Unlocking Email Marketing Success in 2024

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today, we are talking about how to make email marketing work in 2024.

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That is, how can you make over $100,000 on email marketing without spending another dollar on advertising?

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And we have a great guest to help us talk through that.

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Kat.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me Excited to be here.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, I am Kat Malverde.

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I'm the founder of Profesh, a digital marketing and content creation agency, and while I am full service in digital marketing, I have really been honing in and focusing on bringing back the magic of email marketing, especially as we are moving very, very quickly towards a post-ad economy and, you know further, towards the unknowns of what AI will do to us as marketers.

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Indeed, we live in interesting times, and a lot of the marketing channels that people have used over the years, that have been tried and true, are evolving right.

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Yes, yes, and you know it's easy.

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As they evolve, on the one hand you want to get excited about the new tools, but on the other hand, it's really terrifying.

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You have that, you know.

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Just, you're seeing news over and over Like what does this mean for jobs, what does this mean for advertising, what does this mean for marketing?

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It's easy to get scared about it.

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But you know, my take is you know what can we do to innovate along with it?

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For people like me who are really old, it's kind of sad that we can't say I'll just do what I did back in 2015.

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That doesn't really work anymore.

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So true, so true.

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It's like a moving needle all the time.

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But why don't we start off by you telling us a story, or ready to be inspired, about some of the best marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of?

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Okay, sure.

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So there's a couple.

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I mean I not to make this about myself, but I am pretty personally excited that I do not, as a market, spend a dollar on advertising.

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It's not part of my plan anymore and that has been extremely impactful for me.

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But I'll apply that as well to other clients that are seeing the same thing.

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So this whole new focus of mine is coming very full circle.

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The example I've been using is it's kind of like what we're seeing with cable.

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You know, we used to pay our cable subscription.

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We were fine with commercials.

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This is the life we live.

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And then, very quickly in the Netflix era, hulu, amazon, apple everyone's getting into the game.

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And now we've woken up and we're paying a ridiculous amount for these subscriptions and now there's ads on them.

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So we have cable again and it's more expensive and we've done this to ourselves and no plan to stop.

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And that's what I am seeing now as we're moving into this post.

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Ad economy is we, very early on in the internet and socials stage, were using email like Eureka emails electronic mail, as they said, and it's just not a sexy thing anymore that now that we have ads, that we have socials, that we have influencers to be using email marketing.

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It's the last on our list.

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So one of the first clients I took this on with.

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It was a similar sell.

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So we're telling people now, if you start in October, it is possible to bring in an extra $100,000 in revenue between now and the end of 2024 using your email lists.

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And we had a similar sell like, okay, let's see what we can get in a week.

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Can we bring on an extra $20,000, $30,000 in revenue?

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I think we can if we utilize your email lists in the right way.

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And the response was just, I think five or six years at the time, so a couple of thousand.

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But we took their email list and got really thousand.

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But we took their email list and got really, really microscopic about it.

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We was the most profitable client with the highest return on investment who had been there the longest with them.

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Like maybe they didn't spend the most amount of money, but they've been clients for a couple of years.

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Or maybe they weren't spending a ton of money, but they were opening every single email, they were liking every single post.

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Like it was very clearly very high engagement with these certain groups.

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So we segmented them all out, ranked them and then took the top 10% of that list and said, okay, going to take some time, it's a little tedious, but we're going to reach out to these people and we did and just ask them hey, how's it going?

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It's rough out there.

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How's business?

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It's been a while since we connected brands that aren't actually just sending you a copyright style email that's 10 sentences long with spaces in between and different fancy fonts, and you know it's just exhausting, just a very personal hey, what's up, how's it going.

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So the response to that is actual human feedback and saying, well, you know, it's actually kind of difficult.

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This is health care.

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Was this specific client?

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You know I's actually kind of difficult.

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This is healthcare.

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Was this specific client?

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You know I'm having a hard time scheduling surgeries.

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I'm having a hard time getting people in the door.

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Insurance is kicking our ass, Like the what they're approving, what they're not.

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We learned a lot about what was going on with all these different providers for free, like a free R and D session, basically and then we said, okay, great, we took this back to the table and sat down with the client and said what can we do for this, like what can we do to solve some of these problems, and found a few solutions and turned it around and offered it to that top 10% at a discount, saying, hey, thanks for your feedback, we've really been thinking about this and really want to help, like, do you want to try this new service?

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We'll give you a discount, given I've been so helpful with this research and amazing feedback from that.

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But then what you do in addition is you say, okay, now I have some use cases, basically like a free case study.

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Now I have some use cases about how successful this was.

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I'm going to go take that data and write up some other emails to the rest of my email list telling them that same thing in a very helpful, very value-based way, with some proof about how it's been working for other clients, and within that week.

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So obviously we took on a lot of the communication for the client, but within that week they had made.

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Took on a lot of the communication for the client, but within that week they had made over $60,000 in revenue just from this one practice with their email list.

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And this doesn't even you know.

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My second take to that for myself would be okay.

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Now I want to follow up and see if those people that purchased the service know anybody else that might want the service, and I'm really big on creating partnerships where we can say, hey, let's both make some money, but that's even without that.

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This is just purely talking to the people, the very targeted people, and applying it to the mass, and that was pretty cool to not just deliver but over deliver on our thesis that I think we can really turn this into some money, and pretty quickly.

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So it's interesting.

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I think there's three main parts of the magic there.

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The first one is that you're encouraging people to use their email list, if they have it, because a lot of people build it up over time years and they just don't really pay too much close attention to it.

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The second thing is you came up with a creative message.

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It wasn't the standard like template that a lot of people are using, so it stood out.

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It was.

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It was a different message.

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And finally, you came up with a creative offer.

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Right, they grabbed people's attention.

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That that made them want to jump in.

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Were those the three main drivers of why that really worked?

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It was, and I think the the fun part of that too is that it was genuine and authentic.

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This wasn't like, oh, I'm telling you I'm not going to sell you on something and then I use that as a tactic to sell you something.

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It actually was a.

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You tell me your problem and then I'm going to say, hey, thanks for sharing.

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That was like really helpful for us to learn and I'd come up with a solution if you'd like it at a discount as a thank you.

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Like it just feels really good because you did have these direct conversations and you actually really know what their problem is.

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There's no guesswork in it and it's just fun to see people be humans again, like we can authentically just talk like go figure, it is a creative solution, but then it's kind of funny because it's the obvious solution if we're just talking about people, right?

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So yes, that's the exact three steps, and then I would add a fourth if you're feeling crazy and want to keep going, is then following up and seeing if they also know anyone else that would be interested in it, and setting up some partnerships and referral programs.

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And I have to say I really miss the days of you've got mail.

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Wait, hold on now, babe.

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I think that in my heyday as a chief marketing officer, I'll tell you a story back about email marketing that I really love, which is that for many years in their city to come meet with us and get a free steak lunch, and we promised an educational lunch with best practices and networking, and so we would send for every lunch we wanted to do.

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We would send 5,000 to 10,000 emails to business leaders and marketers in all the major cities across the US and we got 30,000, 40,000 people per year to come have lunch with us by offering them a free steak lunch.

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What I learned from that was that people really like steak and they'll make time for a free steak lunch.

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I also learned that email marketing really does work.

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But I think the challenge with that today is that, with this spam filters getting so tight, is that 99% of emails don't get through, in a lot of cases, even emails where people have opted in.

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So my question is, first of all, how can people build up their opt-in list?

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Yes, that's such a.

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You have some suggestions.

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Yeah, of course I would say you know it is a huge problem and you know it's unfortunate, because a lot of it for me has come from kind of plugging and playing with different services, which is not you know it's time intensive, because I have found that some CRM platforms have a much worse record with whatever they're doing on the back end and when they're sending these emails I'm seeing a much higher mark to spam or this looks like a bot, no matter what the message is.

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So I just I'll leave that out there as it is, to say, play around with different services without naming any specifically, and I think that might be a problem we see get worse, as you know, more and more pop up with AI, but the offering then you're not capturing the right audience and they're either going to unsubscribe if the email does reach them or you don't know how like high quality these leads are and you're not really doing yourself a service, right Like.

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That's why I really really focus on high value and perhaps sometimes low volume leads and relationship developing and it's a slower build but you don't run into those problems as much.

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Because they're such high, warm leads, let's say, um, and so that's the second piece to that.

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Does that make sense?

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Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

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Yeah, and then the third piece to it.

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I was just talking to a woman who she wasn't necessarily having a problem with not making it into the inbox directly, but she was kind of capping out of the more affordable platforms, which is a good problem to have because her mailing list was getting quite large.

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But I was just problem solving with her a little bit and walking her through her different options and we started talking about the old school like doing mail merges with Outlook.

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And it sounds kind of silly and it's certainly not scalable.

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But when I'm trying to reach a very specific target audience, let's say of a couple hundred, I still utilize these old school tricks like going into Outlook and having them do mail merges for me.

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And I do that in the example I gave.

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When I'm trying to get this like top 10%, like cream of the crop people that I'm really trying to reach, I use those as well.

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And I think that we're going to be revisiting these old tools as we are like working around innovation.

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It's almost like we're innovating around the innovation to figure out how to get around the robot right.

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So that's my very shrewd and a little bit silly.

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Do you have any suggestions for people on how to get their emails into the inbox versus the junk folder?

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Given how tight the logarithms are these days, I think even the most legitimate emails are going in the junk folder.

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Given how tight the logarithms are these days, I think even the most legitimate emails are going in the junk folder.

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Any ideas that you have for people on that?

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Yeah.

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So I think it also is really important to make sure that you're just checking off the boxes and this is kind of tedious but staying on top of what the algorithms are requiring.

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So Google didn't used to be super tight about making sure you have a subheading, which sometimes some platforms that are really old school don't even allow, which is unfortunate.

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And when I say subheading, you have your email subject and then you have this sub subject that in Google, for example Gmail, you can kind of see the preview of the email, right.

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That didn't used to be a requirement for Google, for example Gmail, you can kind of see the preview of the email right.

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That didn't used to be a requirement for Google, but I'm finding now that it is and that if you don't have a like sub subject line preview, they're much more likely to put you into spam, which is kind of silly.

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But that's my recommendation is staying on top of those.

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That's my recommendation is staying on top of those.

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I have a calendar reminder that every quarter I go in and just make sure I'm on top of what the new requirements are like, what's new industry standard, and that has been really helpful to me because I'm not getting as many automatic follow up emails, like I used to from Google or from Facebook to say, hey, we pushed something new, and I think that's because they're pushing things much more quickly and much more often, and so that's my other kind of tip.

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Yeah, I think it's tough out there right now in some ways because, gmail and Office 365 being two of the top mail platforms that a lot of people use I use both, actually, and when I use Office 365, I noticed that they've recently implemented a quarantine feature.

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Whereas almost everything goes into quarantine goes into quarantine, and a lot of people in the quarantine deserve it because they're the crazy people that, once they got my email, they literally email me every day and those people deserve to be in quarantine and those people deserve to be blacklisted.

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But there's also a lot of good stuff that unfortunately goes into, like the Office 365 quarantine.

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I mean very, very little gets through.

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Yeah, it's so true.

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It's crazy.

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I would say, too, that's such a good point.

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You know, it's almost like we need to pause for a minute and think is what I'm doing?

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Would I be annoyed by this?

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I could not imagine emailing my email list every single day, and in fact sometimes I get multiple, and the bigger the company gets, the you know, bigger offender they are, presumably because you know they're widening their funnel as big as they can in the hopes of playing the numbers game Gosh.

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I would say that's let's be humans first.

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It's like an oversimplification, but it's so true, is like an oversimplification, but it's so true.

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Another thing that I have done that maybe isn't necessarily 100% aligned with what we're talking about, but is really helpful in building trust, is, if I see that somebody on my list hasn't opened the last three emails, I send them an email and I say hey, I see that you haven't opened them.

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If you want to unsubscribe, by all means.

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Like, here's the unsubscribe link.

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But if not, if there's something that you're not seeing, like, one, are you getting my emails, but two, if there's something that I haven't touched on that you're interested in, like, hey, let me know.

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That would be really valuable and I'd love to be sure that I'm you know ensuring you're getting something out of these.

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You know ensuring you're getting something out of these, and actually the feedback from that is really wonderful too.

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I think people just aren't used to getting that and it lowers my unsubscribes.

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I'm sending more successful emails in the long term.

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Yeah.

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So I think I agree Dehuman and don't be ridiculous with the frequency.

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And the second thing that's disappointing, aside from the frequency, is the stupid things that a lot of people actually send.

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It's like don't send it if you don't have a good offer to make.

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Like back to your example at the beginning of the episode is have a good offer at least.

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At least when I was emailing people and offering them a free steak lunch, I didn't feel too bad about inviting people to a free steak lunch.

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I didn't feel too bad about inviting people to a free steak lunch because there was real value there, even if they were just hungry.

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And you know, I think that have a good offer.

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Say something meaningful.

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I just get really frustrated with other marketers who just some retailers, for example will just send something every day to send something, and I'm like why are you doing that?

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Like it's just dumb.

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And so I think being smart with email marketing and thinking about the frequency, thinking about what you put into it, being human, like you said, these are all really critical things, in addition to some of the technical things like have a subheader to deal with Google and keep your list clean those are all like really good things that people can do to take their destiny into their own hands.

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It's not just like oh, like, email doesn't work anymore.

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I have to throw in one of one of my tips.

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I had a LinkedIn expert come on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and made a great case, and I agree with it, that even if you have your own email newsletter, it makes sense to start a parallel one on LinkedIn, because they enable the opt-in and people don't have to give their email.

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That's so true.

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And they actually send out the email for you.

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So they solve the deliverability thing.

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And what's more is they will invite all of your connections to subscribe to the newsletter.

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So if you, particularly if you have a lot of connections, it there's a no, it's a no brainer.

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Even if you have an email list outside of LinkedIn, if you have leaders in the company, you are connected to a lot of people.

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It does a really good job of getting a lot of people signed up and it gets people to subscribe because they don't have to put in their email and it gets it delivered.

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And so, for all those reasons, I'm like wow, linkedin newsletters like are really great.

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So that's, that's.

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Yeah, that's a great tip.

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That's so true, it's funny, it's.

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It's.

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That's going back to like OK, let's just keep innovating around this innovation.

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How can we use this?

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Whatever they're coming out with, great.

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But you know, how can I get around it as well?

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Well, any final ideas or tips you wanted to share on this topic that we didn't get to?

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You know, I would say, if you aren't focusing on your email list, I mean, start now.

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I promise you you will be happy, especially if a day comes where Facebook doesn't like you anymore or, you know, google has released search GPT and ads are obsolete.

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I mean, it's coming, and that's where I feel the most pressure to kind of like shout it out into the universe like guys, prepare.

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And I promise you you will never be sad to have your audience in a database that you can still reach them.

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And outside of that, I would say, make sure to go to my webinar release homepage.

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It's emailrevampcom.

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I genuinely mean this when I say it.

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I am giving away all of these steps for free.

00:21:04.531 --> 00:21:11.738
I'm not going to sell you, I just am shouting it from the rooftop like let's prepare and there's real money to be made.

00:21:11.738 --> 00:21:14.031
So that's going to be coming out in the next few days.

00:21:14.031 --> 00:21:16.194
So go sign up just to get updated on it.

00:21:16.194 --> 00:21:21.031
Or follow me on LinkedIn, because I'm for sure going to take that tip you just gave and I'll release it there too.

00:21:22.715 --> 00:21:23.017
Awesome.

00:21:23.017 --> 00:21:39.733
Well, I've made a link to your website and your LinkedIn and the show notes so people can get in touch and learn more about how to be successful in email marketing in 2024 and live the golden days of email, just like you've got mail, that's right.

00:21:39.904 --> 00:21:41.211
Beautiful, beautiful sound.

00:21:43.405 --> 00:21:45.291
Thank you so much for being with us, kat, today.

00:21:45.291 --> 00:21:46.234
We appreciate it.

00:21:46.234 --> 00:21:48.530
Thank you for making the time today to share these ideas with us.

00:21:48.530 --> 00:21:48.832
Yeah thanks.

00:21:48.832 --> 00:21:49.093
Eric.