AP 1116: How Do I Increase Engagement Through Email Marketing?

AP 1116: How Do I Increase Engagement Through Email Marketing?

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Pat Flynn:
What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 1116 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur just like you. And today we're talking with Jake Lang, a serial entrepreneur if you want to call them that, who has a very similar start to mine, and he's done some stuff with helping people pass some exams in the insurance space. And he's doing some stuff to build his brand over at theentrepreneurridealong.com where he's sharing his journey with others similar to myself as well, which is great. I love people who are transparent and open and sharing like this.

Pat:
And today we're going to be talking with Jake about engagement with your community and more specifically through email, which I think is a really smart question to ask. How do we use our email list to engage our community to understand more about them? This is such a powerful strategy that is often overlooked in the email marketing space. It's something I teach my students in Email Marketing Magic and it's something that you all should be doing too because emails shouldn't be just a one way conversation. It should be a two way conversation and you can learn a lot from your audience. So here he is without further ado, here is Jake Lang.

Pat:
Hey Jake, thank you so much for being here on AskPat 2.0. Why don't you take a quick moment to tell everybody who you are and what you do.

Jake Lang:
Sure. I'm Jake. Jake Lang. I live in Massachusetts with my fiance and my two dogs, and what I love doing is I start online businesses. So I've started about six online businesses. I'm starting a couple of new ones this year, and I have a website now that's kind of tracking my journey. It's called theentrepreneurridealong.com, and essentially what I'm doing is I start new businesses and I share with people kind of like myself five, 10 years ago that had no clue what they were doing, trying to get started an online business. And I try and share my journey then be transparent as possible with the online businesses that I'm creating.

Pat:
What are some of the businesses that you've created? I'm just curious to hear a little bit about that.

Jake:
Yeah, so I started a couple. The few that I have going right now that I'm still maintaining, one of them is an insurance based website where I sell online courses to help people pass these exams in the insurance industry. I actually got the idea years back from the Green LEED Academy.

Pat:
Nice.

Jake:
So I took that-

Pat:
It sounds similar.

Jake:
Yeah, yeah, it's like the same process. So I got the idea from you and put it to work with the exams that I was taking working as a product analyst in the insurance industry.

Pat:
So great. It sounds like you've got a lot going on. You're obviously very knowledgeable about business. I love the idea of you sharing the journey. That's how I got started too. It's a great way to build authority and build a brand without having to know everything. You're kind of just taking people along with you. What do you need help with? How can I assist you today?

Jake:
So the big thing I need help with is a bit about email marketing, and I know you are the email marketing wizard so I figured it'd be a great question for you. And in particular it's getting engagement from my list. I'm getting a couple of subscribers, new subscribers every day, but I'm just getting no engagement from them. And I really love that one-on-one connection. I love meeting new entrepreneurs, and I set aside time every week to meet with entrepreneurs for free, no charge. I'm not trying to sell them anything. I just want to jump on a call and help and meet people, but nobody's taken me up on the offer. And I can't figure out why. So we could really use your help with the engagement in email marketing.

Pat:
When you say engagement, like ideally... Take me through, I'm a brand new subscriber, I just come on your list. Ideally eventually, what would you like to happen?

Jake:
I would love to just make the personal connection. I figured first it's going to start by a reply to my email. Couple of emails back and forth. Maybe they're checking out my content and my followup series that I'm sending them. And then eventually take it into a conversation on a Zoom call where we jump into like kind of a free coaching call, I guess you could call it, and just to connect that way so I can learn more about them and help them just because I love talking about online business with other entrepreneurs. So that's kind of the ideal process, the ideal flow there.

Pat:
When a person subscribes to your email list, what are they subscribing for? I'm curious if you have specific lead magnets or what's your mechanism for capturing emails at this point and time?

Jake:
Yeah, good question. I'm using ConvertKit first of all, and I have two lead magnets at the moment because I kind of figured out I'm serving two different people. There's those that want to start a business but have no ideas and have nothing started. And for those people, my lead magnet is my five niche site ideas. It's essentially as I start these businesses, I have a big list of businesses that I've researched and want to start online. But I just don't have the time right now. So I put together this five part video series, and it's—you join the list and then it's one email per day. I'll put together a little video just breaking down what I would do in this niche. I'd give my niche idea, try and help spark ideas for the entrepreneur, whatever's going on in their life. And I break down like exactly how I would get started in this niche, and it's one video per day so that's one lead magnet.

Jake:
The other one is for people that have a business but are struggling to drive traffic. So I do a lot of SEO work. That's typically how I drive the traffic to my niche sites that I have going. So I put together a challenge. I kind of use... I know you have the email challenge going on at the moment. I kind of did something similar to that where it's my, I call it the 1K Challenge. It's a five day challenge to set up your site and a couple of blogs to start ranking on Google. And it's how I drive the first 1000 organic website visitors to my website. So those are the two lead magnets that are driving email subscribers at the moment.

Pat:
Great. And the reason why I was wondering was because I just wanted to see what kind of value you were offering as soon as a person subscribed and what they could kind of expect. So to me it just seems like, well people are excited to start getting in there and getting their hands dirty with whatever it is that you're going to teach them. Depending on what sort of section they're at. What are you trying to do right now to engage them and what is not working? I'm curious, after they go through these challenges or after they go through and get this sort of mini course sounding thing, what's the followup sequence like? What are you doing that you thought was going to work for engagement but is not, if anything?

Jake:
Yeah, good question. So in each video, at the end of the video, I always give a little call to action. I'm like, "Hey, shoot me an email. I want to hear what you think about this niche, that idea, and I want to hear what ideas you have." So every single time I'm asking them to like shoot me an email, and I say that I jump on these calls with people. Like I want to talk to you and hear about your business ideas. And same thing with the other lead magnet for how to drive the person that was in organic visitors. Same type of thing. I'm like, "Hey, what keywords are you looking at? I'll personally go in and look at them on my end and try and give you some feedback."

Jake:
And then I also do an email at the end of the five part series. It's like a simple question. It just says like, "Hey, what are you working on?" Or like, "Hey, what's your idea?" And I just say like, "Hey, reply to me. I want to hear from you. You've been through this five part series. What are you doing? Shoot me an email, I want to hear from you." And I think I've got a couple of hundred people that have been through this series, and I've had one person reach out to me with an email. It's kind of disheartening when you only get one reply.

Pat:
Yeah, no I get you on that, especially when that's something you really want. And I think that we could potentially ask for some engagement much sooner in the process because I'm thinking about, let's say there's 100 people going through this process. They've given you their email list. A certain percentage of them are not going to immediately go and watch the videos or if even they do, not all of them are going to watch all the way through. And even if they do, not, all of them are going to be inclined to sort of reply to you or respond at that moment in time versus what could potentially happen. And this is what I often do in my email list and what I recommend for others is if you want engagement, get it in the easiest, fastest way possible because the quicker that you can get a person to engage and realize that they're in a safe place to engage, that it's easy to engage, they're going to do it more and more after.

Pat:
So before waiting until like the end of the videos to engage and likely, I can also imagine that a lot of these people who are just starting out, they're kind of gun shy about that. They don't want to look stupid or they don't want to ask dumb questions. I get that a lot. And of course we always say like, there are no dumb questions, but people feel that sometimes. However, if it's in more of like a private email, if they just subscribe and in that email that goes right back to them afterwards with their instructions, just had a simple question that they could hit quick and reply to. And if you could potentially promise that you will reply to them, then I can imagine that sort of engagement going up and then seeing it continuing throughout the rest of the process versus just kind of waiting until they get in the video and then asking them.

Pat:
And it might not be something that you want to do forever because once your list continues to grow and grow, I mean you're going to get replies. You can only handle so many, but maybe in the beginning just to get people interested in idea and make it easy for them. Just asking them for a quick reply.

Pat:
One thing I did for an email sequence that I had for a while that worked really well was literally the first email that fired out after a person subscribed was, "Hey, real quick, can I ask you question?" And that was the subject line. And then in the email itself said, "Hey, what's your number one challenge related to building an online business right now? Hit reply, I'll reply back or give you some resources that can help you." And very short, not instructional, just, "Hey shoot me a quick email," like a friend to a friend. And I got so many replies from that because I think it was just easy and clear what I wanted back from them. And then over time, more and more of those people would continue to fire emails back.

Pat:
And I think that also benefit of that is you get them to reply to an email right away and then your emails are forever then never going to end up in promotional tab on Gmail. They're always going to be sort of white listed as a result of that. And I think that could be a quick, easy way to start that engagement process and just kind of train your audience to continually hit reply to you.

Jake:
I like that. So in my case, they have to confirm their subscription through ConvertKit. That's like the first one that gets their inbox. So is it okay to do that? I was a little bit worried about doing that when I said I'm going to provide all this value, I'm going to give you my five videos. I guess so I would send this message first and then immediately after that would be the first video. Was that how you would set it up?

Pat:
Yeah, I mean, I would include if you are, and this is a great question. People are subscribing to get the thing. You don't want to hold them back from getting the thing that they're subscribing for. So what I would do is after that confirmation email, then the email that fires out immediately after would include that instruction, that first video. But then in the email itself, I was just say, "Hey, really quick before you go and watch that video, hit reply right now and let me know what your main goal is related to business. I'd love to learn more about how I can help you achieve those goals. So just hit reply and I promise I'll reply back." And people are often blown away when you do reply, which is cool too. And if you have the bandwidth to do that, then definitely promise that to start. But then you can have the instructions in there too at the same time. So that way you're providing that value but also getting them to hit reply right away and just start to get used to in an easy way communicate with you.

Jake:
Okay, I like that. And when did you also drop in more, I guess you could call them, call to actions throughout the email series. Like another one of those that says like, "Hey, I haven't heard from you yet," or, "Shoot me an email and tell me what you're working on."

Pat:
Yeah, I mean I think if you could relate to the videos, again, if you want to capture as much engagement as possible up front and just get to know these people, which I think is super smart to do when you're starting out in business is just to understand as much as you can about these people. First email can be, "Well, what are you struggling with? Here's number one to get you started." The next day it can just be like, "Hey, thank you so much. I got a number of replies from people." You don't have to say whether or not they replied or not, but just be like, "Here are some of the replies I got from people who have also shared what they're struggling with. Maybe you can relate to them. As you can see, you're probably not alone in this. Anyway, here's video number two for you. And go ahead and go there now. And by the way, after this I'll ask you tomorrow to reply back and let me know sort of what niche you selected," or whatever the next video might be. So that you can let them know again that you're going to ask them to reply.

Pat:
And just again, it's just that training, and you're having this conversation, and it's just kind of an understanding of, "Oh cool. Jake wants me to reply. And he replies back and he listens to his audience. And that's kind of cool."

Pat:
The other part about this strategy is it also just shows that they're not alone. And I think with email and especially private conversations, a lot of people feel like they might be the only person in the world who thinks a certain way. And so if you could potentially even highlight some of what other people are saying and whether you mention their names or not, you could. I think that also showing some of the success stories that your students who have gone through these mini courses have had would be really neat too to show people that, "Wow, there's other people out there like me who are struggling too, and look what they've been able to do." And I think that'll just kind of initially make it feel like, "Wow, there's a community here." And where there's community, there's communication.

Jake:
Yeah. I like that a lot because I can picture myself five, 10 years ago when I was first getting started and I didn't know what a HTTPS was or stupid questions like that where I know nothing about online business or I didn't know what email marketing was. I wouldn't want to reply to somebody that I think is knowledgeable and ask a stupid question or what I would perceive as being stupid to feel like, yeah, that kind of takes the pressure off. It's like, "Oh, I'm not alone in this thinking. There's other people that had this question."

Pat:
Right. Exactly. And then the other way to get people to communicate is potentially on that same page where the videos exist. You could have like a comment section. I know that many people embed like Facebook comments there or Disqus or other comment platforms sort of below those videos to show more communication and that way people begin to start talking and seeing each other in a more public area versus just a private conversation because some people like one versus the other. Some people want to have a conversation with other people in a more open forum and others would never do that while they want to remain private. Others are a little bit weirded out about having private email communication with somebody and would rather have it be more public. So just different options in different ways to get people to communicate. That would be great.

Pat:
And then one thing that I love to do is offer bonuses but only if they reply and really want it. And this also forces a reply as well to get the thing. So you could go through like for example the five day mini series and then you can go, "Hey, by the way, I have a sixth video for you, but I wanted to test you and see if you actually got here. And if you're watching this video right now, hit reply and I'll send you that sixth video. I just wanted to connect with you and say hello and see if there was anything else I could do to help you." And then you reply, you have that video, and another additional link or a page that they can go to and that starts the communication process again. So that could potentially capture those who at the very end of that process who want more, but they're a little bit more quiet. But, "Hey, okay, I'll reach out to Jake to get this sixth video. It seems like it would be very helpful." And then you could sort of start a conversation from there, potentially.

Jake:
Yeah, that's another great idea. I do that with one of my other niche sites actually. It's about training this certain type of dog breed and I say, "Hey, if you reply back, I'll give you my complete guide to managing the energy of this high energy dog breed.

Pat:
There you go.

Jake:
I could do that same exact thing on this website. I just didn't even consider that.

Pat:
What kind of dog breed is that by the way?

Jake:
It's a mix between a Pomeranian and a Husky. So it's like this really hyper type of-

Pat:
Oh okay.

Jake:
... little dog.

Pat:
Nice. And I know you said you had two dogs. Do you have one of those dogs?

Jake:
I don't actually. So I have Great Danes. And we live in this tiny little house, and I have two Great Danes. So they run the household here.

Pat:
They take up all the space.

Jake:
Yeah, exactly.

Pat:
That's cool. Awesome. Let's keep going here. I think you know another interesting way to communicate with your audience that's been really great is outside of email. If you could potentially connect with them on like a social media platform, one thing that's been working really well with my audiences, being able to reply to them and communicate with them in a direct message on Instagram, for example. And whether they reach out to me first and sometimes you might have to reach out to them first when done in a direct message with a video and/or just audio, which makes it even easier than just typing and more personable. People are blown away by that. And I think that's a potential thing that a lot of businesses and brands can do more of because not just it saves time, but it shows us a real person there on the other end, a real voice, and it's a direct connection and a private message, which is not scalable by the way, but also very, very well sort of received.

Pat:
And then on the same lines, one thing that you could potentially do, and I don't know if you've heard me talk about this tool before, but it's called Bonjoro. B-O-N-J-O-R-O. Bonjoro's a cool tool that you could hook up to either a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal or Teachable if you're doing courses or anything like that, or just email. And you can have it set up so that when a person subscribes to your ConvertKit account, for example, it can fire a notification to you on your phone and then you swipe that notification. It opens up a recording screen and you just like kind of live record a reply and say, "Hey Ben, I just saw you subscribe to the a five day series. I can't wait to see you get through it. If you have any questions, let me know. You'll see opportunities to communicate with me all along the way, but I just want to... Ben, man, good luck and wishing you all the best."

Pat:
And they hear their name, they're like, "Oh my gosh. Like Jake reached out to me personally." And you could do that as those come in or I often do them just pile all those replies. And I do those for course students, not my email list or else I'd never get anything done. But I pile them in on a 30 minute to one hour block on Fridays to do. Man, those get incredible response rates as well.

Jake:
Do you think they would work for somebody like me that's may be not as well known, don't have as many followers? Would it be like-

Pat:
100 percent. This is what would get you those followers to get people to become super fans of you. And maybe because you're not like, "Hey, I'm this celebrity. I'm taking my time to actually talk to an individual like you." That's not the play here. The play here is that there's an actual person on the other end, and it could become an introduction moment, a trigger moment for them to go, "Whoa, Jake, cool, good to know. And looking forward to seeing your emails coming out." So it almost becomes just like a great intro versus like a, "Hey, look at me spending time with you."

Jake:
Yeah, you're right. I didn't want to look like some crazy guy just messaged them right away. But I think you're right. If you just play in like I'm a real person. I'm not like some guy. Yeah.

Pat:
I mean, you're right. I could see it being perceived as like, "Wait, I literally just subscribed three seconds ago. You send me a video, you use my name, and now you're behind me. And it's scaring me."

Jake:
How do you know me?

Pat:
Exactly. That's why—I mean it's not why—but I think it's a benefit of like batching those over time. You could alleviate those sort of instantaneous of that if it becomes weird I guess.

Jake:
Yeah and I think it's something worth testing too and see what happens.

Pat:
Absolutely.

Jake:
Do you think it might be overwhelming for somebody if I'm giving too much upfront in a lead magnet and that might cause some disengagement if I'm giving them these five videos in a row and maybe they don't want to watch a 10 to 20 minute video. And so they don't even want to engage anymore because they're just like, "Okay, this is too much at once."

Pat:
This is 100 percent the right way to think about it, and the right question to ask. Back in the day when I started this internet business stuff, it was 2008 and the trend was give them as much as you can. Overwhelm them so much that that they're going to want to be in your brand because they can't get that information elsewhere. Versus now, which is like everybody has information everywhere, and it's those who can do it more concisely and precisely who are going to be the more helpful ones, the ones that get followed, the ones that get shared.

Pat:
And I can definitely imagine, and I don't know if you're tracking this or not, but you could probably see open rates over the course of the five day period as well as video views and likely that number is going down. And you just have to consider how many people are actually finishing all the way through and can they get the same kind of content in one 20 minute video or five, three minute videos. And it might be a little bit more difficult based on the niche that you're in, and I know that topic obviously. So it might take a little bit more time, but the quicker that you can make it, yeah, I mean the less chance there is for people to think they can't do it anymore and you could be sort of overwhelming them.

Pat:
You could break it up also into a sort of a two-phase process. If you didn't want to overwhelm them with five sort of trainings up front, you could just do and promote the one video they need to watch to get started and then a little interaction or follow through to get sort of the rest in more of a broken up type of thing. That way you can get people to get a quick win up front to get them feeling good, get them feeling like they're making progress, and then moving into the next steps, which potentially could have overwhelmed them if they saw everything up front.

Jake:
Okay. That's a good point. So maybe combine like the two ideas that you were talking about where have them reply to get the engagement, to get that bonus. Maybe I tweak the entire series a little. Is that what you're saying?

Pat:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. To combine everything we talked about, like you were just saying, maybe they subscribed to get the first thing which maybe is a cheat sheet or just like find your niche, some keyword research thing that's easy to do. And the followup email after that is, "Hey, did you find the thing? Here are some tips that might be able to help you. If you did finish, awesome. I have sort of the next part of the training for you. And guess what, it's also free and all you have to do is hit reply. Let me know that you're ready and then I'll send it over to you." And I also know that that could potentially be automated, but maybe not at first as you want to communicate with your audience a little bit more directly to start.

Pat:
But yeah, even that part can be automated. "Click here to let me know you finished." You can do this with ConvertKit, which creates an action trigger or a link trigger that then takes them off of that list and then onto like the phase two sort of tag, which would then put them into the sort of followup sequence and probably just break up that process a little more so that it's not as overwhelming.

Pat:
Another thing to do would be to go to those people who didn't open email two and ask them like, "Hey, what was up with day one? Why didn't you do it?" And get some just direct feedback, and you can actually see who has and has not opened those emails so that you could follow up with them too.

Jake:
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. So I think in ConvertKit you can do that, right?

Pat:
Yup.

Jake:
You can see who doesn't open.

Pat:
Exactly.

Jake:
And then you would just send them a broadcast message.

Pat:
I would send them a broadcast. Yeah. I mean again, you could go super automated over time. Like, "Hey, whoever didn't move on to the next step after three days, send them the followup about day one." And that's complicated, so let's make it easy and just do a broadcast to start just to collect some info and see what's up. And maybe you can verify and know for sure like, "Yeah, there was just too much and I didn't have the time to do it." And then you can sort of make adjustments from there.

Jake:
Yeah, yeah. I was thinking like maybe the videos are just too long. I know in my 1K challenge that that followup series, one of the videos is, I already know too long, it's like 45 minutes and it's-

Pat:
A lot of value, I'm sure. Just like people don't have that time anymore.

Jake:
Exactly. Yeah, I know. If I was just starting out learning SEO, I wouldn't want 45 minutes crammed in my face about keyword research and on-page SEO. So I already know I've got to go back and modify that one.

Pat:
You can just two X the speed and cut the time in half. There you go.

Jake:
There we go. Yeah, that's the real advice from this coaching session.

Pat:
Cool. So I hope that gives you ideas for engagement and to sort of just better increase the experience that your subscribers have, and it sounds like you're off to a great start. And you're in sort of just tweaking optimization mode right now. Any other questions or things on your mind?

Jake:
No, this was a ton of great feedback. Thank you so much. I got like a full page of notes here that I can go implement now. This was great. Thank you.

Pat:
Thanks Jake. I appreciate that. If you could let everybody know where they can go and follow up with you and see your journey, where should they go?

Jake:
Yeah, so it's over at theentrepreneurridealong.com and that's where if you guys want to check out these followup series and how I tweak it, that's over there at theentrepreneurridealong.com.

Pat:
Awesome. Thanks Jake. We appreciate you and good luck with everything.

Jake:
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that coaching call between Jake Lang and myself of course, and here to help. So this is great. If you want to check out Jake and all the other projects he has going on, check out theentrepreneurridealong.com and you can follow him there. And thanks Jake for coming on and being open and it sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, which is a great thing and keep up the great work. You are an action taker I can tell, and I can't wait to see what has come as a result of this conversation when we connect later in the future.

Pat:
If you're listening to this and you'd love to potentially get on a coaching call like Jake did today with me, then all you have to do is apply at AskPat.com. Just click the button on that page to apply. You'll answer a few questions and I may reach back out to you in the future. And I hope I do because all the conversations are so great and we all learn from them. Whether you get selected or not, they're just fantastic. And I hope that you're enjoying the show. And if you are, if you haven't yet done so, please leave a review at AskPat on Apple podcast. That would be super amazing. And I just appreciate you so much. And of course, if you haven't done so already, hit subscribe. Hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts so that we can connect the next time a show comes your way. And we got a good one coming your way too, I promise. So make sure you hit subscribe and as always, #TeamFlynn for the win. I appreciate you. Peace.