– I want to come off as, hey, It's me and Holly, that's it like, you're talking to us when you reply to this email, when you buy our products, you're supporting us and we thank you for that, That's kinda how I wanna come off in my emails. And so that's why I don't do a lot of flashy stuff anymore really. – How did the subscribers on your email list relate to you? Have you built a personal relationship providing, relevant information while still providing a sales path, so that they can deliver your most wanted response? Well, in this third and final episode of the series, how to monetize your website with email marketing, Luke Bible will show you how to cement a personal yet sales focused relationship. Hello, I'm Paul Buckingham, roving ambassador for Solo Build It!. You can view the previous two episodes in this series, by clicking the link right above there or underneath the bottom of this video, in the description box. In this episode, we talk about the pros and cons of fancy HTML, formatted emails versus simple text emails.
We look at how many words your emails should have and how often you should be sending them. We also cover lead magnets and squeeze pages. Make sure you watch right to the end, when Luke will share his top five tips, for what not to do with your email marketing list. That's all coming up right after this, (soft music) – As we've already talked about, we're about building relationships, but we're also really about getting good sales. In the timeline of somebody signing up and maybe their natural conclusion of not being part of the, email chain anymore. Is there a period of time when they're more likely to buy, then later on, let's say they're fresh. they're excited, they've signed up. Is the first six months, the most likely period that they might buy, or is there no relationship whatsoever with that? – If there is, I don't have any data to support it.
I fully believe that there is, with my own list though. I don't have anything to measure that. But what I can tell you is that I sometimes have people as I'm sure, other site owners do too. They'll have somebody who visits their site and they're an immediate fan. I've had people who are not on my list. Who've dropped $150 on all of that. They just buy all of my products. Like they love everything I'm doing. First time visitor, now that's few and far between, but it happens.
And then on the flip side, I've also had people who've been on my list for two years, then consuming my emails for two years, never bought anything and then they'll buy something. So really and that's where your email list is so important, is because you have that ability to constantly be sending to them because you never know when the timing is right for somebody I've been running sales for five years now. And I run them pretty much the same way every time, I'll run it for seven days, first email to announce it, second email a couple of days later, as a reminder, and then the two emails on the final day, saying it's the final day and the final hours.
I've been doing that for five years. And every time I run it, I've always thought, Oh gosh, I don't think it's going to work this time. And it does. (laughs) It works every time, because everybody's timing to buy something is different. And so by you constantly being out there and being in communication with them, you're keeping you in the back of their mind that when they are ready to buy, they pull the trigger. – I personally like to send HTML emails. So they've got a banner and a picture and all of this sort of stuff, but lots of people also send texts. Is there any real recipe around that, that you're recommending or why you do a particular thing? – I typically will do text plain text emails, or if they do have HTML, just very little HTML, maybe just a little bit with changing the font or something. And the reason that I do that, is because I want my emails to appear more like they're coming from me, which they are, but I want them to be more personal.
And to me, when you just sit down, when I sit down to write an email to you, Paul, all I'm going to write is, Hey, Paul, it's Luke, how are things going? Okay. Talk to you later. Bye. The chances of that getting opened and read and responded to are much higher than if I get this email from you that has all these graphics in it and banners and logos and headers and footers and all that kind of stuff, because then I know that's coming.
Like, you're just, you're just mass mailing that to me. Does that make sense? so early on I kind of, I got a little, I went a little overboard early on because I was like, Oh man, I can do this. And I can do that. All this customization. And like you said, I can brand my logo across the top with my email header and all these kinds of things.
Well, that's fine. And here again, it depends on what kind of business you are. If you're a retail business, you know, if you're JC Penny, for example. Yeah. People know, people are subscribing to JC Penny for what, they're not subscribed to JC Penney to hear from the CEO all the time or from the senior vice presidents or the marketing people are the salespeople. no, what are they subscribing for? They're subscribing to get deals. They're subscribing to get percentages off and get something for less. Okay. So they're obviously gonna have a different type of email than an email for me, who is Luke barber, who is a Sole Entrepreneur. Who's raising his family and trying to survive like everybody else. I'm just like you, I'm not some big corporate company or whatever. Right. And so that's why I've always kind of done my emails, in that fashion is because I don't want people, to think of a big corporate company.
Right. A lot of people kind of shy away from that, unless it's, JC penny, they need to get some clothes that week or whatever. But I want to come off as, Hey, it's me. It's me and Hollie, that's it like, you're talking to us when you reply to this email, when you buy our products, you're supporting us. And we thank you for that. That's kind of how I want to come off in my emails. And so that's why I don't do a lot of flashy stuff anymore.
Really. I do graphics once in a while and I do fun things. like, GIFs, you can have a lot of fun with those and they're fun and they show your personality, Like you definitely want to show your personality. You don't want to be a wet blanket. You can see that I'm a very dramatic person, with my hands and things. And my facial features are facial expressions. So you do want to let your personality shine. But to me, I feel like people are going to resonate more, with what I'm doing when it's just coming from me. It's not some real, pretty, kind of email. Cause then they're like, well how much money did he spend to do that? or something. I don't know. That's what my money's being spent on. I dunno. That's just my thoughts on that. – It also means that it's probably taking you less time, to create each email. – Yeah. Very true. – Is there a length to your emails that you kind of use as a guideline? I don't mean a word count, but tonight's reading perhaps something like that.
– Yeah. Yeah. No, I do use a word count actually. In fact this is not backed up by anything. This is just me talking, but obviously pro tip, obviously, if you only put images in your emails, you're going to get flagged as a spammer because images can be anything, an email service provider, algorithms and code and stuff. Typically can't read what your image says. It just knows that it's an image, In code it just says image. So you could have anything on there. You could have a support Hitler or whatever, like they don't know. So you're going to get flagged as a spammer. If you just have a bunch of images in your emails, now there's ways to get around that. I don't know what they are because I don't send a lot of images in mind. But typically what I try and go for, is kind of what SBI! has said, is like the minimum amount of words that you want on a page, which was like 350 to 400.
Now I don't always get there. But what I can tell you is that if you have content, just like your webpages, if you have content in your emails, the email service provider robots are going to see you as a more legitimate email person. – Luke, let's jump to the subject of lead magnets. This is something that comes up all the time. When you talk about marketing and email lists almost in the same breath, somebody will say, you really need a lead magnet. Why is there such a thing about lead magnet pages? Because to be honest as a Solo Build It! user, I've never really seen the value because you have a webpage, you can just adapt it to serve exactly the same purpose and not pay an extra marketing service. – So a lead magnet page is set up solely to do just that it's to get a lead. So when you look at a good lead magnet page, it's very straightforward. It tells you what you're going to get, in exchange for email address, and there's nothing else to do.
So when you get sent to a lead magnet page, it's give me your email address or get out. There's one thing to do. It's give me your email address or exit the page. lead magnet pages are also referred to as squeeze pages because they're squeezing you for information. And they're very effective. I mean, they work that the hands down. That's why people use them because there's so much distraction otherwise on your website, With banners or ads or other articles to look at, or RSS feeds or here's my latest article or whatever.
There's so many things on your website. You want to get rid of those distractions. If you really want to get somebody's email address and qualify somebody to give you that it's give me it, give me your email or get out or leave. – So what's the advantage of that, of as a standalone item, if you like, when you have a site that already is attracting free traffic, or is it really for people to don't have that, that luxury, if you like that solo built luxury? – Well, and of course you can also have, there's lots of different ways you can put, lead magnets up on your site, You can do the, the light boxes, that will pop up over the content. There's ones that come up on the side, ones that do lots of different things. And Fully encourage you to put those on there within reason. I mean, don't overdo it, but a lead magnet is for a very specific things. So for example, for me, I have five different lead magnets, and I still have to build products out for some of them.
But typically when I send somebody away from the main content of my site, and I say, Hey, get this free thing right here. When they click on that. And it takes them over to a page that all they can do is give me their email address. Typically I will have, that will be a page, that when somebody signs up to get that free lead magnet, they're going to get a series of emails after, that provides them even more value and then eventually pitches them on a product and hopefully sells them on the product.
So that's kind of how I differentiate, an actual squeeze page from just, Hey, here's a free thing on my site. I have lots of free things on my site and you can give me your email address for that too. but when I have something that's, Hey, this is very valuable. I'm also gonna give you a bunch more value and I'm gonna to try and sell you on a product. – So Luke, we've talked a lot about all the different options that people can go through with how they work with emails to generate income, but are there some absolute no-nos that maybe they really should not be doing? Don't even think about it. Don't go there. – Yes. I have quite a few, but I'll give you kind of, a top five that you should definitely always for sure do so are not doing it – Or not do – Yeah. – Excuse me.
So I'll definitely give you a top five, of what not to do ever, okay First one, don't buy a list and don't just find lists or have people write down their email address and then put it into your email system. Just assuming that people want to hear from you, always give them the option. That's called double opt-in. Always give people the option to opt into receiving emails from you, because otherwise you're going to, and I have experience with this, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago, he found a way to get access to a list of email addresses of professionals in a group and he said, well, let's just use those . And I said, well, I don't think we should, because of you're going to be looked at as a, spammer people aren't expecting to hear from you, so on and so forth, we're going to get blacklisted.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, it's fine. He's like, I'm okay with that. And he's like, let's just do it. He said, a lot of other people in this profession, do the same thing, I said okay? And so we downloaded it, put it into our system and we got some people who engaged, but most people on subscribed. And a lot of people replied to him because his email address was on the sending side it was coming from him. And a lot of people replied to them and said, how'd you get my email address? Why are you emailing me this blah, blah, blah.
And they got kind of upset with him. So I was like, Hey, I told you anyway, okay. So don't buy this. Number one. So tip number two is not giving people a way to unsubscribe. Most good email marketing platforms, will have an automatic built in thing that every email you send is gonna to have a thing, is gonna to have a phrase or something at the bottom that says unsubscribe, if you don't want to receive these emails anymore, unsubscribed here. If you're sending mass email without something in there that says, here's how you can unsubscribe, you're going to get dinged either by the algorithms, the robots, or you're going to get dinged by people, because they're going to start replying to you and saying, how do I unsubscribe from this, stop emailing me and so forth.
I'm always need to give people a way to unsubscribe. All right, tip number three, don't always sell to people. Remember I suggest 1 to 3 So for every sales pitch or email that you're going to promote something to try and get people to buy, send three pieces of value. Now there's lots of different ways that you can do that. Quizzes, downloads, surveys, videos, other people's content within reason.
There's just, there's lots of ways that you can provide value. And I think, you know what those are. It's it's anything that could be helpful, to your person on your email list, but one to three, one promo for three pieces of value, Number four, not sending email regularly enough. Now we talked about it earlier a little bit, regularly could be different for you than it is for me, which is different for somebody else. I send content on a weekly basis. You may not have the time or the energy to do that, or their money or the resources. Maybe twice a month is going to work more for you. Maybe once a month. I would encourage you to at least try and send twice a month at the least. And something that I will tell you is that think about all the content. if you're fairly far along and you have 30 or 40 or 50 pages of content, Hey, use one of those articles. I mean, if you had 20 or 30 pages of content, that's essentially, if you did twice a month, that's 15 months of content you have that you can send to your email list, just because somebody visited your site.
And even if they looked at a page or two, it doesn't mean they've seen everything on it. So if you have 20 or 30 or 40 pages or 50 pages of content, guess what? Every single one of those pieces of content, in theory, if you've written them well, should be a good valuable piece of content that you can send to your email list. So, that's something that you can set up ahead of time and schedule with ConvertKit. I assume you can do that with other email service providers, as well, but set that. So I plan all of my content like six months in advance, just to give you an idea, I will lay it all out and say, okay, starting in September.
So for me, speech pathologists and teachers, they go back to school in September or August, excuse me, the end of August. So starting in August, I do messages about welcome back to school and here's some ways to get to know your students and so on and so forth. Then come October, Hey, it's Halloween, everybody's selling it. People celebrate that. And they do fun things for that. So I'm scheduling that stuff out months in advance. And then by doing that, I know that it's going to go out on time every week or whenever you're going to send it. And you know that it's going to go, and then that allows you the time to create new content, to send out six months after that. – And I presume you can repeat some of the content as well. So it's not that bad. – Exactly. And I've, I've repeated and used my content, but before as well. Yes. Great point. – So dad said that you use shortage of content, is a reason for sending out once a month, is what you're saying.
– Yeah, (laughs) – exactly. – Okay. Number five. – So if you're sending from, Paulbuckingham@gmail.com, you're not going to be seen by the email service providers or by your recipient as legit businesses or legit sites. So a bill that I believe allows you to set up five, different email addresses. So you might have Luke, you might have Holly, you might have info, you might have advertising, you might have whatever, you can set up at least five in Solo Build It!. And so you should always at least have that as you know, So mine is Luke@homespeechhome.com. And so with that, you're just going to add way more legitimacy, to both the email service provider and or the email service provider robots and your reader. That was actually a question that was asked to me, a number of years ago when somebody said, should I be sending from a free one or from a business one? And I said, well, I don't know.
And so I did a bunch of research and come to find out, yeah, you get you get, because anybody can do that. Right? Any person in the world can set up a free Gmail account and just start spam blasting, email blasting, people like crazy. Right. So you're much more legitimate if you have a web address, if it's registered all those good things. – Yeah. And that'd be sending from info@ it's Luke@ or it's whatever, – Be personal with it. Yes, for sure..
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You might be interested in learning more about lead magnets and squeeze pages. Speaking of lead magnets, you might be interested in this article on lead magnets. Additionally, if you want to dive deeper into email marketing best practices, you can check out this article on email marketing. These resources can provide valuable insights and guidance for optimizing your email marketing strategy.