by: AskPat 516 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 516 of AskPat thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week and we have another question today from Eliska, who asked a question late last year 2015.
She's back again because she asks great questions.
Aright, here's today's question from Eliska.
Eliska: Hi Pat. My name is Eliska and I'm from Czech Republic. I would like to know what do you think is better to send in email. I know you have [inaudible 00:01:16] on your sequence for a long period and now I'm sending to my email list. Just an email with notice about a new blog post. What do you think is better and why? Is there some big difference in open rate and click rate between these emails? Maybe some information which are not on website and just broadcast emails with notice about new blog post. Is this some big difference, and do you think it depends a lot of which type of these two emails I will send? What and how should I choose? Thanks for everything Pat. I love what your doing and I hope I will hear from you soon. Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Hey Eliska. Thanks again for the second question. You ask great questions, like I said earlier, so thank you for that. This email strategy, this one is very important because there is a lot of options with email. Of course a lot of you know who have been following me for at least about 6 months now, know that I've undergone some major changes in my email marketing strategies lately.
Just to give you an idea, the very first experience I've had with emails. This was actually even before collecting an email list, and it was these emails that would be served by FeedBurner. FeedBurner is an old school RSS reader tool that google has and it's still alive but nobody's servicing that particular tool anymore, so, you know I wouldn't recommend starting out with it, but, it was a tool that you could use to have people subscribe to your RSS feed, and they could do that via email too. There's a little option in there in the settings to have people leave their email address and essentially every time you came out with a blog post it would send them an email with that blog post in it.
That was my very first one and I actually have a few thousand subscribers from way back in the day who continue to get my emails because of that, and a lot of people prefer to get emails with just blog posts. The cool thing about the way I did it then, and what that service was all about, was people chose to get those emails. They said yes, I want an email sent my way every time a blog post is posted. So, you know, essentially gave them permission, or gave me permission, to send them those emails. Didn't mean that they were on an email list, and I didn't start building my email list until 2010 which, like I always say, was a huge mistake that was two years after I started my website which was, you know, it just makes me mad that I waited that long but you know I've been making changes and trying to do things right.
Of course when you have an email service provider, whatever one that is, I started out with Aweber, then I went to Infusionsoft, and now I'm on ConvertKit which I highly recommend. I'm actually an advisor for the company now I love it so much. You can check that out at askpat.com/convertkit, and you will not be disappointed I promise. Especially if you are just starting out. With any of those emails service providers you can send broadcast emails, where whatever it is that's on your mind on that day, whether its a brand new blog post you manually put that in there and send it out or its just information on an upcoming launch or a webinar registration or some sort of news or telling people what's up. You can do anything with those broadcast emails which is cool.
Now, of course you can also utilize, and you should utilize, their auto responders which is a series of emails that you write before hand, that get sent out sequentially and automatically over time which is really cool because you put in that work up front to write those emails and then you constantly keep in contact with your audience automatically without you having to push send on those, because the service provider does that for you. So, you get higher open rates because of the auto responder, you get to automate a lot of your funnels and sequences and what not. You should definitely utilize that, but let's just talk about the broadcast emails.
So, what is better? Broadcast emails, where you're talking about something that's happening that day or ones that only have blog posts in it or links to blog posts and that's it? Well, the way that I've solved this problem recently, and this is thanks to what ConvertKit is capable of, and there's a lot of other email service providers too, but I've been able to create what's called a digest. That is just a term that I made for another course essentially, or a list, that people can subscribe to specifically. Where they get tagged as in wanting this digest email and anybody who is tagged, or who signs up through that particular email sign up form to get those digest emails, they get my blog posts.
Now this is separate than other people who are on my list, or, and in edition to the people who get my normal broadcast emails. So I've essentially told people, hey guys your on my email list and if you want my digest you can also click here and it automatically tags that person. Then every Saturday, or Sunday, I send a broadcast email out, specifically with links to the blog post that I published earlier that week.
So I send that weekly and its been a great compromise, I guess you could say, because I could send out a broadcast email that has, you know, every time I come out with a new piece of content I could send out a new broadcast email, but that would be overwhelming. Especially when you consider AskPat comes out five days a week. I have a blog post on Monday, a podcast episode on Wednesday and an SPI T.V. episode on Friday. That would be overwhelming so my compromise was sending a weekend digest of everything that I published earlier that week and it's been working out really really well.
Now a lot of people chose not to get that because they would rather just hear from me on important matters that happen during certain times of the year. I send a broadcast email that way, not related to a blog post, once every couple weeks. It could potentially do it a little bit more or a little bit less, but again that's up to you. What I would do, if possible, if you have the capability, is I would create a separate list that is specifically, or a tag that is specifically for those who want just your blog post emails.
Now, people would also get the other broadcast emails too, but the fact that you've had them select to be the person who wanted those blog post emails its gonna get a much higher open rate, because they chose that. They've given you permission to send that to them and they're gonna read it and the cool thing about that is people click on those because they want those emails.
That's how I would go about it. There's not one that's better than the other, it's not either or. You can compromise like I did but if you don't have that capability then you need to figure out what is most important to your audience. Now I feel like for you, what you could do if you don't have that capability to separate those two things out and create some sort of digest, you could send an email out with important timely information but also include blog posts that you just written too.
What you don't want to do is send broadcast emails that don't seem personal, that almost seem kind of automated. There are ways in email service providers, including ConvertKit, where you could set up a what's called a “digest” or not a manual one but an automated one. Where it automatically takes, based on the RSS feed that you have it read, any new blog post that you create and kind of create a summary in a link back to that blog post. Aweber does that, I used to do that for a while, but you know it seemed like it just lacked personality, it lacked the personal touch that I feel is and should be in an email. Unless it is one that people know that is automated. So, there's a lot there. I think what you need to do Eliska is try things out and also survey your audience. I would survey your audience and see what it is that they want and prefer, and you might find that there's a mix. If there is a mix, you want to try and see if you can come up with a solution that can solve as many of those issues and serve as many of those people as possible and if not than you'll have to prioritize well which one is important to you.
I definitely think that you can send broadcast emails with timely information and include blog posts within some of those too, and have them sound like they're coming from you and not from something that's automated. So Eliska, hopefully that helps you out. I was just spit balling there and hopefully that got the gears turning to help give you some direction moving forward. Really cool that your asking about email strategy, it's something that's been on my mind quite a bit over the last few months here and I'm still tweaking, fine tuning things. You're gonna hear more information about email strategy later in the future this year on SPI.
Until then, thank you so much and hopefully this helps. Eliska, so we sent you a t-shirt already, I'll have my assistant reach out to you just so if you'd like another one or if you wanted to have a special you know, a random person on twitter or something in a future episode, give it to them or whatever, but we'll figure that out. Like I said you've been featured before so I wanted to ask you.
Anyway, thank you again so much for the question. For everybody else out there who asked questions, you are what make the show possible so thank you, thank you, thank you! I appreciate you. Just head on over to AskPat.com if you have a question to ask. I also want to thank everyone out there who's been supporting me and rooting me along for my upcoming book called Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea so You Don't Waste Your Time and Money.
I'm really, really excited about this and if you want to get more information about it head on over to willitflybook.com and you can also get early notice of when it's coming out and access to some of the information in terms of the rewards and the bonuses that are coming for those of you who get it early and all those sorts of things. Go ahead and check it out again willitflybook.com and as always I like to end with a quote and today's quote is from the great bambino himself, Babe Ruth. He said, “It's hard to be the person, who never gives up”.
Cheers take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.
