EPISODE #05

VICTORIOUS

EMAIL MARKETING & AUTOMATION

EPISODE #05

Victorious Email Marketing & Automation

 

Disclaimer:  Work Wife Wine Time supports the responsible drinking of alcohol. Because when you’ve nailed your email marketing strategy and automation processes, you’ll find you’ll have more time to get back to the things you love, like having one extra bevvy because you totally can.

Gemma [0:43] – Okay, so, um, Mik, please tell us a little bit more about what you do.

Mikala [0:53] –  Okay, well, I am a tech guru automation Queen, productivity consultant and strengths coach so, I do quite a bit but basically, what my jam is, is helping female entrepreneurs and their businesses thrive online. So it’s helping you set up the tech that you need to run your business online, the automations that you need to keep your business running and to give you back some more time and space to spend on the other important things in your life like family or hobbies, that sort of thing. The Productivity side of things is again, helping you work more efficiently in your business to give you more time and space, and the strengths coaching is a new arrow that I’ve added to my bow or something like that. And..

Gemma [1:48] – Yes!

Mikala [1:50] – Is that the right terminology? Anyway.

Gemma [1:53] – That’s about right!

Mikala [1:54] – That’s about right? Okay. It’s just a new thing that I’ve added and basically it’s looking at the talents, so the things that people naturally do well, and looking at ways to build those talents into strengths and then leverage them in your business in your life. So, essentially, you end up doing what you do really well every day, and making the most of that. So using it to help grow your business and just live life better.

Gemma [2:25] – Okay, that sounds amazing. And I imagine that’s something you’ve obviously done for yourself?

Mikala [2:31] – Yes, I have. It’s actually based on this thing called the Clifton Strengths Assessment. It used to be called Strengths Finder. A colleague I was working with years ago now, it used to come in a little book and you’d have a code, you’d read about all the different themes of talent in this book, and then there was a code at the back to do an online assessment. And so I kind of did that and got my results and went, ‘oh, wow, this is really awesome,’ and then put it in a drawer for the next eight years. Until that same friend did the coaching course and offered me a free coaching session. And so I still had the sheet of paper, so I pulled it out and we did the coaching session on it and it was absolutely life changing. Like, following that session, I quit my job in government and made all these changes to my business and life and like now, it just, it really has changed the way I do things and the way I work and it’s just made such a difference.

Gemma [3:44] – Absolutely amazing. I think we should hear more about that.

Mikala [3:48] – Yes, we’ll do another episode on that one.

Gemma [3:52] – That’s fantastic. So tell us about your your past working life then.

Mikala [3:58] – Okay, well, I started off working in a video store like, you know, that’s how old I am. Back when there was actually videos in video stores not DVDs, and we had VHS and Beta like, you know.

Gemma [4:14] – Nice! A Beta!

Mikala [4:16] – Yeah! So that was sort of my job at school, and then over the years, I’ve sort of worked as a dance and drama teacher. I was a massage therapist for a while, I actually was studying to become a naturopath, but life had other ideas for me. So I kind of finished my deployment of radial massage and did that for a few years, and then, strangely enough because that’s how life works for me, I ended up in a job in a political office and spent a few years or, I was in the office for five years and I spent three years working as a chief of staff.

Gemma [4:58] – Wow!

Mikala [4:59] – Across like three offices in Canberra, Wagga and Griffith, Wagga’s where I’m from originally, and then I moved to Tasmania and got a job in the Tasmanian Department of Health, then I’ve kind of kicked around there for the last, I don’t know, 10 or 12 years, doing various project and sort of admin type roles. I worked in eLearning development for a while. Managed Registrar education for Radiation Oncologists, like I’ve just done a bit of everything but now I work one day a week as an E Learning and Development Manager for Spacemakers, which is productivity consultancy in Hobart and the rest of the time I run Inspired Office.

Gemma [5:48] – That’s amazing. That’s quite a lot there in you past life! Great well, so tell us now then who do you work with in Inspired Office?

Mikala [6:02] – I work mainly with female entrepreneurs, women who have reached kind of the limit of what they can do, the way they currently work, and they want to grow their business and take it to the next level, and they just appreciate that they can’t do it under the current circumstances. So they need to streamline their systems and work smarter and more mindfully and deliberately.

Gemma [6:30] – I love that, a bunch of levelling up female entrepreneurs, wonderful.

Mikala [6:35] – It’s awesome.

Gemma [6:38] – So then what brought you into this industry and to work for yourself?

Mikala [6:45] – Well, it’s kind of an interesting story and I have to say that with this whole COVID lockdown thing that we’ve had recently and with homeschooling, it’s kind of almost like a bit of deja vu. What happened, a few years ago my son was really struggling with anxiety at school and I made the decision to take him out of school for a couple of years and e-school him from home. And in doing that, it meant that I couldn’t work my project jobs in the Department of Health anymore because they required I actually be in a physical office. And I couldn’t survive on the few hours I did for the productivity consultancy a week. So I just basically went ‘okay, I need a source of income that I can do from home.’ I’d always been really good at tech, like every job I worked in from the political office right through until pretty much everywhere, I worked in the Department of Health, I was the tech troubleshooter. Like, if a printer wasn’t working, or someone didn’t know how to do something it was always ‘ask Mik, Mik will fix it for you!’ People would even bring in their laptops from home so I could help them do things and set things up for them. So I’ve always sort of done that sort of thing. But basically when I decided, okay, I need to start a business, I thought I’d start off as a virtual assistant, you know, because it’s admin, and that just comes really easily for me. And I joined a business school, it was called Business School for Mums, back then, now it’s called the Elevatory. Because basically, I knew nothing about business. And I knew that I knew nothing about business. And I knew that I had to do something and I had to make it work. So I wanted a good strong foundation. I’d kind of been running Inspired Office for a few years, just as a hobby, doing the bits from home that my colleagues wanted me to do. But yeah, I thought I’ve got to do this, right, so I joined the course and I went through with a cohort of women, and one of the first things that I discovered straight up was we were learning a lot of, I suppose, ‘theory’ and practical stuff in that you’d learn how to manage your finances and how to write, for example, an email automation. But everyone was then falling down and struggling with the tech side of it. It’s like, ‘Okay, I know how to do a funnel. I’ve got all the emails written up. I know the distance between them and all that sort of thing. But how do I actually put it into a platform? Like, how do I make that work?’ and me being the tech geek that I am was like, ‘oh! I can do that!’ So basically, I’d learn how to practically apply something that we’d learn in the course, I’d teach myself how to use the tech to do it, and then I’d offer that as a service. And so that’s really how Inspired Office took off and then later on I just had more, I joined masterminds and things. And I’d have women coming to me then because, you know, I’m always offering tech advice and that sort of thing in the forums and groups that I’m in, and they go, ‘Oh, can you do this?’ And I’m like, yep, I can work that out in two seconds! And then, ‘oh, can you do this?’ And so, it kind of grew, and I left the VA thing behind very early on. And then, yeah, the more I worked with women who were in, the mastermind space, instead of the startup space, I just learned the skills and the marketing, and, you know, all the knowledge behind the scenes of how it should all work and come together. And yeah, I just sort of grew that knowledge and grew those skills and repackaged it up and offered it as services to my clients.

Gemma [10:52] – That’s just, it’s fantastic. I absolutely love that and I was one of those ‘help me!’ women. I can’t do the thing it’s very hard and I don’t want to learn it because I still won’t understand any of the tech stuff, so please!

Mikala [11:10] – Yes, so, so many women are like that, because it’s true. I mean, you know, like you are an amazing copywriter. I know this because you’ve done my copy for websites and email, funnels and all sorts of things. But that’s, you know, that’s what you do well and if you were trying to teach yourself how to do all this other stuff like it’s a waste of your time it’s not what you’re good at, it’s not what you want to do, it’s not what you need to do.

Gemma [11:37] – Absolutely! And I did try!

Mikala [11:39] – You did try, Yeah!

Gemma [11:43] – I did try, let me tell you and yeah, if we’re going into like productivity, then my productivity for it just plummeted. Because I hated trying to do it, I was trying to do it, I went around in circles until I figured out why am I trying to do something like this? It’s not where my talents lie. It’s not what I can do. Let’s outsource this. What am I doing? And there’s nothing wrong with that, you know?

Mikala [12:11] – No, well, it’s like I did with you recently. You know, I wrote up the copy for an email funnel for my strengths coaching, and it killed me like that was four hours, which is way more than it should have taken, actually was probably longer than four hours because I spent quite a lot of time procrastinating because I just didn’t want to do it. And you know, that was that was hard, and it was horrible. And there’s so many other things I could have been doing instead. Whereas then at the end, I finally went, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m just handing this off to Gemma.’ And now it’s like, that’s what I’ll do right from the start because, you know, it’s not my strength, it’s not what I do for business, that’s not what I need to do. So, yeah!

Gemma [12:55] – Absolutely. Well, we’ve heard all about your past working life, and your Business passions and everything. So what why don’t you tell us a bit more about you and your interests?

Mikala [13:08] – About me? Well, I live in Tasmania. I’m in Kingston, which is 10 minutes south of Hobart, and I actually grew up in regional New South Wales, but I hated the heat. I do not do well in the heat. So that’s what prompted my move to Tasmania. And it’s damn cold here so, that suits me just fine, I’m not disappointed in that respect. Yeah, I have well as you kind of get from my work history, I’ve had a bit of a colourful life. I spent many years growing up, dancing and singing and doing drama and performing musical theatre, and since moving to Tasmania, like, I love the outdoor life, I love the beach, I love camping, hiking in the mountains you know I can see Mount Wellington out my window and most days it’s got snow on it at the moment. It doesn’t. Not that long ago it did. And yeah I love musical theatre, I love reading, that’s a really big passion of mine, like I think, before we went into lockdown for COVID I got about 30 books from the library and I got through them like in the first few weeks so I’ve been on Kindle Unlimited for like the past few weeks until the library’s open back up again. But um, yeah, so that’s basically me.

Gemma [14:47] – That’s wonderful. Dare say, I do miss libraries being open as well. So…

Mikala [14:54] – I mean, I love my Kindle, I’ve one of the original ones which you know, it’s not backlit, so it’s kinda like a book, but I love actually holding a book and flipping the pages.

Gemma [15:06] – Me too! Wonderful, and that was quite the introduction of the fabulous you! Um, so let’s get into today’s podcast on this wonderful Friday afternoon. And it is today all about automation from the automation Queen, of course, and email marketing, which is, I guess, the passion of both of ours. Let’s begin first then with what is an automation? Because for me, it does sound like a very scary word. I’m just putting it out there.

Mikala [15:51] – No, it is, a lot of people struggle with that. Well, automation is basically taking the ‘you’ out of small and repetitive manual tasks in your business. And one of the things that a lot of people think about automation, which is a bit of a misconception is that, it makes things impersonal. Like, you know, automating emails and that sort of thing, but I’m against being impersonal in business, I don’t like it. I think you really need to connect with people like that’s what I do, when I meet with the client for the first time, it’s live, it’s via a call or a Zoom session, because I want to get to know the person and know if we’re a good fit and we often like, you know, have a laugh and that sort of thing. So I’m really aware of being mindful with what you automate and how you automate it. So, there’s some things that you can do that are instant like for example, I have some Zaps it up, and Zapier is a program that you can use to automate tasks, where when a client signs a contract with me, so they become a client, Zapier then Zaps them into my email marketing program, so I can send them client newsletters. And it also, when someone fills out a lead capture form on my website, Zapier adds them as a contact to my Google Contacts so I have them in my phone. So when I make that phone call, I don’t have to go looking for their phone number. It’s already there. So, it can do things like that to make your life easier, you know, I don’t need to manually add them to my newsletter list. So I don’t I automate that. I don’t need to manually add their number to my phone, so I don’t, I automate that. So there’s lots of little tricky things you can do like that, but on another level, automation can also mean things like just having tasks set up for yourself. So I work with a few consultants and coaches, and the way I set up automation for them is when they meet a new lead, they enter the lead’s details into their CRM, and they add a workflow or a track or whatever it’s called in the CRM. So that creates tasks that then prompts them to do the things that they need to do. So if they need to then send an email with some more information or a follow up phone call or log them in some kind of system. Then these tasks are automatically created for them. So basically, the way that automates it is they don’t have to try and remember to do these things. They’re there on an electronic to do list for them, or they need to do is tick them off. So again, it’s freeing up their brain space to be able to be more creative and to serve their clients rather than going, ‘Oh, I must remember to make a note to phone John at two o’clock next Tuesday.’ So you can use automation in that way. It’s just basically making life simpler and easier for you. And, you know, having, say, email templates that you can use that you can basically click a button and that email is populated, but then you go through and you personalise it. So instead of writing the whole email from start to finish, and spending, say 10 minutes on it, you just spend two minutes just sort of editing and that sort of thing to have it ready to send. So yeah, basically in a nutshell, it’s giving you back more time and space to be able to do what you do best in your business.

Gemma [19:54] – Well, that’s actually amazing!

Mikala [19:56] – That’s the short version, yeah!

Gemma [19:59] – It’s not scary at all, it’s actually fabulous. That was a wonderful definition of it, actually so thank you very much for that.

Mikala [20:12] – You’re very welcome.

Gemma [20:14] – So I guess my next question is, how then does automation tie in with email marketing?

Mikala [20:22] – Email marketing is the most overlooked of all the business automations like, I see all the time people commenting, going, ‘oh, email marketing is dead,’ and, you know, ‘don’t waste your time on it building your email list.’ And we actually had a discussion in our, I think it was our COVID episode of the podcast with Rowena about, you know, the importance of having an email list so you can communicate to your clients about what’s going on and what’s happening. And yeah, like email marketing is just so important because it allows leads to basically go from a cold lead to a warm lead or even a converted lead without you doing anything. Like, it’s magic in some respects, it can drive a sale without you having to lift a finger. Once it’s all set up and working, provided it’s done well, because, you know, of course, that’s the thing with marketing, you’ve got to do it well, and you’ve got to test and tweak and it’s like a living thing rather than just a set and forget. But yeah, it’s just a way of growing your business and nurturing your leads and taking care of your clients. And when you take it from a lead to a client or a customer, there’s then email automations that work in a customer retention phase. So it’s bringing your customers back and just keeping the communication and the relationship going, which generally you wouldn’t have time to do if you were doing all the manual steps if you were manually sending all the emails, and doing all that sort of thing, so it really allows you to up-level your business and to reach more people.

Gemma [22:16] – Absolutely, so let’s delve in a little bit more there then of why it really is so important for business.

Mikala [22:28] – Okay, well, as I mentioned, it builds connections. So it really lets you connect with your potential customers or your current customers and also your past customers and clients. And it’s a personal way of doing it, like when you post on social media, people can just scroll past you know, they might see what you’ve posted, they might like it, they might comment, but generally they can just scroll you know, where as an email landing in your inbox is something that if someone’s actually interested in what you’ve got to say, and you’ve started to build that know, like and trust factor with them, they’ll open it. And they’ll take in what you’ve said, for example, I personally only have a very small email list. I am working on growing it, but it’s highly engaged, like I have phenomenal open rates. And when I send out a newsletter, I, early on in the COVID thing, I did what was called a ‘COVID Consult’. So I just offered all of my existing clients, a 15 minute chat, just to provide advice or bounce ideas around for ways that they could pivot, you know, in the climate of everyone going into isolation and that sort of thing. I had so many people comment on that and take me up on it. Because I had this engaged list of people that know, like, and trust me, and out of that, I ended up with more projects as well. Like the idea was sort of made to give advice, but it actually ended up generating more work, which, you know, helped me get through some of the quieter times. So that was really great.

Gemma [24:08] – Wonderful.

Mikala [24:10] – I mean, email marketing, it’s cost effective, the marketing platform I use at the moment, it doesn’t cost me a cent. It’s free.

Gemma [24:18] – Amazing.

Mikala [24:20] – And it’s a way of communicating directly with your audience, telling them what you’ve got on offer, what you’re doing, giving them ways that you can help them and it’s also another way of educating your clients about what you do and what you can do and, you know, you can send out information on your blog posts, all of that sort of thing. So it’s really just a way of keeping the communication alive.

Gemma [24:53] – That’s amazing and I agree with absolutely all of those because I’m all over email marketing as well. But one thing I find is really important from the copy side of that, because of course, that’s a big side of it, right?

Mikala [25:10] – Very much so.

Gemma [25:14] – Copywriting is, you know, words to sell and to initiate an action. And emails are really, really action orientated because we’re almost conditioned to do something with an email, you know, if it lands in your inbox you’re like, ‘I need to open or I need to forward or I need to reply, or I need to click on something’. So it already has that action in there, which is what I think really helps with getting better response rates.

Mikala [25:47] – Yep, that’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought of it like that. But yeah, in the whole productivity thing, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that, that is exactly what you say, you know, you look at an email in your inbox and the question is, what do I do with it? So, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

Gemma [26:03] – Yeah, absolutely. And it is there, of course, it’s another platform for you to offer education to offer advice to offer help. And that’s building, you know, your business, your brand as you being an authority because ‘oh, Mik sent me this email again, the last one I read was just so helpful. And I’m going to read this one again.’ And with that constant, you know, value there, it really, really does help to, you know, create new clients, new customers, get old ones to come back again, get someone forwarding the email, and it’s just a fabulous form of marketing and probably is one of the most cost effective because it doesn’t cost anything.

Mikala [26:50] – Yeah. That’s it it all it costs us the time to write the email!

Gemma [26:56] – Well, absolutely. Well, I guess we could keep talking about why it’s so important because we love it and it is, but. So tell us how does email marketing, how does it work?

Mikala [27:09] – Well, the best way to get started in email marketing, in my opinion is to start with a simple list and to put in some strategies to grow it. So one of the most common ways of growing your funnel is to have a lead magnet and a lead magnet is a free offering, it’s something that you offer in exchange for an email address. So it could be a checklist or it could be a video or it could be a mini challenge. There’s so many different options that you could do. But basically, you offer a lead magnet and someone signs up, gives you their email address in exchange for the lead magnet. Once they’ve received the lead magnet, you then put them through a nurture sequence. So this nurture sequence is where you tell them a bit about yourself. You tell them a bit about your business, how you can help them, you provide them with more value. So you give away other little bits and pieces that can provide them with a quick win. So it’s gives them an opportunity to test and to see that you actually know what you’re talking about, and that you can provide practical help for them. And then ideally, what you do is you work towards a core offer, which is the thing that you really want the people to buy. And to get people to your core offer, you use what’s called a tripwire. And a tripwire is generally a lower priced service or it could be a discount offer service or something like that. And basically, it’s to get people to buy from you or to engage your services for the first time. So it’s something that is high value, lower cost, and it really starts the client engagement part of the relationship. So that’s where I often see people starting and that’s where I start a lot of my clients with email marketing, and then there’s a lot that you can do after that. But this is where I want to jump back to you for a second, Gemma. So, in order to be able to work out your lead magnet and to work out the best nurture, sequence and tripwire, you really got to know your clients. So, this comes back to client avatars. Because this is something that is really your jam, can you tell us a bit more about what a client avatar is and what it is important to know about your clients in order to you know, create the lead magnet and the sales funnel that’s going to work effectively.

Gemma [30:04] – Absolutely. Yes, it is my jam a client avatar is– So you’ve, you’ve done all of your target audience research, you’ve gathered all of the information, you delved deeply into the psychographics you’ve delved even deeper into, you know, what they like, how they like being spoken to, all of the important communication or tone stuff, I guess. So then you come down to breaking it into two people. It can be one but two options is always better. Also, a specific avatar is someone who is exactly in your target audience. So you name him or her and you give him or her really, really specific details where they live, what they watch on TV, the media they consume, how much they make at work, what they do on a weekend, everything like that. So you actually, deeply, deeply understand that specific person within your target audience. And if you know that person so intimately, you’re going to know exactly how to nurture them through your marketing email sequences. You’re going to know how to speak to them, what information they’re interested in, and how they’re going to take an action that you want them to take.

Mikala [31:38] – Yeah, and also what they’re struggling with what their pain points are.

Gemma [31:44] – Of course. It wasn’t even in my head there. I guess that, again, I’ll just touch on this shortly because this really could just take me to another planet or dimension but, if we’re delving really deeply into consumer behaviour and consumer purchasing decision. People are purchasing something because they have a problem.

Mikala [32:14] – Yeah.

Gemma [32:14] – Right? And they need to solve that problem. And they’re going to solve it by purchasing something, whether it’s a product or service. So if you’re touching on those problems and you’re offering the solution to that problem, and you’re putting it right there in their inbox, they don’t even need to do any more searching or research, it’s right there for them if you’re offering them that solution and of course if you know your avatar deeply then you know what problems they are facing, what what pain they’re having, everything like that. So that’s how you then go in there and offer them that that solution and email marketing makes that so personal.

Mikala [33:00] – Yeah.

Gemma [33:02] – I’m going to stop there.

Mikala [33:06] – Otherwise we could be talking for the next hour and a half.

Gemma [33:08] – We could talk forever because I love consumer behaviour.

Mikala [33:15] – That’s why I let you do that stuff.

Gemma [33:20] – Goodness, thank you. What components, then, do we need to grow your list? So we’ve covered how it works, why it’s important. What do you need to grow it? Apart from knowing avatar, of course, what other components do you need to grow your list?

Mikala [33:44] – To grow your list, like it’s really all about having the lead magnets having a way to get the word out there then about your lead magnet like a lead magnet could be, I mean I have several at the moment and I can do that because I am tech savvy, so I’ll write a blog post and go, ‘oh, a checklist to go really well with that!’ So I can throw together a checklist in Canva, and quickly set up an email funnel to go with that. And then I promote the blog post and I promote the lead magnet through my social media and also through my newsletters, to get people to engage and to sign up for it. So it’s really, like we said, knowing what the problem is that our clients have, and generally a really good place to start with is one. You want to find the one thing that is related to your core offer, the main thing that you want people to buy from you, or service that you want people to buy from you. But then as you move into other areas and your business grows, that’s when you can start offering different things. For example, I was talking earlier about my strengths coaching funnel that I’ve put together. So because that’s separate from my tech and automation side of the business, that has its own lead magnet and its own separate nurture funnel and its own separate tripwire. So yeah, you can develop these things as you go as long as you start with your first funnel. But the most important thing, I think, is what you then do with your subscribers, once you’ve got them on your email list, because you can’t get people onto your email list and then ignore them for six months. You need to keep in regular contact with your subscribers. So I do monthly newsletters, I’d love to do them more regularly, but I don’t have time. Like I’ve got other areas of my business that I need to put my time in. So when I do send out a newsletter, it’s very well thought out and I collect information that I’ve shared on social media and things that I’ve learned in the past month, and things that I’ve done in the past month and I share all of those things in my newsletter, so it’s generally got a blog post that I’ve written, and a podcast I’ve listened to or a Work Wife Wine Time podcast if we’ve done something that’s really relevant to my audience, and sometimes a book that I’ve read, so I just, I share information that I found interesting and that is relevant to what I do. So it’s relevant to the reason people subscribe to my list. Basically, there’s that side of it, so there’s getting people onto your list, there’s looking after them once they’re on your list, but then there’s also another side of things, which particularly is important for product based businesses, but it can also be used really well for service based businesses as well, which, as I mentioned before is the retention side of things. So with a product based business, for example, when someone buys a product, you then want to send them a thank you email. You know, thank you for purchasing this product, tell them a bit more about the product and do another follow up email asking for a testimonial. Do another follow up email saying, ‘oh, you’ve bought this, here’s a product that goes really well with that!’ Like, keeping in touch, continuing to nurture the relationship and offer more solutions to their problems, basically. An abandoned cart email sequences is another option, providing a discount for people that abandon their cart or just a reminder, you know, constantly nurturing the customer or the client and paying them attention, helping to solve their needs. And the most important thing is offering them value. Like, you can’t just keep hassling them with the sale you know, with an abandoned cart for example, ‘oh you miss these come back and buy come back and buy come back in buy!’ it’s like, you’ve got to actually offer people things for free, like offer them content that’s valuable that they’ll get something out of, because it’s gotta be a two way street. It can’t just be you constantly asking and them giving. You’ve got to give before you can ask.

Gemma [38:21] – Absolutely. And that’s great that you touched on email marketing for product based businesses as well as you and I are in service based businesses. But email marketing works just brilliantly for both product and service.

Mikala [38:42] – Yeah, well I actually have quite a lot of product based clients, product based business clients that I do the email marketing work for, and like some of them have just done brilliantly. I’ve got a few clients, one who she sells things for parties for home like, you know cups and plates and balloon garlands and that sort of thing, and she does it brilliantly, like her lead magnets are wonderful. She’s got really well thought out nurture sequences. She’s got all her abandoned carts set up, her post sales emails, her retention. And she does really well from that, and I often find that when I get a new client and when we set up the email sequences, often a lot of them have already got the list, but they haven’t been nurturing them, and a quick trick that you can do if you’re a product based business, is send out an email to everyone that’s been on your list but you haven’t heard from for six months or so with a discount offer. I did that for one client and overnight, she had like six sales from, you know, essentially cold subscribers on her list. So you know, everyone loves a good discount.

Gemma [39:56] – We’ll love a quick win right?

Mikala [39:58] – We do! That’s it, it’s the quick win.

Gemma [40:02] – Oh, this has been fantastic, so what can you leave us with with a final thought or a key takeaway or something that is a little gem from you?

Mikala [40:14] – I guess my final thought is email marketing is definitely not dead. It is really important. One of the other things I didn’t mention earlier was it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 1000 subscribers to your Facebook page or your Instagram page that can be shut down in a second. And I’ve actually had clients who have had Facebook shut down their business page for no reason, and they’ve lost it. It’s never been reopened. But your subscribers on your email marketing list provided you have followed all the rules and done everything aboveboard. You own them. They’re yours, no matter what. Like you can’t lose them. They can unsubscribe, yes, but you actually own those email addresses and so you therefore own that way of communicating with your clients. So social media is great, having followers and likers is wonderful, but they can be taken away from you in a second. Whereas email marketing, it’s yours and it’s essentially yours to keep. So you need to nurture it, build it and take care of it.

Gemma [41:21] – Amazing. I think that’s a very, very, very important thing to remember. So that that’s great. Thanks for that little gem there. And finally, do you have anything available for our listeners out there that would help them in any way?

Mikala [41:43] – I do. I actually have a downloadable which is a brief guide to email marketing. So it explains a bit more about what we talked about with the lead magnet and tripwire and all that and what those things are. And also has a little exercise that you’ll like Gem, which is about, identifying your customer avatar. So it just kind of gives you a bit of a prompt and a bit of a start into thinking about those sorts of things. So if you’d like to download a copy of that, you can go to our website, www.workwifewinetime.com.au/emailmarketing. And that will send you to my landing page where you can get your hands on a copy.

Gemma [42:42] – Wonderful. That’s amazing. I’m sure everyone will be heading there very, very shortly. Which brings us to a wrap up of the end of our episode for this week. As always, it’s just amazing to hear from you. And all of your your world of knowledge. So thank you.

Mikala [42:47] – And thank you it’s been really great having your input on this topic as well because it’s something that we both get a bit geekily excited about.

Gemma [42:54] – We do. Thanks for having me geek in with you.

Mikala [42:59] – My pleasure.

Gemma [43:03] – And as always, all of you other kick us women, fellow work wives, fellow female entrepreneurs, business women. Remember you’re not alone because collaboration is power.