AP 0485: How Should I Use My Email List?

AskPat 485 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 485 of AskPat. Today we have a great question from Meagan, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, making it super easy for all of us to manage our business finances, everything coming in, everything going out and also invoicing too.

They also have an award-winning mobile app, so you can check the financial health of your business on the go too. If you'd like to check this out for 30 days for free, head on over to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.” All right, here's today's question from Meagan.

Meagan: Hi Pat, my name's Meagan and I have a dog care blog called Canine of Mine. My question is, I've been able to develop an email list over the years, but I'm not really sure how I should be using that email list. Should I be emailing subscribers about every new post I publish? Should I send them newsletters? Should I be sending them news about sponsors or people that I work with to promote their products? I'm just not really sure how I should be using this email list, so I'm hoping you can help me out with that. Thanks Pat, love your show. Thanks for all your help.

Pat Flynn: Hey Meagan, what's up? Thank you so much for the question and I really appreciate this, because this is something I know that is a big pain point for a lot of people. We always hear about building your email lists and conversions and getting people on your lists, but then what do you do after? A lot of people don't talk about that, which is why I have, and a lot of people know this already, this is a resource that I created specifically to answer this problem, to solve this pain point. If you go to EmailtheSmartWay.com, again that's emailthesmartway.com, that is my 40-page PDF guide, totally free, to help you understand what kinds of emails to send.

There are ten sort of different templates, or styles, or kinds of emails you could send you audience to do a number of different things. In each of those ten different kinds of emails, I tell you why that's important, when to use it, and how to structure it too. There's ones like—and they each have a different name and I'll explain them in a little bit—the Quick Win, the Free Resource, the Hard Lesson Learned, the Student Teacher, the Tip of the Iceberg. Now let's just talk about a few of these, I'll let you all go into EmailtheSmartWay.com and download that, again for free, so you can get more information about them, but for instance, the Student Teacher.

I like this one. This is where you feature somebody in your audience and something they did that teaches everybody else. Something that they've implemented that you've perhaps taught, and that is great because it helps your subscribers to understand that when you put, when people take action with your stuff, they actually get results. It's not you teaching, it's one of your students or one of your subscribers, one of your readers or listeners. They're the ones that are being used as an example of teaching for everybody else, and that shows that you have compassion and you are listening to and also following and teaching your audience and listening to them and showing them off too and that's going to inspire a lot of people too.

There's the Hard Lesson Learned, where you share some sort of thing that you learned because of a mistake that you've made or some failure. Those always work really well. A Quick Win, that's one of my favorite ones and that's actually what I would start out with, which is a “here's one tip that you can do and implement in five minutes” and that gets a great result. That will help people continue to open those emails down the road. There's also other kinds of emails you can include inside your autoresponder series and again, I'm talking about specifically autoresponder series, emails that you write before hand.

Now there's obviously a lot of emails that you could write at the current time, broadcasts, stuff that's happening right now, real-time stuff. Any promotions that you have going on, any news, all those kind of things work well for broadcast, but not necessary for autoresponders because those things people get later down the road after they subscribe. Okay, so other kinds of emails are survey-centric emails, is what I call them. Basically you are starting a conversation, getting responses back. Emails are a great way to survey your audience and get an understanding of what else you could do to serve them. These are the what are you struggling with emails, or which one are you, if you want to start segmenting too.

Do you know the right answer? So getting people interested in actually communicating and sharing their answer, because humans, we just love to share the right answer when we know it. If you can have your audience begin to start to interact with you over email, which isn't done very often, it's only going to help you build that relationship even stronger, get people to open those emails that they're going to get in the future and also just have much more love for your brand. Again, I'm not going to get into each of these and into the details of each, but that's what I would suggest you do, Meagan, and everybody else out there who's struggling to figure out what to include in their email autoresponders.

All you have to do is go to EmailtheSmartWay.com and you can get it right there. Meagan, thank you for asking the question. I wish you all the best of luck. In terms of the new posts, you can definitely send out broadcast emails with your new posts, there are different ways that you can do that. You can do that automatically, you can do that like I do with a digest every weekend. You can do, again, like I said, any sort of announcements that you need to make, use your broadcast feature and send those out and I would definitely do new posts and if you have something like ConvertKit, you can start to segment your audience who want to get every post. I would definitely send out the most important ones to everybody because that's traffic.

Your email list is potential traffic coming to your website too, so I would definitely, definitely do that. Meagan, thank you again so much. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show and for everybody else out there, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank FreshBooks.com/AskPat for sponsoring this episode, again, making it really easy for all of us to manage our finances and just not have to stress about that.

They just make it really easy to keep track of your books and that's so important when you're running a business, because you want to make sure you're organized and come tax season it becomes much easier to organize and figure things out too. If you want to check out Freshbooks for free for 30 days, head on over to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. To finish off, here's a quote from John Caldwell, he said, “To get the right message to the right person at the right time, you first need to get the right data to the right database at the right time.”

That means, in this particular context, making sure you get that email list built in a way where it's targeted and you understand exactly what you need to say collecting data surveys, all that sort of stuff so you know what to include on those emails. Again, if you want the structure for those emails and the templates, head on over to EmailtheSmartWay.com. Thanks so much, I appreciate you and I'll see you in the next episode of Ask Pat. Bye.