Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. And welcome back to today's co-host, our wonderful Email Marketing Manager Laurie is back for another episode of the Laurie and Lauren Email Marketing Podcast. 

Laurie: So excited. 

Lauren: Yay. 

Laurie: Thank you for having me back. 

Lauren: Thank you for being willing to come back. 

Laurie: Yeah. All the time, anytime. 

Lauren: I'm going to put you to the test on that one. Secret insider look, this is our second attempt at recording this episode. So, while it's Laurie's second time on air, it's her third time in the studio with me. And she still isn't sick of me. So thank you. 

Laurie: Yeah, it's all good. I'm excited, and hopefully it'll be even better than the first time we recorded this. 

Lauren: I think it will be. Which is going to be a tough bar to reach because I think that episode was really good. I just screwed up the audio. So.  

Laurie: That episode is really good and this is going to be better. 

Lauren: Yes it is. 

Laurie: That's kind of the point of us recording it – 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

Laurie: – For a second time. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

Laurie: It happens. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: We gotta work around it. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, hey, sometimes you gotta just figure out how to roll with the punches. Even the best laid plans. You got to pivot last minute. 

Laurie: That’s true. 

Lauren: Which also explains why…if anyone actually made it to the end of a recent episode where I teased that the next episode was going to be me and Laurie, and then the next episode was not me and Laurie, this is why. So.  

Laurie: Nice. I didn't think about that. I should buy you a coffee or something. 

Lauren: No, I should buy you a coffee. Are you kidding me? I'm making you do double work. 

Laurie: Pumpkin spice. 

Lauren: All right. I got you. 

Laurie: I am that – 

Lauren: Okay. 

Laurie: – basic…girly. 

Lauren: Good save. I mean, we are, if you look at it, we're fully prepared for fall here. 

Laurie: We are. 

Lauren: You're in your cozy flannel. I've got my Halloween sweater on. It might be 78 degrees outside –  

Laurie: Sadly. 

Lauren: But we're here. We are in fall. 

Laurie: Well, it's also like, colder in the office. I'm always prepared for that. 

Lauren: Oh, I mean, it's always – 

Laurie: But - yeah. 

Lauren: – absolutely always freezing in this office. So there is absolutely that, for sure. 

Laurie: Yeah. But nobody cares about that. I think they might care about this sweatshirt that you're wearing right now. 

Lauren: Oh thank you. 

Laurie: Crewneck? 

Lauren: Thank you so much. It is a crewneck that I got at Disney a couple years ago. And…this is a very, very rare occasion of me buying merch that has the classic characters on it. But it was so cute and fun and Halloweeny and I really liked the colors. 

Laurie: Yeah, I like the colors too. And it's like the vibe without being like super orange. 

Lauren: Right? 

Laurie: Which I appreciate. 

Lauren: Me too. That's one of the biggest struggles that I have as a Halloween season spooky girly, is that the orange doesn't do much for me. And so all the Halloween decor and clothing and stuff like that, that is all orange, orange, orange. I'm like, well, what about purple? 

Laurie: What about purple? 

Lauren: What about purple?

Laurie: Or black? 

Lauren: Or black. 

Laurie: Or like…dark purple. 

Lauren: Yeah. Maybe like, maybe like a nice burgundy. I don’t know. 

Laurie: I love a burgundy. 

Lauren: That's my color palette at home. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: So that's why all of my – that’s also why I don't own any Halloween decor, because all of my Halloween decor just gets… like, I buy Halloween stuff and then it doesn't get put away. It just gets filtered into my every day home. 

Laurie: I'd love to do a Cribs episode where we just show up at your house and see everything in there –  

Lauren: I mean – 

Laurie: – and learn all the – 

Lauren: – please do. Please do. But also right back at you because I know you've been putting some work in on your house. 

Laurie: I have, I have.  

Lauren: So, I bet it's amazing. 

Laurie: Yeah, it's fun. But it's a lot of work and I'm ready to do it all over again. Because now I'm like, hmm, I would have done this differently. It's only been a year, but. 

Lauren: That's fair. Actually, I just started redoing my whole loft. 

Laurie: Did you? 

Lauren: Yeah. Which is where my…so my desk when I'm working from home is up in my loft. 

Laurie: Oh yeah, yeah.  

Lauren: It's also where all my bookcases are. So it's like my home office slash library. It's been like two years since I've done it and I have the itch and I have to do it. 

Laurie: No, I love a home project. 

Lauren: Yeah. And I, because I am the kind of psycho content creator who says, I'm going to film myself doing this and create some fun, like – 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – time-lapse, before and after videos and everything. And then never actually create, like I'll film it and then never create the content. 

Laurie: My phone is full of that kind of thing. 

Lauren: Same. 

Laurie: Yeah. Maybe one day. 

Lauren: So I will have some before and after it. Maybe one day. 

Laurie: We can share. 

Lauren: Okay. I'll do it if you do it. 

Laurie: Okay. 

Lauren: Deal. But yeah, I will hopefully have some fun content to show. That's my plan for this weekend, is to see how far I can get.  

Laurie: Love that. 

Lauren: Because I can't, I can't do this forever. 

Laurie: I know it's a lot, but it's so much fun. And I actually, I really like where my house is now from all the work that I've done to it. But my sister is about to do some work on her house. So I've been looking at like, all my old saved inspo and being like, oh, man, I really like this color, but I'm done painting.

Lauren: I know it's really, it's actually amazing how much my hyperfixations are influenced by social media algorithms. So like if somebody is like, oh, I'm working on my house right now. I'm working on my guest bedroom. Do you have any ideas? I know you like that kind of stuff. And then I go on Pinterest and start looking at that. And then my Instagram feed starts giving me like, home bedroom furniture ideas. And then all of sudden I'm like, I could redo my room. 

Laurie: It's addictive. 

Lauren: Yeah. It is. But I am, I am trying to be responsible about it this time. And instead of just like willy nilly going off and doing things, I'm going to approach it with a plan. 

Laurie: Good. 

Lauren: So. 

Laurie: As we should do for this episode.

Lauren: As we should do for this episode. 

Laurie: I don't know how we got off on this tangent. 

Lauren: I don't either. But I'm really glad you picked up what I was putting down there. 

Laurie: Rein it in. Okay. 

Lauren: Oh, no. No, no, no. I was just, I was just trying to say, how do we get from point A back to the station?

Laurie: Oh my goodness. 

Lauren: No, I'm never, I'm never going to be the one to rein us in. So don't you worry. But I do think that maybe we should talk a little bit about what we came here to do today, which is not to redecorate either of our homes. That'll be an off the air project. 

Laurie: Yeah, yeah. 

Lauren: We'll report back the next time Laurie's on, on how our progress has gotten for either one of us. 

Laurie: Yeah, we should do that. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

[6:31] - Today’s Topic

Lauren: But until we get to that point… Today, we thought we would talk about how to approach planning and executing a email marketing campaign. This is something that we may or may not have timed intentionally, because we are around that time of year where you might be doing a big marketing push in the next coming weeks or months. Maybe not though. Maybe you don't have any plans for any Black Friday or holiday sales campaigns or anything like that, but you are planning ahead for your next book launch, or product launch, or something else, where you might be reaching out to your email list for not just a one-off email, but an actual campaign series of emails. And so we wanted to talk through a little bit what that would look like, what that process looks like, and what you can do to make sure that you are maximizing your reach and your email marketing efforts. 

Laurie: Yeah, yeah. And I love the emphasis on like, good for holiday, good for book launch, good for any kind of push outside of your normal schedule. 

Lauren: Yeah, yeah, we are talking about something that's outside of your normal email cadence. So we're not talking about like your regular…whether you send a newsletter or you are currently just using your email as like a, send out an email when I have something to say, but not on a regular basis. We're talking about a dedicated push right now where you're really going to be putting in some effort. Which is why you also have to start with putting in some serious work on the planning.

Laurie: Exactly. 

Lauren: And you can't just start moving furniture around your loft willy-nilly without a plan because it doesn't work that way. 

Laurie: You could, but you might waste a lot of time and you could be a lot more efficient and happy with your results. If you do have a plan, you have a goal and then you execute.

Lauren: I think that’s the way to go. 

Laurie: We're going to take this whole like, remodeling your loft theme for the rest of the episode. 

Lauren: This is going to be the episode that Matt and I failed to do the curb appeal, craft your curb appeal for your brand. We dropped that metaphor like fifteen minutes into the episode. It's going to make its reappearance now in this one. 

Laurie: I love that. 

Lauren: So I think what we're going to talk through, just high level look here, just making sure we're clear about why you want to set up or take the time to set up your email campaign. So we want to talk through why it's important to plan ahead and prep for your email campaign. And then we're going to talk through kind of like a pre-campaign planning timeline, and then some ideas for what you can do after that campaign is live and you are monitoring it and then reviewing your results at the end. Sound good? 

Laurie: Sounds great. 

Lauren: All right. Let's get started. 

Laurie: Let's do it. 

[9:08] - The Importance of Preparing and Planning Ahead

Lauren: So just to kind of talk through a little bit about why you might want to do some prep work here, why you can't just dive right in and start throwing books over the side of your railing because you've got to clear those bookcases out because you have to move them. Spoiler alert, it's really hard to move a fully stocked bookcase that doesn't have wheels on it, especially on carpet. 

Laurie: I do not envy you. But if you need help – 

Lauren: This is – 

Laurie: Happy to come help.  

Lauren: This is a bed that I made for myself at this point. Like I have no – I volunteered myself for this job. For sure. But you definitely want to plan and you definitely want to prepare as much as possible. What are some of the risks that you think people are taking if they don't plan ahead? 

Laurie: Yeah, if you're not planning for your campaign and a big launch, then you know you're risking lower engagement. If you're going to increase your frequency, which generally you're going to do for a launch, you can end up having deliverability issues if you don't kind of ramp up and plan for that increase of sends. And then the biggest thing, I would say, is like, if you're not prepared, you're not segmenting your audience appropriately and you don't have a goal for your campaign or your launch, which means you don't really have something that's propelling the campaign forward. Which kind of then bounces back to like, if you're not clear with what your campaign is trying to achieve, your click through, or your call to action, is going to most likely be a little bit confusing for the recipient. Because if I'm just like, throwing a bunch of stuff in an email, the recipient is not going to know where to focus. So, that's a couple of ways that you kind of throw yourself under the bus. 

Lauren: So basically, like you're running the risk of, in one way or another, discouraging your subscribers. So either you're putting yourself in a position where your subscribers are not going to be getting high value content from you, so they're going to be less likely to open future emails. Or you're putting yourself in a position where inbox filters are going to filter your emails out before they even get in front of your subscribers because you're not following email best practices – 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – with the way you're sending them. 

Laurie: Yeah, that's a real possibility, especially if you're not regularly sending emails right now. So that's just a few things. 

Lauren: Sounds like pretty important things. 

Laurie: Yeah.

Lauren: So. Definitely want to plan ahead on stuff like that. Do you think that there's general mistakes that you see people making within this? Whether it is like not planning or other things that they might be doing wrong, or is it kind of hard to narrow that down? 

Laurie: I mean, I think touching on a little bit what I just said, like with the segmenting. You know, you want to have your data kind of compiled so you know exactly who's going to get the email. If you've got a couple of different versions of products or campaigns that you're going to send and you want to target those emails to the appropriate audience. You just, you want to take those steps to make sure that's all in line. And it is a big mistake to just like, blast your entire list with everything. And then just very much at a high level, like we probably aren't going to go into detail on this, but just having accessibility in mind. Because, you know, you want the content easy to read, easy to access, and just making that language very simple and straightforward. So the action is easy to take whenever it lands in somebody's inbox. 

Lauren: Yeah. You want them to do what it is you want them to do. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: And if you're not clear on what that is, then no one's going to have a good time. 

Laurie: Like, eh. 

Lauren: Yeah. Like, oh, sorry. I opened your email, but beyond that I got so lost or couldn't read your text on the background color or…

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Couldn't tell which button was the button that you wanted me to click because I couldn't tell what the CTA was. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

General Campaign Planning

Lauren: So some things that you're going to want to do in general when it comes to planning for a campaign, not necessarily within your timeline that you're working on that pre-campaign planning, but just high level things that you're going to want to do. Primarily is set a goal for your campaign, right? . 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: So what are some of the goals that people would set? Like, what do we mean by that?

Laurie: Well, the first thing you think of is like open rates and click rate and conversions, which are all things that you're going to want to keep in mind. And hopefully you're tracking those metrics over the course of the year, whatever, however long you've been sending your emails. So you can compare that to how your campaign performs. But kind of taking it a step further than that, it's like, I want to sell X number of books with this campaign, or I want to have X number of downloads. So having a more concrete goal, I think, is one really good way to look at it first and kind of go beyond the like, I want to increase my click rate by half a percent or 1% or whatever. Like, have it more – be more concrete than that. And then if you are running a sale or discount, you want to get X number of uses on that coupon code and kind of take your goals from there. I mean, there's a lot of different goals that you could set, but that's generally where I would start. But depending on what your author brand is, or your creator brand or whatever it is, your goal is going to be unique to you. So it doesn't have to be from that list that I just mentioned. 

Lauren: Right, of course. But I will emphasize your point that you made that you need to be tracking these before you start the campaign, because you will not know if the campaign was successful if you didn't know what your starting metrics were – 

Laurie: The baseline. 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: That's the word, baseline. Thank you. Yeah. So you definitely want to know that and you definitely want to make sure you have that available to you. So if for whatever reason you're not, mean, these metrics should all be available in your email service provider. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I can't imagine that there's any out there that doesn't have at least the basic bare minimum metrics within them. 

Laurie: Yeah, I would hope not. 

Lauren: I would hope – 

Laurie: I mean – 

Lauren: Yeah, why are you using that if it's... 

Laurie: Yeah, immediately shut that down if you are. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: But yeah, it makes it really easy, but it's good to kind of look at. You could even go back and look if you've ran a campaign previous to the one you're working on now, you can go back and look at the performance specifically for that campaign or that launch. Or you can go back and look at Q4 of last year and how your marketing performed during that time, and try to kind of like set your goals around what you did previously. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. Especially if this is cyclical in any way. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Like if this is, if this is a recurring campaign, whether it's an annual campaign, every time you put out a new book, whatever, having specific goals for this campaign and then also like year over year or month over month or campaign over campaign, I guess. That's a good thing to look at. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: You're also just in general, obviously, if you are going to do an email marketing campaign, now's a really good time to try to up your efforts to get subscribers to your email list. 

Laurie: Yeah, your acquisition. 

Lauren: Yeah. So anything that you can do that isn't necessarily tied to this campaign. But just double check that your subscribe form is set up correctly, that everything looks good on your website. That if you have it linked anywhere, that link is still active. That link hasn't broken over some, you know, sometimes social media, you'll be, you'll be so blind to your own link in bio that you never check it. And then you go click on it and you realize that like, somewhere a character got deleted and that link hasn't been working for who knows how long. 

Laurie: Yeah, that happens to literally all of us. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Laurie: Yeah, it's a good time to start auditing those things ahead of your acquisition efforts. 

Lauren: Absolutely. So whenever it is that you're ready to get started – we're going to present to you a two month outline. And we'll kind of explain as we go through it a little bit why we're putting a two month time frame on this, and we're not saying this is something that you should do in 48 hours. But if you have a month, if you have a few weeks, whatever, you can still do it. Don't sit here and go, oh my gosh, what do you mean two months? This campaign has to start next week. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Like, okay, there's still, there's still time. But…

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: If you're listening to this now for a campaign that you're planning on doing in January, take notes.

Laurie: Or in October or November. I mean, the main thing is it's like, listen to this episode. There's a lot of good content out of it. The best thing you can do for yourself is to plan as far in advance as you possibly can. But if you're like you said, in the middle of a campaign or launch, it's happening much quicker. Like, just pull out what makes sense to you from this episode and use more of it next time. 

Lauren: Yes. I know a lot of the pushback that I get from people that don't like planning and even sometimes Matt on air has pushed back a little bit on the idea of like, if you plan too far in advance, you're not leaving yourself any room for creativity or not leaving yourself any room for like…what if something comes up out of nowhere that you really want to talk about? Something related to your campaign comes up or related to your book or your brand or whatever comes up in the news and is a hot topic of conversation. And you've, you've locked yourself so thoroughly into a content plan that you don't have room to talk about that thing. I would argue that a campaign like this, that you're laying out the effort like this, isn't the kind of thing that you want to have impulse content in. And there is room for like, we will talk about once the campaign is live and you reach that point where you have to make on the fly edits and adjustments and changes and be reactive like that. But I would say that something like this, if you're planning it out ahead of time, it gives you more time to have that creativity and flexibility in your other content. In your other, like in a one-off email that you might send that isn't a part of this campaign, in other like social content or whatever it is, whatever your main content channel is. So. 

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah, and I would also like, kind of piggyback off that; if you are prepared and you are planning your steps out in advance, it does give you more flexibility when something does come up. If you're like, oh, actually like, I can't miss this opportunity. I am going to like, kind of divert my plan a little bit. It's a lot easier to do that when things are kind of teed up, versus kind of a haphazard reactive response to those things. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Cause yeah, you can shift things around, and then they're ready to go whenever. 

[19:08] - General Planning

Lauren: Some of the first things we're going to talk about here are things that are not creative pursuits, or content-based strategy, or stuff like that. They are things like optimizing your email list, which that is the beginning and the end of what I know about optimizing your email list. So Laurie, why don't you take that one? 

Laurie: Yeah. I mean, so. Optimizing your list. This is something that you should be doing, you know, on a quarterly basis, couple of times a year at minimum. You're constantly growing your list, but a lot of people aren't thinking about, kind of, cleaning up the list and making sure your list is optimized to your most engaged contacts. So if you've got something coming up, you're going to want to go into your account, create a segment of people who have subscribed at least a year ago, and within that past year you've sent them twelve emails, for example, and they have not clicked or opened any of those emails, then suppress those users. You might decide to take a segment of that maybe within the past six to nine months–and maybe you want to give them a year–and kind of create another segment that you're going to; these are people who are clicking but they're not really making purchases. They're engaging in some way but they haven't like fully dropped off your engagement list, then those people you might want to send them a re-engagement email. And that can look like, hey, are you still around? Do you still want to stay subscribed? And have them take an action to remain on your list? And if they don't take that action, you can decide to suppress them. You don't want to delete them though, because when you delete them, their data is gone. All the attributes to their profile is gone. So if they decide to come back later, which by the way, they can always resubscribe later and that's fine. But if you delete them, then like, you just have no way to go back and look at that data later. Cleaning the list and optimizing and making sure that you're only sending to people who are going to engage with your email is going to help your deliverability. It's going to help reach the people that actually want to hear from you and want to buy your book, whatever it is that you're sending through email. And this is one area that you don't need to do two months out. Like, you can do it today if you're launching something next week. 

Lauren: I mean, hey, take this as a sign. No matter what you're doing, even if you're not planning on doing a campaign in the next eight months. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: If you can't remember the last time that you did any kind of like, hygiene maintenance on your email list, take this episode of the sign to put that on your to do list for this week. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Why would somebody not want to just blast an email out to their entire list? Why would they want to segment out or suppress people that are non-active subscribers? 

Laurie: Yeah, well for the non-active subscribers, if you continue to send them emails and they continue to not open, continue to not click, that then sends a signal to the inbox provider. So Gmail or Yahoo or–do people use Hotmail anymore? I don’t know? 

Lauren: I don't know.

Laurie: You know, whoever you use to check your emails that sends a message to them that says, okay, like my customer who's the person that owns the email address, they don't want to get this email. They're not opening. They're not engaging with it. So we're just not even going to let it hit the inbox. So that will happen. It does happen. It happens to everybody, large brands and solopreneurs. 

Lauren: So you're basically just increasing your odds of getting shuffled directly into – 

Laurie: To spam. 

Lauren: – spam folder. 

Laurie: Or bouncing. 

Lauren: And then it's twice as hard to win back that real estate that you lost.  

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: By getting put back into a primary inbox. 

Laurie: Exactly. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Laurie: Yeah. And then the other part of your question was blasting your whole list. Ideally, you have, you know, subscribers with all different backgrounds and preferences. And even if it's down to like, the time of day that you send the email, you can segment your list. So if you've got people from different parts of the world, you can segment and time that email to go out on a certain… My 8 AM is not the same as somebody on the other side of the world, that's sending to them at midnight. So that's just a very, very basic way of segmenting. And those are – it'll go a lot deeper than that, but just kind of refreshing your data and making sure that when you are ready to send that campaign, it's going to the people that are gonna engage with it. And then also it's – your messaging is catered to a certain segment based on the information that you've either collected upfront when they subscribe, so they're like giving you those preferences. I mentioned the re-engagement email that you can send. If you're not collecting data that you can then segment, then start doing that now, and you can put that in your onboarding. So either, like I said, when you subscribe, you can have like, a dropdown where someone can select from…whether it's like, the topic that they're most interested in that you talk about, or the service that you're selling, or the type of book, or maybe it's even their birthday, or whatever it is, like collect that information upfront. And if you don't get that at signup, you can put it into your welcome series so that you can use that data to then segment later. And it just personalizes the message a bit more, whether it's their preference or based on location, for example. 

Lauren: Cause you never really know without asking. We've talked about this in other episodes, both the episode that you and I did, and then Matt and I have talked about this in other episodes. About like you don't really know what your customers want until you ask them. 

Laurie: And shout out to our friend, Robbie, from MKTG Rhythm, because that's one thing that he talks about, too. You know, picking up, are you making these purchases for a gift or for yourself or for your business? And you might see that come through Lulu emails. And it's the same thing. You know? 

Lauren: Yes. 

Laurie: We're able to personalize the message based on those answers. 

Lauren: Yes. Shout out to Robbie –  

Laurie: Shout out.  

Lauren: – who was just a recent guest on the Live From CEX episode and shared some very interesting insight into the data that we're talking about right now. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: So absolutely go give that episode a listen if you haven't. Robbie is the last interview in it, but I'm not going to tell you to skip ahead to his, because all the other ones are really good too. 

Laurie: Shout out to everybody at CEX. 

Lauren: Yeah, that too. We had such a good time. Well, I had such a good time. 

Laurie: No I did too, I did too. 

Lauren: I can't speak for you. 

No, I loved it. It was my first time and I learned a lot.

Lauren: I was – 

Laurie: I was there for work, but I learned a lot. 

Lauren: I think it was actually the most that I've ever like, gone to sessions at a conference that we were like, not attending as attendees. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: And I left with a lot of notes. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: So, had a great time there. 

Laurie: Me too. 

[25:42] - Two Months to Launch

Lauren: Some other things that you're going to want to look at while you're looking at your emails as well. And again, as we were saying, we're not necessarily talking about content right now, we're talking about maintenance. That's why we're talking two months out right now. So you can get all this stuff out of the way and get to the creative stuff when you get closer to your campaign launch. 

Laurie: Another place that you can kind of like, plan ahead and get yourself all set up is updating your email templates. And again, this is something that you can be doing at any time of the year, not just for a big launch, but it helps you when you are going to set a few emails up for your campaign. So ensuring you've got the consistency and format to help you establish your brand identity, your visual identity, where people recognize the email. Whether that's like – it's not just your logo, but it's, you know, the colors you use, the language you use, the tone that you take in the email. So those are things to consider. Most of the ESPs, the email service providers, whether you're using MailChimp or Kit or Klayvio or Flora or any other of the many options you have to choose from, a lot of them have like a drag and drop formatter that you can set up the format of your email where you've got your logo, you've got your format like – sorry, I said format like five times, so now I'm very much aware of that.

Lauren: Words, words start to lose all meaning when you're on a podcast. 

Laurie: I think so. 

Lauren: So you're fine. 

Laurie: But yeah, you want to just set that template up so that everything's standardized from your logo to the formatting to the font. Like, don't jump around to a bunch of different fonts and also consider both the font and the color choices for legibility and accessibility. 

Lauren: Yeah, you're gonna want to keep in mind – I don't remember if this is in the episode that is now lost forever or if it was in the episode that the first one that we recorded. But I learned this the hard way with having your phone in dark mode and getting Michael's coupons emailed to me. Laurie: Oh yeah. 

Lauren: And they don't scan when your phone is in dark mode because it's a dark, dark gray background with a black barcode over it. 

Laurie: Yeah.

Lauren: And there's not enough… 

Laurie: Contrast. 

Lauren: Thank you. That's exactly the word that I was looking for. There's not enough contrast in the two colors. So you have to switch your email back into light mode in order to scan those coupons in your email. Which is not something that I ever would have thought about –

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: – if I didn't have that experience. And you as a solopreneur or small business owner are probably not sending people barcode scan coupons. But there are still things that you're going to want to think about when it comes to designing your email templates and your branding and stuff like that. 

Laurie: Yeah, go ahead and test those in dark mode and light mode. Dark mode is really hard. There are people who are like, email developers who work on that, and we're not all email developers. So we do our best. And so it's good to like test, like Lauren said, because you want to know if you're going to send an email out and the contrast just isn't there. So you can't actually read the email. It's never going to be perfect, but you can work towards it at least being legible. 

Lauren: Right. Right. And especially if you're doing, if you know, we're talking again about preparing in advance you want to make this as easy as possible for yourself. If you do all of the work and you design an email template and you draft ahead of time ten emails that you're gonna send out and you do all of that stuff you you have everything ready to go and then you send the first one out and somebody email, like somebody responds to it and says I couldn't read this on my phone. Like, the font was too small or the contrast between the font and the background was too different or not different enough. Or like for whatever reason, like something is wrong here in this email template. You don't want to have to go back and redo all of the work that you've already done. And it's after you've already launched it. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: So giving yourself that opportunity now to go in and update your email templates and then test what those look like gives you the time to make the adjustments that you need to before this campaign ever launches. 

Laurie: Right. And then when it's done, it's done and you can just use that same template for forever. 

Lauren: Forever ever? 

Laurie: For ever, ever, ever. 

Lauren: Perfect. Yeah, I think, I mean, we've talked a lot about the concept of branding in general and all of those subconscious aesthetic cues that people have that they come to associate – what color do you think of when you think of Publish & Prosper? It better be purple. But I bet that came to mind like, immediately. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: That is something that you want to like, really commit to that branding and make sure that's present in your email. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: It does matter. 

Laurie: Yeah. And then another thing I would mention outside of branding is to start increasing your send frequency, which we did touch on. So if you're sending one time a month right now, work your way up to one time a week or twice a month, and eventually get to the frequency that you're going to be going to during this campaign or at launch. Again, because if you go from one email every other month or one email a month to four emails for a month-long campaign, then there's a possibility that your ESP is going to be flagged by Gmail or Yahoo or whoever the inbox is because of this inconsistency of frequency that you're sending emails to. 

Lauren: Right. Which is one of the main reasons that we said that you want to start this planning – 

Laurie: Ahead of time. 

Lauren: – ahead of time. You don't want to really start doing your pre-campaign prep a week out. You can if you have to, but you would like to be able to kind of gradually increase your email send over time. 

Laurie: Yeah, yeah. 

Lauren: Also, this is a lot of work to do in one week. So just consider it. Something else that I think that for me, because I've already made the point repeatedly about how important it is to have access to your data, make sure that your data is tracking itself correctly right now. Make sure that your metric tracking tools are working. Make sure that all of your other technical details, like I also said with your email subscribe list, with your links on social or on your website, or if you have capture links in your ebooks, stuff like that, make sure those are all up to date, ready to go. Like whatever your default footer is on your email, are those working properly? Like just go through and do that technical audit to make sure that you're not about to put a whole bunch of work into something that is going to accidentally lead people to a dead end. 

Laurie: Right, because part two of this is to actually start the acquisition after you've done all this planning. 

Lauren: Yeah. So how do we do that? 

[32:10] - Four to Six Weeks to Launch

Laurie: So planning your pre-launch and your launch and developing your content schedule and the frequency and all of that, that can literally happen in an afternoon, or take a couple hours. Make yourself a nice cup of coffee and give yourself an outline for that. That kind of then moves you into that phase of being ready to start your acquisition, like Lauren touched on. Whether that's on social, in ads, any way that you can to drive people to your subscribe opt-in page, so that you can build your audience up ahead of time, of the launch. Or maybe you're a podcast guest or, you know, you have an event or something or you like you mentioned Lauren, a code or like, a QR code or sign up in a book. Obviously if you've got a QR code in your book you can update that landing page like you can change that it doesn't have to remain the same. And so starting that acquisition would be probably best done around a month out, but if you've only got a couple of weeks just get to it as soon as you can because you want to get your list kind of in prime position before you go live. 

Lauren: Yeah, I feel like this is that phase where we're like, we haven't quite committed to saying one month out yet, but it's in that gray area. It’s almost like six weeks out. If we're doing a two month window, you know, this is the stuff that you should be doing in that window of time where you're like, okay, I've done my groundwork already from the two months out, but we're not quite in that under a month timeline yet. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Whether that's planning your…planning your actual campaign efforts, planning out exactly what emails you're going to send when you're going to send them or planning out how you're going to increase your acquisition efforts. Or planning out like, what that increased send is going to look like between now and then. You also do have to do that. I don't think we've covered that in the last episode that we did. If you're going to be increasing your email frequency, you should probably come up with some content. You can't just send people like, blank emails just for the sake of it. So here's that opportunity for you to come up with some fun, creative, on the fly content.

Laurie: Yeah, that kind of goes, I would say in your pre-launch too –

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: – your pre-launch plan. You know, you can ramp up to that full launch. And part of that, you know, when we touched on in the beginning where it was like sending that re-engagement email, that's one part of that. Like you're just kind of like this onboarding ramp to increasing that frequency in your content. 

Lauren: Also, this is the fun part, you know? Coming up with the content or coming up with the copy and the graphics and the design of the emails for your campaign. That's where you get to have fun. And it's not just the–using the word audit again, which Matt does not like. But, but yeah, this is your opportunity to not just be checking whether or not all your links are still working, but to actually have some fun and actually go through and say, hey, okay, what content am I going to be sending? What's – how do I want to get this message across? Again, what is my goal for this campaign? What do I want people to do? If I want people to click on a link, how can I best entice them to do so? What's the best copy? What's the best CTA? What's the best design for doing that? If I'm trying to sell people on my book, how do I come up with the best elevator pitch possible to get them to buy this book, or at least to click on the learn more and check out my book here or whatever? This is where you have some fun with that. 

Laurie: Right. And you mentioned like, what's the best way to do it? Sometimes we just don't know. And so doing the A/B test is a good opportunity, and you can kind of learn what your audience is responding to before you do a big push on a launch or for holiday promotion. And on top of that, just keeping in mind, like remembering that you want to give value to the person on the other side of the email. Not just kind of like sending whatever fun content you want to give them. I mean, I think you mentioned weaving a story into, to like, lead into your email. You had that really great idea last time we chat. So that's bringing a story into it, bringing yourself into it and providing valuable content. Which I know is hammered home on this podcast a lot, it is really important for email to provide that value so that people continue to open your emails.

Lauren: Yeah, you don't want to do anything that's going to discourage people from opening your emails. That's, I mean – 

Laurie: That's, that's – yeah, that's a really good tip. 

Lauren: Like, just don't do that. 

[36:31] - One Month to Launch

Lauren: All right. Have we hit the one month mark yet? 

Laurie: Yeah, I mean, I think we, we hit it. We're talking one month out, 

Lauren: Okay. 

Laurie: We've already kind of started to tease on social and in ads, if you've got some money you want to put behind it. I mean, I don't think that's like the top choice for people for email acquisition. But you, you can get your social audience engaged by teasing whatever it is that's coming up, like whether it is a book launch or get on our list because we're going to be sending out our yearly promo if you only do it once a year or whatever it is, teasing that on social so can get people over onto email so that they have the opportunity to be first dibs. You know, a lot of times email can be… It's almost like an exclusive club where you get the first news on something. And so you can frame or tease your launch out that way on social and to the various community, audience-building communities that you participate in. 

Lauren: Yeah, you might even have a VIP segment within your email, right? 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: And if not, you might even want to consider doing that right now. 

Lauren: Yeah, yeah. And how you define the VIP is up to you, but often it's going to be the people that are clicking or opening. Probably more than opening, but clicking or making purchases or engaging in some consistent manner. 

Lauren: I am on one VIP email list. 

Laurie: Is it the Lulu VIP? 

Lauren: No, I'm on two. I'm on two. But one of them I earned my way onto. And by earned my way onto, I mean spent my way onto. I'm on a VIP mailing list for a spend threshold with a small business. 

Laurie: Nice. 

Lauren: But you know what, as much as it was like, ooh boy. Oh wow. That's really putting into perspective how much money I've spent. I get free shipping on all, all my orders from them and I get early access to every new launch. 

Laurie: I like that. 

Lauren: So every new product launch, they send out like, ahead of the launch, a password to get into their website early so that I have a better chance of getting everything that I want before it's sold out. 

Laurie: Yeah, I love that. And that's, you know, that's just another like, creative way to generate that engagement too – 

Lauren: Yes. 

Lauren: – with your loyal audience and thinking outside of the box. Maybe it's not access to your site, but it's like, here's your specific code that either gives you that early access or gives you a little bit more of a discount or whatever it is for a VIP list. 

Lauren: Yeah. And it's something that I think it's one of those little things that goes a long way in building that like, mutually beneficial connection between you and your audience. You are benefiting from it and that you're getting higher email opens, higher engagement on your emails, clicks, sales, whatever it is. And you're also fostering relationship with them, where they feel like they're getting a personalized white glove treatment experience from you. Where it really does make you feel like, I'm part of this special club.

Laurie: Yeah.

Lauren: Like I am recognized by this brand that I clearly like enough that I have spent a lot of money with them or I've done a lot to engage with them or whatever it is. That reciprocity is nice from a consumer perspective, for sure. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: So. 

Laurie: And as you're saying that, I'm sitting here thinking about all the money I've spent at Lowes on doing all these – 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: – home renovations and I am definitely not on their VIP and I don't appreciate that. 

Lauren: Wow. Wow. Well, I was going to go there after we were done recording and maybe now I won't. 

Laurie: I would always choose Lowes though, over Home Depot. 

Lauren: Same. 

Laurie: But the amount of money I've spent there, they haven't given me that email. 

Lauren: Are you putting your email in at checkout every time? 

Laurie: Okay. I don't give them my email. But I do give them my phone number, even more personal. 

Lauren: All right. Wait for that SMS marketing. 

Laurie: Oh my goodness. But yeah, I mean, I digress. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: We're going down rabbit holes, But. 

Lauren: We are. But we knew we would. 

Laurie: We always do. 

Lauren: We always do. We kind of already talked about the idea of building and testing your emails when we talked about templates. But I think that it's important. Like, you know, we tested the templates. We said test the templates to make sure everything looks good before you build all of your emails. But then you are still going to want to build out your emails and test them. I don't think – 

Laurie: For the campaign itself? 

Lauren: Yes. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I don't think a single email goes out at Lulu without somebody else other than you like laying eyes on it, right? 

Laurie: Right. Right. 

Lauren: We send a lot of emails. A lot of emails. 

Laurie: We do. 

Lauren: And every single one of them gets reviewed by at least one other person, just to test and make sure…does this, you know, did I miss anything, or did Laurie miss anything? Did Paul miss anything? Does this email look really good on desktop, but oh, on mobile, like, looks like it's really weird or whatever. You got to test that stuff. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Especially if you're putting all of this effort in. You really don't want to trip at the finish line like that. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: You want to make sure everything looks good if you're going to put this much work into it. 

Laurie: Yeah. Once you're kind of into the campaign planning and aside from the logistics and making sure that everything's functioning. A lot of times the copy that you've written, which PS, if you haven't written your copy yet – did we talk about that? You definitely want to do that before you put it into email, but. It often looks a lot different in the email than it does in a copy doc. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Laurie: Because you know, we'll write all of our copy in a separate doc, and then I'll bring it into our ESP. And at that time, it's like, oh, actually, this is too much, or it's not clear or, know, whatever it is. My best advice would be to batch create all that stuff like batch create your copy, batch create the emails, since a campaign could be sending anywhere from three to ten to twenty emails, depending on, you know, the audience and how long this campaign is going to last. So yeah, getting it out of your copy doc and into the email and testing those emails is good advice. And on top of that, if you are running promos, create those promos, check that they actually–the code’s like, actually functioning and it's working as intended, you know. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: While you're testing the email out. 

Lauren: There is no danger to you in creating a promo code and setting it live before the campaign itself actually starts. Because you haven't shared it with anybody yet. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Nobody is going to jailbreak your laptop and find out what your 20% off promo code is. It's not that deep. So like. It's okay if you say, my big sale of the year doesn't start until Monday, but I'm going to set the promo code to go live on Saturday so that I can do one last round of testing and make sure everything is working before it goes live. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Because you really don't want to find yourself in the position of Monday morning, your campaign has gone live, your email is out there and a bunch of people are coming to your website to buy your book. And then you get twenty-five emails from customers going, your promo code doesn't work.

Laurie: The face you just made. I’m sorry. 

Lauren: I mean, it's a personal pet peeve. 

Laurie: Oh my gosh. 

Lauren: But from both sides of the coin. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: But that is something that you really do not want to have to deal with. And the only way to guarantee that you don't have to deal with that is to give yourself the buffer of setting that code live ahead of time and testing it and making sure it works. 

Laurie. Yeah, I do that every single week. 

Lauren: Yeah. It's an important part of it. In the same way that you would – if the email campaign that you're doing is that you're announcing the launch of your new website, you'd want to test to make sure that website works, right? 

Laurie: Yeah, all the links are working…

Lauren: Like – right. If you're announcing the launch of your new book, you want to make sure that–and you're selling direct from your website–you want to make sure that your shop is set up correctly, your checkout experience. These are all things that we've talked about in other episodes. Like, you want to make sure that the customer experience is as seamless as possible from the minute they first encounter you to after their checkout experience is over. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Like you want every step to be as smooth as possible. So you have to give yourself the opportunity to build this stuff out ahead of time and test it and make sure it's all working ahead of time. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Which is also why you're gonna wanna schedule this stuff in advance. 

Laurie: Exactly. Yeah, at least your first couple emails and then keeping that flexibility open as Matt would say, in case something comes up, you wanna – If you schedule every single one, then you might go back and unschedule something to adjust it. So, at least your pre-launch and your launch email, and then you can go back to your plan halfway through your launch or halfway through the week and decide, okay, is the next phase of emails that I was going to send? Do I still want to follow this plan, or do I need to make copy adjustment, or maybe I've sold out and I don't want to continue to promote it? Like, whatever it is, you can check in and then schedule the rest of those emails. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, you can always unschedule an email, right? 

Laurie: You can always unschedule. 

Lauren: As long as it hasn't sent yet. 

Laurie: Yeah. Unless it's like sometimes, you know, if you wait too long and it's scheduled for, I don't know, a couple hours sometimes you can't unschedule those, but. 

Lauren: But you can't unring the bell. 

Laurie: Yes. 

Lauren: You can't take it back after it's already been sent. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: It's a lot easier to turn it off and change your mind on it than it is to have it be 11 PM the night before a campaign is supposed to launch and you're frantically scheduling tomorrow's email because… 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I mean, queen of procrastination over here. I'm not judging anybody for doing that. I'm just saying don't do it to yourself if you can avoid it. 

Laurie: Yeah, we're gonna stay on our schedule and plan ahead, leave some room for flexibility, but we're not going to be scrambling the night before. Right?

Lauren: And this episode is definitely not going to be as long as the first time we attempted to record it. 

Laurie: Okay. 

Lauren: Technically we have not done that. 

Laurie: Done. 

Lauren: Technically we have not hit that spot yet. Just saying there's still time for us to be under the –

Laurie: Okay. Alright. 

Lauren: – under the target. 

Laurie: Well, then the last thing I will say about this whole scheduling thing is –

Lauren: yes. 

Laurie: Once you've got your email scheduled and really after your campaign, which this might be something to save for later. But keep in mind any of the like pieces of content that you might want to use for evergreen, and you can usually save those in your email platform as evergreen content. So you can save a block so that you don't have to recreate it for a future email. can just save it as universal content and then pop that, pop that baby back in another email. 

Lauren: Oh, I didn't know that. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: That's cool. 

Laurie: Saves a lot of time. 

Lauren: Which is also why it's useful to plan all this stuff in advance and have all this, like have an understanding of the overall picture of all this so that you know what can be. 

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Oh, look at that. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: I feel like an email marketer. 

[47:12]

Lauren: I feel like that kind of leads us into the point where…we've scheduled it. It's live. It's out there. We've sent emails. We're starting to do things and now we just kick our heels up and pour a glass of wine and do nothing. Right? 

Laurie: I mean, you can do all of that except for do nothing.

Lauren: Okay. So I can monitor my campaign heels up – heels off, honestly, feet up heels off, chilling. watching my campaign. But what am I – what am I watching for? What am I monitoring in a campaign once it's gone live? 

Laurie: Yeah, you want to watch that performance. And the first thing you're going to do is decide if you're going to send a re-mail. And you might just build this into your schedule campaign to send another email, maybe with a different subject line, to anyone that hadn't opened yet. So it's not a different email. It's just a re-mail of the same one that will catch anyone that may have missed your first email. 

Lauren: Happens.

Laurie: Yeah, especially during, you know, a big holiday season, if this is what you're planning for. Because so many companies are sending emails, it's very easy to skip things. So it's also common for companies to send the same email multiple times in a day, or over the few days, just because it might get missed. And since you've kind of increased your frequency, you can do that. Because the inboxes will expect it and won't flag that as something weird. But yeah, you just want to circle back and revisit those goals that you sent, that you set at the beginning of your planning and watch the performance. So I sent my email out, oh, I've got like two sales this morning. I want to hit ten by Wednesday. Like, what is that performance trending towards? And do I need to make any adjustments to meet that goal? 

Lauren: Yeah, you don't, you can't make adjustments to help you meet your goals after the campaign has ended. So. 

Laurie: No. 

Lauren: It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. So if you wait until your campaign has ended to go back and review your metrics, you don't have any opportunity to try to course correct, or try to make some changes in order to increase your odds of meeting your goal. And I say this with any, I mean, this is coming from social media marketing as much as it is from email marketing. When we do, when I used to do our holiday campaigns for social media, which were three month long campaigns. This was not like a one week campaign. This was an extended window of time. I would track those metrics weekly. I had an insane, stupid spreadsheet that was literally like, a week by week and then cumulative over time. And then even like, comparing to previous years and comparing to other social channels, so that I could pivot and make those adjustments on the fly. 

Laurie: Yeah, that's a good point. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Check in on that weekly. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Doesn't have to be every day. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, you know, adjust it to however long your specific campaign is. If your campaign is only two weeks long, I would say maybe don't wait until the end of week one to check in. 

Laurie: Right, right. 

Lauren: But you don't have to check every three hours. 

Laurie: It's really hard to not do that. But that's good advice. 

Lauren: I understand. I used to sit at Thanksgiving with just my laptop open, laptop in one hand, glass of wine in the other. And my whole family would be like…are you joining us? And I'd be like, I'm here. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just hitting refresh on Meta Business profile. Looking at Meta Ads Manager. It’s fine. 

Laurie: Oh my gosh. 

Lauren: Don't worry about it. 

Laurie: Your favorite way to spend Thanksgiving. 

Lauren: I mean, yeah, pretty much. Gets the job done every time. Of course, if you are on track to meet your goals, you know, we're not saying that you're absolutely definitely not going to get it right. Especially if you've done campaigns before. If this is not your first rodeo, chances are you are doing well and that your planning was for good purpose and good reason. And your campaign is on track. In which case, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. 

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Lauren: You know? 

Laurie: Yeah. I don't want people to think that they're going to have to – 

Lauren: Right. 

Laurie: – make a pivot or change things up like a – you only want to do that if you're seeing signals that you're not going to meet your goal.

Lauren: Yes. Whether those signals are just noticing that your open rates are lower than you were hoping for, or… Can you see data on whether or not your emails were filtered into spam folders from your end? 

Laurie: You can see bounce. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Laurie: And you can see if someone like, marked your email as spam. But if it's like…bounce is going to give you a couple of different categories of reasons why it would bounce. Which could be interpreted as spam by the inbox provider, like Gmail or whatever, but you can see if an individual marked your email as spam, yeah. Which your ESP is gonna automatically unsubscribe those users so you don't have to worry about doing that on your own. 

Lauren: So that – can you see unsubscribes from a specific email?

Laurie: Mmhmm. Yeah. 

Lauren: So if you notice that you had a higher than average number of unsubscribes after one specific email in your campaign, and you had a very similar email planned for phase two of your campaign, you might want to…

Laurie: Right. 

Lauren: Turn that off. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: Reschedule that, something. So pay attention to customer feedback like that, but also pay attention to customer feedback that comes directly from them. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: You're going to hear from your customers. 

Laurie: Replies. 

Lauren: Yeah. Replies, social comments. And, you know, you're not just going to want to pay attention to the complaints and negatives, but also pay attention to the wins. 

Laurie: Pay more attention to that. 

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Those are important to have. 

Laurie: They are. 

Lauren: And they're important to have because at the end of your campaign, when you're wrapping everything up, when you have finally reached that point where it has successfully run its course. You want to know what performed well as much as you want to know what didn't perform well. You want to be able to gather all of your metrics, all your data, and have a high level and granular look at… Okay, what can I definitely, like absolutely have to make sure I do again next time, because it worked super well this time? What do I never want to do again? What was one thing that I noticed in here that, oh, this inspired me to think that maybe next time I should try doing this thing. Didn't get a chance to try it this time around, but I want to try it next time. Pro tip, write that down. Do not – do not assume that you're going to remember it next time. If you have an idea, write it down. 

Laurie: Put it in your brain forever. 

Lauren: Yeah. Tattoo it somewhere. 

Laurie: Tattoo it on your palm. 

Lauren: Sure. That'll wear off eventually. Palm tattoos wear off. 

Laurie: Yeah, I guess they do, don’t they? 

Lauren: Yeah. People have to get hand tattoos touched up all the time. 

Laurie: Yeah, that's true. No, that's a good point. I like the like, debrief of what worked, what didn't work, and what could potentially it would have worked if this or this or this or you know, you can use that data to then again test like write down your ideas and write down what worked, but also continue to test things out. Because it's not always clear why something didn't work. You know, you mentioned, can you see who unsubscribes? I mean, you don't always know why somebody unsubscribes. are certain things that you can get that feedback from someone, but really if they've unsubscribed, it's like, don't ask them for anything. It's not going to help you. But it could be they just hadn't heard from you in a year because you didn't do that list cleaning. Or maybe it was the content. There's a lot of different reasons. So I would just keep an open mind about why something didn't work and like, is there a pattern that you could then understand the reason behind it going forward? 

Lauren: Yeah. Because hopefully this is something that you'll do again. If this is your first ever email campaign, hopefully you'll do it again at some point. Because you'll have another big sale or another book launch or another product launch. If this is not your first time doing it, then it's even more likely that you'll do it again at some point, because clearly this is a part of your general business strategy. 

Laurie: Yeah. 

Lauren: So do future you a solid and set them up for success by taking the time now to make note of the things that you want to remember for the next time around. 

Laurie: Yeah, absolutely. Because email is always going to be one of your number one channels for success for a big launch. So take advantage of it. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

Laurie: And plan it accordingly. 

Lauren: There we go. Because next time around, you're going to start with a whole two months before your campaign starts. 

Laurie: Exactly. 

Lauren: And the cycle continues back at the beginning. 

Laurie: Yes. 

[55:22] - Wrap Up

Lauren: I think we nailed it. 

Laurie: I think we did. 

Lauren: We are…wait, let me look. Hold on. We are technically under time. 

Laurie: Alright. 

Lauren: We are currently at an hour and twenty-four minutes. 

Laurie: Okay. 

Lauren: So everyone listening, that's our current time stamp. Let's see how much editing I do on this episode. We'll see what it clocks in at at the end. 

Laurie: Yeah. So only twenty-four minutes longer than you thought it was going to take us today. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Laurie: Because it took us a lot longer –  

Lauren: Yes. 

Laurie: – the previous time. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Lauren: But that's okay, because we had a lot to talk about. 

Laurie: We did. 

Lauren: And I think even though this was a deeper dive into a very specific type of email marketing, this was still a high level look at that. We could do deeper dives into every single step of what we talked about here. And by we, I mean Laurie, because I'm just here for comedic relief. 

Laurie: I don't think that's true at all. 

Lauren: I think we had a lot to say in here, and I think we shared a lot of really valuable insights into email campaign management. So thank you, Laurie, for coming to share your expertise with us. 

Laurie: Oh, thanks for having me again. 

Lauren: Anytime. 

Laurie: See you next time. 

Lauren: I was gonna say – anytime, please. If you have any questions for Laurie or for us in general, you can always reach out to us. You can email podcast@lulu.com. You can leave comments on YouTube or Facebook, Instagram. You can find that all in the show notes. And if you are not already subscribed to Lulu’s emails, please do. Laurie sends some incredible emails out that have all kinds of fun content, promo codes, exclusive things like that in there. And you will have a little insider look at knowing like, I know who wrote this and who put it together and who sent it. 

Laurie: That’s true, 

Lauren: Because you listened to this podcast.

Laurie: That’s right. Lots of marketing tips in there too from all the amazing content. Also be the first to know about podcast episodes that come out. 

Lauren: Yeah. Well, you could also be the first to know about new podcast episodes if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. So if you're not already doing that, please do. 

Laurie: That is a more direct way to get the podcast episode. 

Lauren: But also subscribe to our email. Subscribe to everything. Just subscribe. And in the meantime, while you're eagerly waiting for next week's episode, let us know what you want to hear more about. And whether it's email marketing or otherwise, we'll be happy to talk more about all that soon. Until then, thank you so much again, Laurie. It was wonderful. 

Laurie: Thank you. 

Lauren: And thanks to everyone for listening. We'll see you next week.