deeper into any of the things that we've talked about in here, definitely let us know and we'll get Laurie back on to answer more questions. 

Laurie: Oh my gosh, I would love that. 

Lauren: Me too. 

Laurie: And that would give us a really nice clear pathway to take, to find out what our listeners want to know about and we can like, deep dive on that topic. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

[31:33] - Personalizing Your Subscriber Engagement 

Laurie: Kind of one more thing I'll touch on for using email marketing for things that aren't newsletters, going back to engagement. There's really fun ways that you can get your subscribers to engage with you. And those are things that you can kind of sprinkle in, in between your newsletter or in between these automations that we've spoken about. Something that kind of gives the email subscriber something, but also like, helps inform your strategy going forward. Through a quiz or asking for feedback, asking their opinion on something. Like you could have an email with two book covers, and you ask your subscriber to click on which one they want you to print the book in. There's like, various quizzes that you can send out and just kind of generate interest and people like to weigh in on things. They're not going to like, fill out a fifty question survey, but if you ask them, do you prefer a paperback over a hard book? Like it can help inform what you do next. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: And it doesn't even have to be about the product. It can be, you know, about the content that you're sending them and that will help inform your strategy later. So really using that first party data where the customer or the subscriber is telling you what they want to hear about. You can't go wrong with that. And there's lots of fun ways that you can do it. 

Lauren: Yeah, I think that that's something that we tend to overlook as creators so often, is that we spend so much time trying to guess what people want from us and forget that we can just ask. People love to tell you what they want from you if you ask them to. 

Laurie: Or what they don't want or.

Lauren: Plenty of that. Well, but even yesterday we were talking about something that you had sent out that people replied to it. And I was like, I don't think it's ever occurred to me that I could reply to a brand marketing message or something. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: But you can. 

Laurie: You can. 

Lauren: You can. And you can ask people to reply to you. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Let me know your thoughts. Let me know your feedback. Do you want more of this? Less of this? Anything like that. 

Laurie: Yeah. And it works really well for those like, reply to my email and I'll personally respond. Like that works really well for a solopreneur or a smaller business, because they have the resources to do that versus someone with…well I guess you can, you can still be a one person show and have so many subscribers on your list that you can't actually handle responding to every single one. But as you're building your list that's a really good way to engage your community and learn from them and respond to them directly.

Lauren: Well, it's building that brand loyalty thing –

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – that is so important and that like authenticity and that actual like connection. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Because that is also one of the things – way back in the beginning of this episode, you mentioned that you've done email marketing for brands, obviously, including right now. But also as personal brand efforts for consulting and lead gen for consulting and stuff like that. And again, with this kind of overlap that I see between email and social. There is a difference in how you're allowed to approach those things when you are a representative on behalf of a brand versus when it is you yourself, your own brand. 

Laurie: Right. Yeah. 

Lauren: And I think that's one of the things that is so valuable in email marketing for a solopreneur. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Unlike a brand for a solopreneur or content creator, this is their opportunity to connect one-on-one with their audience –

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: – in a way that feels one-on-one, even when you know secretly it's going out to a whole list of people. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Because you're just speaking for yourself – 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: – in that moment. 

Laurie: Yeah, absolutely. 

Lauren: And I think we really underestimate the value of that personal connection or even the perception of personal connection. 

Laurie: Right. Yeah. And you mentioned authenticity and that is like, still so important. And email does have all these automated and like even machine-driven forces behind it. But remaining authentic, not pushing out something just because you're trying to get an email out, and being really mindful of it and how you're presenting your brand, even if it is one person, is really important. And that's what sets you apart from someone else that's kind of doing something similar. 

Lauren: Right. Which is ultimately the goal for any of this content.

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Whether it's the newsletter, email marketing, or the more automated stuff. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: The goal is to remind people that you are someone that is reliable in providing valuable content. 

Laurie: Absolutely. And that presents an opportunity to show a little behind the scenes, or like the real person behind the brand or the author behind the book. 

Lauren: Yeah. I just recently wrote another one of those creator spotlights – 

Laurie: Oh, yeah. 

Lauren: – for the Tilt newsletter on Lindsay Dollinger. Among other things, she is a travel agent and a travel creator. One of her areas of travel agency is planning Disney vacations. And she was telling me – 

Laurie: Of course you love her. 

Lauren: Of course, obviously. But she was telling me the purse that she uses is usually one of several of the Dooney & Bourke Disney line. And all the time, people will strike up a conversation with her by just saying, oh, I love that bag. I love that character, I love that movie or I love that ride, I get that reference, whatever. And the conversation will go far enough or they'll say, I've been meaning to plan a trip to Disney. It's been a few years since my family's gone. She'll say, oh, well, if you need any help with that, I am actually a Disney vacation travel planner. 

Laurie: So convenient. 

Lauren: So here's my card. And like – 

Laurie: That's brilliant. 

Lauren: Right? And it is literally as simple as the purse that she uses when she's going shopping – 

Right. 

Lauren: – can be a lead gen tool. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: You know, and if you are the kind of creator where you're not running into your customers in public and maybe your primary form of conversation with them is exclusively email content. But you have that ability to say in an email like, Disney has nothing to do with my content in any way, shape or form, but I'm going to start this email by saying, I just got back from a week at Disney – 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – and let me tell you how that has to do with – 

Laurie: Yeah, it's weaving that story –

Lauren: – whatever else – 

Laurie: – and – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: – like you said, building that connection –

Lauren: – exactly. And if even one person reads that and goes, oh, they're a Disney person. I'm a Disney person. You won. Go you. 

Laurie: Immediately going to go buy your book now. I think that's how that works. 

Lauren: I mean, I've purchased books for less, honestly. 

Laurie: Same. 

Lauren: It'll work on me. But yeah, I think that was my very long winded way of saying I think that we very much overlook the value of creating those personal connections. And email is an amazing tool that you have at your disposal to do that.

Laurie: Right, yeah, it can be kind of a one way communication, but it can be two ways well, depending on what the message is. You kind of like, put something in my mind. There's the personalization of sending the recipient content that's relevant to them. But then there's also like, the personalization of you presenting yourself to them. It's like so many layers.

Lauren: First of all, there's nothing better than when somebody provides me a sound bite and like I'm literally sitting here going, that's going to make it into the show notes as a quote from this episode. So thanks for that. 

Laurie: Oh, my God, that’s amazing. Love it. 

Lauren: But yeah, no, I think you're like, absolutely right about that. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: See, email is just about the warm and fuzzies, right? 

Lauren: Always. 

Laurie: It's actually not. But that's that's a big part of it. Yeah. Yeah. 

Lauren: It is. But it is. think and I think that's one of the reasons that email never dies. 

Laurie: Email is definitely not dead. And that's a kind of a big joke within like, the email marketing network. Network of email marketers like – 

Lauren: Nerds. 

Laurie: Yeah, we're definitely nerds. Loveable nerds, though. Yeah, people are always like email marketing. It's almost like people think about wallpaper. That's so old school. And it's like, no, it's not. It's very relevant and it makes a huge impact on your podcast studio or your marketing goals, depending on what you're talking about. 

Lauren: We're going to circle back on that after we're done recording, because I was actually looking at wallpaper the other day – 

Laurie: Were you? 

Lauren: – and meant to reach out to you because I know you might have some ideas. 

Laurie: I do. I have some, I have some thoughts on that. 

Lauren: This is not a joke. We're actually going to have a conversation about wallpaper later. 

Laurie: I love that. I actually got a text from a friend recently and they were like, oh, I just ordered wallpaper. I thought you should know, I’ll send you the link of what it looks like. So I love that I'm like the wallpaper and the email marketer. 

Lauren: You – see? You can be an expert in many different ways. But even – even something like that, even something as simple and silly as that. I open up my next email from Laurie and it starts with an anecdote about how she was deciding between three different wallpapers for her new library. And maybe even included in the email, these are the three different wallpapers that I'm between, which one? And anyway, that also reminded me of how I was trying to narrow down the cover choices for my book. 

Laurie: Yeah. Exactly. 

Lauren: You know, there's ways to create that personalized connection. 

Laurie: Right. Yeah, that's a really… that's the perfect like, example of using that in real time of that. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

[40:26] - Wrap Up

Laurie: I'm curious, if anybody out there is doing email marketing, like what are the tactics that they're using that are getting engagement? There's just so many options and that's part of the reason why I love email. I've been doing it for something like eight, nine, ten years. Don't even remember at this point. 

Lauren: Time isn't real. It’s okay. 

Laurie: It's very revenue driven for most companies, but it's also in my mind, extremely creative. And there's so many ways you can go about it. And it produces results, so it keeps you energized. And once you start doing it, you're like, I'm seeing the results of the work that I'm doing here. And it’s just… It's something that if you're selling anything or plan to be or want to monetize your writing through and through even a newsletter subscription, you definitely want to start building that email list ASAP. If you take anything from this, that's that's it. 

Lauren: I think that is actually.

Laurie: Yeah.

Lauren: Like, that is the number one primary most important point. If you are not already working on building your email list,stop listening to this episode right now. I won't even get mad. Stop listening right now and go start working on that. 

Laurie: Yeah, exactly. 

Lauren: And then come back and finish the episode. 

Laurie: Listen to it twice. You might need to listen to this one twice. 

Lauren: Yeah. And if you're like, great, I got started. Now what? Now what do I do? I have more questions, comments, concerns. Let us know. We'll do another episode and talk about them. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: Absolutely. Is there anything before we start winding this down? Is there anything else that… I mean, I know, again, we could go on for hours about this, but is there anything for the topics that we talked about today that we didn't cover that you wanted to add in here? 

Laurie: I would just say to experiment. There are many more flows from what we talked about here. Even fun things like sending an anniversary email when someone hits their one year mark of being subscribed and it either sends them a note that's like, thanks for being here or here's a small token of my appreciation. You can test those things. You can…just kind of have fun with it. I think that's the main thing. And yeah, I mean, there's so many different paths you can take in finding out what your audience really is going to respond to is kind of like something to just keep in mind on the back burner at all times. 

Lauren: Love it. It kind of really is like a microcosm of content creation. 

Laurie: It is. 

Lauren: Like, if you're a content entrepreneur, you're doing all these things at a larger scale. But email marketing itself really kind of is all the things that you're doing in that larger brand growth is also happening within very specifically the email – 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: – element of it. 

Laurie: Yeah.  

Lauren: Sounds fun. 

Laurie: So fun. 

Lauren: I do think that is actually probably the thing that I would do if I was going to – over trying to like, grow a social media brand or something. If I was ever going to be like, I'm going to start my own content brand in some way shape or form. I think I would probably try to do some kind of email newsletter situation.  

Laurie: Yeah, as you should, because then you're owning that audience. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: And no matter what happens, as long as they opt in, you can take them. If you change email service providers, you can bring them along. If you switch your social media, you might not be taking those people. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: You know what I mean? 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: It's not your land to move. 

Lauren: Yeah. No, but those emails, they're yours. 

Laurie: They are. 

Lauren: Or they've been voluntarily shared with you. They're not yours, but they have been voluntarily shared with you. Well, if you have any questions about anything that we talked about in this episode or anything that you want to talk about with email marketing, anything that you want to ask Laurie about, please feel free to leave comments on any of our Lulu social posts. We will be happy to respond to them. You can email me, Laurie won't get these, but I will, at podcast@lulu.com. 

Laurie: You can respond to SMS if you subscribe to SMS. And that's an option on our subscriber page, if you're in the United States. And spoiler alert, like, well, maybe not a spoiler, but SMS is like the hand in hand with email marketing. And maybe that's a topic for another episode, but. 

Lauren: Oh, maybe. Yeah, we can do a whole –

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – thing about, because that's something that I don't understand at all. 

Laurie: That one’s really fun. 

Lauren: So you could come explain that to me in detail. 

Laurie: Yeah, okay. Yeah, that one's a good one. But yeah. 

Lauren: Well, then hopefully we'll be back with another episode. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: With more email topics. So if there's anything specific that you want to talk about, let us know and we'll be happy to do it. And even if not, feel free to like and subscribe, leave a review, or just tune in next week for another episode. And until then, thank you so much for joining me. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: It was so much fun. 

Laurie: So much fun. 

Lauren: I hope I didn't scare you away from doing these. 

Laurie: No, I loved it. 

Lauren: Fantastic. Well, then I can't wait to come back and do another one. 

Laurie: Awesome. Thanks Lauren. 

Lauren: Thanks again. And thanks for listening, everyone. And we'll be back next week.