Craftsman Creative

Hey everybody, it's Daren. Welcome to today's episode of the Craftsman Creative Podcast. So today we're diving into email. Email is the topic of the week that we discussed over in the Society of Independent Creators. As I mentioned last week, I've been writing a post day, and I thought I'd share three of those in our weekly podcast.

It gives me an easy way to put a podcast out every week, and hopefully it entices you to come check out what the other two ideas are. , and you can do that by joining the Society of Independent Creators. Now, the easiest way to do that is head over to craftsman creative dot score app.com. The reason for this is because it actually helps you, not just me, , you can get a free scorecard.

Which rates your business across six different areas and will give you some insight as to where you have some strengths and where you have some weaknesses and where you could [00:01:00] put your focus for 2023 or at least the next few months. And that's gonna be really helpful because the more that you can, you know,

identify the constraints in your business, turn them into strengths, that is the secret there. So let's get started. I got three ideas for you today. The first one is a very important statistic. . Now, a study was done by a team of marketers years ago that showed that 85% of sales occurred after the first 90 days.

I may have mentioned this last week. It's that important. It's such a mindset shift that you have to like wrap your head around and go, okay, I gotta do something about this. This statistic highlights why email marketing is so I. When you use the system that I teach in the 10 K Challenge, which you can find for free inside the Society of Independent Creators, you engage people immediately for a week at least, and then weekly with your very simple newsletter after that.

Now, I've had people on my list for years before they made a first [00:02:00] purchase. The reason is that you need the right person match with the right offer at the right time. And it may have just been that they saw a promise with my business and I just wasn't delivering on that promise. Yes. But as soon as I had an offer that met their needs, they bought.

The best way I've found to do this is through email marketing. At the bottom of each newsletter, every week I put a trigger link that will tag those people as interested in whatever they click on. And so what happens is when you do that for each of your offers and lead magnets, when they're ready for that next step, they click a link, they get tagged as interested, and then they are sent a.

Of, uh, like a series of emails about your offer, and it works brilliantly in the background. You don't have to do anything manual. You set it up once and it runs thousands and thousands of times. It's personalized, it's timely, and it just works. I have built three $10,000 a month businesses with almost no social media presence, strictly relying on email.

So if you haven't yet gone [00:03:00] through the email session in the 10 k. Make some time this week to do that and build out your email system again, that's a reminder and an invitation to come check out the 10 K Creator Challenge inside the Society of Independent Creators. Now let's talk about the jobs of a welcome email.

I think I'm gonna skip over the second post. That was a good one. That's too good for the podcast now I'm just kidding. I think it just would take longer to to explain than I have time for. I wanna keep these under around like 10 or 15 minutes every Friday. So let's talk about the jobs of a welcome email.

This is idea number two. Your welcome email has a much bigger job than just to welcome and confirm a new subscriber that is the bare minimum. , but there is so much more, and the problem is the bare minimum is what 90 or 95% of other companies and other businesses do. So you want to be different, and you can stand out by looking at your welcome email.

So here's a few things to check on with your welcome email. First of all, you wanna set expectations. [00:04:00] Are you gonna be emailing them every day, every week, once a month? Tell them in this first email to set appropriate expectations and prevent overwhelm. So if you do have a daily newsletter or a daily email that goes out, they need to know, expect an email every day,

And it may be something where you wanna create an opportunity where you can generate a weekly version with the summary and links to the different daily emails. And so if they don't want daily, they can, you know, uh, select a lower frequency and get it once. The second thing your welcome email should do is get them to reply or click.

Ideally, you're gonna ask them a question or request that they reply with an answer. Now, these questions can then trigger automation inside your email service provider, like Convert Kit to tag them based on their answers, like I mentioned, but. This also allows you to send them relevant, personalized emails and sequences going forward.

So if they're interested in photography and not copywriting, you wanna know that because you don't wanna be pitching your offers [00:05:00] about copywriting services to your photography people. Now, ideally, you want to have those on two separate segments or two separate lists as well. I have two separate segments inside my Convert Kit account, one for the.

People who have purchased and are interested in courses and one for my newsletter and people that are interested in working with me with crafts and creative. And so that works for now. I'm about to split the courses off into their own business in which time I will take that entire segment, of course people and move them off of my list and onto a new list specifically for light bulb courses.

And there'll be two separate things. . To be clear, the people who are on the courses side do not get my weekly newsletter because they haven't subscribed to that. They opted in to get a free preview of a course or they're interested in that. They don't wanna hear from me. They want to hear from the course per like the creator that made that course.

So that's how I've set it up, but I'm soon gonna be splitting it into two accounts. [00:06:00] Um, it's also this, getting them to reply or click on something in this first email, it's also a good signal to their email service like Gmail that your message was expected and valuable. So those signals of. opening, clicking and replying shows that your message isn't spam, so it's gonna have a higher chance of ending up in the primary, um, tab or inbox rather than a promotions tab or spam or junk.

Okay. The third thing, your email, welcome email should do is open the door so you can add links and stuff in like the PS section of your, after your main content, your new. That go deeper into your content archive, and so you can link to a podcast, a YouTube video, a workshop, a blog post. You can give them options to start exploring now rather than, rather than waiting for 24 hours until your next email goes out.

And so that's huge. Excuse me. I don't know why I've yawning so much today. Now, I made you yawn in the [00:07:00] car on your walk or wherever you are cuz yawns are infectious. The reason is because the air pressure changes. So when I yawn, it makes you want to yawn . And that's how, that's how yawns work. Uh, that aside, um, You want to give people an opportunity to go deeper into your content, and so if they've just come into your world, they saw you on social media, they clicked on a link, they joined your newsletter, well now generally you're wait making a wait like 24 hours to get the next.

email, but you could instead put a link to a recent podcast or a relevant thing or an about me or your book or whatever it is, so that they have an opportunity. If they're ready right now and they've got 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, they could click on a link and go down the rabbit hole of your website. So definitely put that in there.

I like. Those in the the PS section. So it's not necessarily the main content, but it also means that they can, you can have that show up in every email. You can just put a different link, and that's a great way to get people more [00:08:00] engaged in your content. All right, that's number two. , we got one more for you.

Which one are we gonna do? We did welcome, email, did the marketing opportunity. Let's talk about using email and your marketing strategy. This one's fun. So this week was all about email inside the 10 K or inside the Society of Independent Creators community, and. But we've also gotta consider the bigger picture of where email fits into your business.

Email is a part of marketing, and the point of marketing is to get your ideal customer or target market to know, like, and trust you. I love this explanation from the book, the one page marketing plan. So he says in this book, if the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying circus coming to the showground on Saturday, that's advertis.

If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor's flowered and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that's publicity. And if you get the [00:09:00] mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. If the town citizens go to the circus, you show them that.

Uh, the many entertainment booths explain how much fun they'll have, spending money at the booths, answer their questions, and ultimately they spend a lot at the circus. That's sales. And if you planned this whole thing, that's marketing. So I love this book. I've been going through it the last few weeks and, uh, just really simplifies marketing.

Again, that's from the book. The one page marketing plan. Um, so where does email fit in? There's nothing in there about email, right? ? Well, the cool thing about email is it can span a few of these activities and it can kind of shape shift however you need it to. So you have sales sequences, you have promotion sequences, and even advertising emails to promote a new product or service and convert prospects into leads.

So, at any. Someone on your list could be a prospect, meaning someone who might be interested, they could be a lead, someone who has shown interest, or even a customer, someone who has purchased, but they're still on your [00:10:00] list in getting your weekly emails and your email strategy has to be able to accommodate the reality that you've got people at various stages of the customer journey in your list.

So you can decide ahead of time or in the moment, but it makes sense to have a job in mind for every email. To write, for example, your weekly newsletter's job is to convert prospects into leads. So you do this by adding a soft call to action at the end of every newsletter, like I said in the PS section, so they can signal their interest in your products and services.

your welcome sequences job is to increase the desire your new leads have for your product or service, and delay that offer to the point where they want it so badly that they can't wait any longer. So I'm very much against showing up and hitting people with sales emails. Day after day, after day after day, as soon as they hit your list, it's just gross.

It's kind of like proposing on the first date and then proposing every single time you call that person to [00:11:00] go out on another date. Oh, by the way, will you marry me? Oh, do you want to go on a date on Saturday? Great. Will you marry me yet? Oh my gosh. Like that would be tedious and it would not last very long before that person said, don't ever call me again.

The email equivalent being unsubscribe, right. You definitely, when you're courting somebody, you don't lead with the big ask, right? Because you don't even know if they're a good person to be partnering with yet. So you wanna give it some time and you want them to have a few times where they signal their interest and that they're ready to move to the next step.

So that could be. Going on a C, going out for coffee, and then it could be going to a dinner date, and then it could be going to dinner in a movie. Then it could be coming over to your house for dinner. And then it could be, Hey, I would like you to be my boyfriend or girlfriend. And then it could be, Hey, we've been dating for a few months or a year.

Let's get engaged and then let's get married and then let's have kids. Right? So there's all these things like the last thing you wanna do is talk about marriage and kids on the first date. Uh, unless that's your strategy, maybe that works for some people. [00:12:00] certainly is not something I would recommend. So again, that welcome sequences job is to increase the desire your new leads have for your product or service, and then you want to delay that offer to the point where they want it so badly they can't wait any longer.

You, you like . It's much easier to get a yes from a proposal from someone who's been wanting you to propose for a year. than someone you've been dating for two weeks, right? So you're kind of applying that same psychology to your email sequence and saying, look, I'm not gonna lead out the gate with sales.

I'm not gonna talk about buy this, get this discount here, save 20% buy now. It's 90 per. Percent off, but it only lasts for 10 minutes. You have to buy now. Don't do any of that stuff. Just talk about how awesome you are and how much you can help people, and then they're gonna want it more and more the more you talk about it until finally you're like, Hey, if you're interested, click here.

And they're like, I can't click fast enough. Right? That's what you want. And then that leads to your sales sequence and your sales sequences job is to [00:13:00] convert those leads into customers. So that's why you need all these three pieces. You need welcome sequence. Sales sequences and a weekly newsletter. Um, so if you want to do this, if you want help figuring all that out, if you want help with your email strategy, head over to craftsman creative dot score app.com, take the free scorecard, and then at the end there's an invitation to come check out the Society of Independent Creators.

And inside that society there is a, all the recordings from the recent 10 K challenge we did at the beginning of 2023. I've bundled it into a course that you can take within. 30 day free trial. How crazy is that? I'm encouraging you to come check it out and take the course for free because I know how much value it is and I know that you're gonna want to work together after that and stick around in the community and, uh, start your membership after those 30 days are over.

So appreciate your time and attention today. There will be links in the show notes, and we will see you next week for another episode [00:14:00] of the Craston Creative Podcast.