E7: How to Write Email Sequences That Convert
Do customers keep forgetting about you?
Find out how to turn your neglected email list into a value-driven tool that keeps your business front and center in your customers' minds.
Learn the steps to create email nurture sequences that actually get read and convert!
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Sean Garner is a marketing consultant and Certified StoryBrand guide dedicated to helping small business owners grow and dominate their industries. He created the Marketing Domination podcast to teach people how to combine storytelling with strategic marketing to help businesses connect with customers and stand out online.
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MARKETING DOMINATION PODCAST
EPISODE 7 TRANSCRIPTION
Introduction to Nurture Email Sequences
[00:00] Sean Garner:
Are you tired of being forgotten by your clients and lost in all the noise and confusion of online marketing? We are going to show you in this episode, how to stay top of mind, continually provide value and stand out as the go-to expert for your customers. Welcome to Marketing Domination.
So in this episode today, we are going to show you how to leverage the most overlooked thing with small businesses and their marketing. And it is this: your email list. If you've been following along on this series that we're on right now, it is all about building and setting the foundations for your marketing funnel. In the past couple of episodes, we talked about things like your lead generator and that transitional call to action, how to actually get people on your email list.
Why Your Email List Is Your Most Valuable Asset
[00:50] Sean Garner:
And then after you have done all this work to provide all this value with this lead generator, this series of emails that you should be sending to follow up with people after they download your lead generator. But in this episode, we are going to talk all about nurture emails. These are ongoing emails that you're going to be sending out to the list that provide value and showcase you as an expert.
The thing you need to realize about your email list first off is that it is, in my opinion, the most valuable resource that you have when it comes to your marketing, there's this really great quote when it comes to email marketing that I really like, and it is “don't ever build your business on rented land.”
What that means is most people/brands are building their business on rented land and what that rented land is is social media. You don't control social media. People complain about the algorithm all the time. If you even look at your Explorer page, there's always somebody showing, hey, I'm going to show you the trick to beat the algorithm on how to get more views and how to get your content actually seen.
[01:58] Sean Garner:
Because that's the crazy thing about social media is somebody can be following you, you can post something and they still might not ever see it. With email, you control the list. You control your customer's information. And when you want them to see the information. There is so much frustration surrounding social media.
And it's because you don't own the list, right? You're renting. It's an awesome platform. It's an awesome tool. I love social media for marketing your small business. We're going to get a lot to that in the future episodes, but if you want to be able to own your list and truly grow your business, making growing your email list a priority is where you should be spending your time.
We talked also in the last episode about the difference of strategies and tactics. So right now, this is going to be a strategy tactic episode. So there is a strategy here of staying on top of mind and making sure you're always adding value to your potential customers so that whenever they are ready to buy, they think of you.
Why Email Marketing Is Timeless
[03:01] Sean Garner:
And the tactic that we are discussing is email marketing. A question I get asked is. Is email marketing dead? Absolutely not. I don't think that it is, but I think the way that most small businesses do email marketing is dead.
And in this episode, we are going to give you the overviews, the strategies, and then also some templates and frameworks to make writing emails easy, something you enjoy, and more importantly something your customers enjoy so they actually start opening up your emails.
So when it comes to doing your nurture email sequence, there are a couple of different things that I want us to consider, and I'm going to give us some tips, how to do it and the frameworks, like I said, to make sure that this is a very simple process for you.
The very first thing you need to do in order to get started with your email marketing is make sure that you have an email marketing platform. If you do have it, you should have this already set up. If you do have a lead generator in that auto sequence, these emails are called broadcast emails.
Initial Setup for Effective Email Marketing
[04:05] Sean Garner:
They are not emails that you should ever be sending out through something like your Gmail or your Bing or your Yahoo account. These emails need to be sent out through a software and email marketing platform that's meant for large distributions and mass email sends. If you try to send this through your regular email, it will not work. You will most likely have a restriction against your personal email account.
You could even get it shut down. So you don't want to do that. The next thing to think about when getting started with this is it can be very overwhelming. You might be thinking, ah, man, I'm not a copywriter or I'm not a marketer. How do I even know how to do this and get started? The very first thing that I would even say is start just making yourself aware.
So what I want you to do is start looking at what's working in your industry and your niche, and then also just hobbies, interest, and other newsletters you subscribe to. So this is one of the things that I do is I will subscribe to lead generators and email newsletters and sequences and stuff for people that are in my industry and niche.
Learning from Successful Email Campaigns
[05:11] Sean Garner:
As well as just things that I'm interested in, things that have nothing to do with small business, digital marketing, or anything like that, just to, one for the things that aren't marketing, I want to get the value from it. But the second thing is I want to start looking at what's working industry wide, right? I want to see what are the types of things that companies are sending and that more specifically that I want to engage with.
Then what I do is I have inside of my Google workspace or my Gmail account, I have a folder specifically set for really good email copy. That's actually what it's called. The notes is really good email copy. And as emails come in, what I do is I start to look at things that catch my attention, whether it be a subject line or maybe the way that the email is formatted out, it's really easy to digest the information and it provided a lot of value.
And I will take those emails and I will put them in this folder so I can kind of have a mood board, if you will, and just kind of a reference material to see what other people are sending out, because here's the thing to think about it for your specific business.
Crafting Your Content Strategy
[06:10] Sean Garner:
What I have found with working with hundreds of different business owners, the type of customer that you want to work with from a personality standpoint is typically pretty similar to the business owner. So if something is capturing your attention and sucking you into making you want to read it and watch it, that is something that is most likely going to do the exact same thing for the type of people that you want to work with.
So take those emails and keep them in that note folder. So that way you can use it as reference material, because if it worked for you, it's probably going to work for your customers. The other thing that I want you to do is to start off with making a list of brainstorming topics.
With these nurture emails, you need to realize one very important thing. They are not sales emails. We talked in the last episode about creating sales emails and what the structure and framework for that looks like, and how often you should send sales emails. These nurture emails are not that the whole purpose of these emails is to stay top of mind and position yourself as the perfect guide for your customers by adding value.
[07:19] Sean Garner:
That's the whole point of these emails. They are not to be salesy emails. So the other thing that I want you to do is just start off creating a Google doc and just block off 20 minutes distraction free, and just start writing down a list of helpful tips or topics that you could start easily creating content around just to get yourself started.
Most business owners I have found are overthinking this. They are focusing way too much on, well, how do I design the email and format it out? When what you don't realize as a small business owner is the things that are simple and almost monotonous and easy for you to do are most likely the things that your customers will be most enticed by.
[08:02] Sean Garner:
And that's the most value that you get from them. When I was working as a fitness advisor and writer for Men's Health magazine, what I was always told is the most popular articles and videos on their platform were how to do your first pull up, how to do a perfect pushup and how to plank. Like the most three basic things, that's the things that would get the most traction.
And if you're in the fitness industry, like that's super easy, that's basic stuff, but to the average consumer, that was huge. And that was one of the things that they wanted. So as you're thinking about these email topics, think about the things that are the most common FAQs that you get from customers and start making a list of those things to store all of your topics.
So, we've gotten started here, right? So we started to look at what other competitors are doing. Look at what other just companies that we like to engage with are doing. We're storing all that information. We're starting to get ideas and starting to pay attention to frameworks, subject lines that are capturing our attention and formats of the emails and how they're structured.
Subject Lines That Grab Attention
[09:00] Sean Garner:
We're saving all that data. Then we have captured all of our information to start thinking, kind of brain dumping the topics that we think that we could easily talk about. That is kind of the very first, get yourself started in here so you can start sending out some emails.
The next section that I want to talk about here is just best practices for these emails before you kind of go into the content creation standpoint.
There's a few things that you need to know and realize about what makes emails work. Well, the first thing is your subject line. This is the most important part of your email, because if you don't have a really good subject line, you're not going to hook people and you're not going to entice them to actually open the email.
If your emails are doing really bad. Check your open rates and first, before you start changing the inside of your emails, because your open rates and what got somebody to open the email is dictated by the subject line. If the subject line was really boring, nobody's going to open up inside of the email.
[10:02] Sean Garner:
One of the best practices that we follow at our agency, Sean Garner Consulting, is we try to keep all email subject lines, nine words or less. And we try to use one emoji in the subject line if it makes sense for that industry, there's certain industries that we work with that are financial institutions where using an emoji doesn't necessarily make sense.
But we do want to make sure that we are keeping it nine words or less. The reason being is if it's longer than that, it's going to do what's called turn coding to where it's just going to get cut off. So it's not going to be able to be seen on mobile or on somebody's web browser.
So even though it might sound really good in advising, it's going to be too long and nobody's actually going to see it until they open the email anyway. So with those subject lines, keep them nine words or less and start to make them engaging. We always want to use action based words when we're doing it.
Optimizing Email Deliverability and Engagement
[10:55] Sean Garner:
So that way it makes it be something people want to actually open. The next thing is when you want to make the emails easy to read or scan. So when we're writing these emails, they should be really simple to create because they should also be really simple to read. We should make sure that we're not using too much text on these emails.
We want to use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs, and then also always use active language. An example would be, we would want to say something like discover our new collection versus our new products are now available, right? We want to create action in the words that we're using and we want it to be broken up so it's like little bullet pointed lines so people can quickly scan it.
For me personally, whenever our team is writing, we don't ever put more than two sentences together in a block of text. Almost everything's on its own line. We're going to use things like bolding words and italicized words to make things stand out and pop out on different big blocks of text will change font sizes because you want it to make it where it's not just this big, huge clump.
[12:02] Sean Garner:
So if somebody is scrolling by quickly, they just go on and pass on by it. The other thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that we're using minimal HTML. So what that means, if you're not familiar with that is. Anything besides just text in an email.
So a lot of the beautiful graphic design emails that you might see like big e-commerce brands and stuff, send out those look really pretty, but Google knows that that is most likely a promotional email, because if you're sending an email to one of your colleagues, you're not making this big, huge image and graphic design, email and stuff to it.
So most likely those are going to end up in your Google promotions tab. Plain text emails might not look sexy, but it is going to be the thing that guarantees you the highest deliverability rate straight into somebody's inbox. It's a lot of other factors that affect deliverability, but the higher the HTML content, that means like the images and links and stuff that are inside of your emails, the lower it's going to drop that deliverability to the inbox.
[12:59] Sean Garner:
For your potential customers on that note on deliverability. This is way more advanced than the goal of this podcast. This podcast is for small business owners, not for marketers and stuff, but you do need to know that in 2024, this year, February, Google and Yahoo announced something to where now you have to authenticate your email servers with DMARC. What that means is there's a little special thing of code that you need to put onto your domain on the backend.
So that way it ensures Google that you're actually sending from a legitimate source and it will less likely go to spam. If you don't know what that means, whoever is setting up your email or whatever email marketing provider that you are using, they should have documentation to show you how to set this up.
And if you were set up post-February 2024, it should kind of automatically walk you through it as part of an onboarding for setting up your email marketing platform, whichever one you're using. But for those people who have had their email marketing tool and been sending out mass emails prior to this, or, or had the set tool set up long ago, you will need to make sure that that was done to ensure you get deliverability in your emails that you're writing are actually ending up in the inbox.
Building and Testing Your Email Templates
[14:11] Sean Garner:
The next thing to think about when creating emails is the types, create the types of emails. That you would actually want to open and engage with. If you were bored by your emails, your customers are going to be bored by your emails. So write the kind of content that you would enjoy reading.
Again, these are not sales emails. These should be helpful tips. You should almost sometimes think, man, I'm giving away some of my best stuff here. That's good. We're trying to provide value and position ourselves as the perfect guide expert for our customers. So it should be really good, helpful content.
People don't want to open and read fluff. That's just going to make people unsubscribe. So create content that adds value to customers. And it's the type of content that you would actually want to read is what your customers would want to read. The other thing is frequency. People ask how often should I be sending emails to my list?
How Often You Should Send Emails
[15:01] Sean Garner:
The goal you should kind of shoot for would be at least around one time per week, if that seems way too overwhelming, start with twice a month. If you're like, there's no way I can do that, do it once a month. If you're doing it less than once a month, I would definitely say that you're probably going to more likely often end up in spam or promotions versus the inbox.
The more consistently that you send, the more that you're going to get open rates, this is going to show Google this is legit email, and you're going to get more increased deliverability and better open rates and click through rates for everything that you do. It's going to help you honestly, just practice and get better at the skill the more emails that you're sending.
The most important factor with it, though, I think is the consistency. You don't want to be sending, you know, weekly emails for the next four weeks, and then not send anything else to your list for three months. And then you're going to send two emails. Then you're going to be off for another month. You want to be consistent.
So start off, before you start sending off these emails, what I would do is I would just write 12 emails out. So then that way, if you want to do weekly emails, that's three months of emails by just writing 12 little tips, or we'll get into the different types of emails that you can create, but just creating 12 emails.
[16:05] Sean Garner:
If you send them weekly, three months, that's a whole quarter's worth of content with probably about an hour to maybe an hour and a half of time on your request for your time to, in order to do that, one other thing, and this is kind of a tip for the tips as you're creating the type of email content leverage social media and email to compliment each other.
And this is what I mean: social media and email are great ways to test topics, thoughts, and ideas. If you put out a post on social media for your business, and it got tons of engagements and comments and stuff based upon some type of tip or valuable advice or FAQ that you answered on there, that content right there would be really great to repurpose in an email.
Opposite supply is true. If you have an email that the subject line is way through the roof and it's got tons of clicks and engagement and replies back and everything. That would also be a really good email for you to create social media content. With these emails that you're in the content that you create, you are always trying to think about in the back of your mind, a database of what is getting your customers to engage with, because it's not just about doing the thing.
Using Data to Update Your Email Strategies
[17:13] Sean Garner:
We want to make sure that everything that we are doing leads to a conversion and an impactful sale for our customers. A few things on the data to know is that we want to look at data but also be aware that data, especially now can be skewed. So there's lots of, like I know with Apple, some of their new updates, they automatically open up emails for you so they can scan them for things.
They'll even, now some services I've seen, they'll actually even click links on the backend before you actually do it. So they can test it to make sure that's a legitimate link. So if you're monitoring it on the flip side, if you're looking at it, you might see that you've got all these huge high open rates and click through rates.
It's not necessarily true human clicks. It is bots that are going through the email on the customer's behalf to ensure that the email is actually legit and that there's no like malware or anything like that in it, just some privacy security stuff that they've rolled out. So what I always tell people to do is when you're sending out these emails, and this is just how we view things too, is we always want to look for trends.
How to Leverage Emails with Social Media
[18:14] Sean Garner:
So if you're sending it out to the same list, right, that means the same bots are going to be scanning it for the same customers and everything. So we want to find out and establish what our baseline of data is. And then based upon that, we want to look for spikes or really big lows and drop offs from everything that we're sending.
Don't send out your first email and think that that is the benchmark standard for whatever your stats and stuff are. Wait until you've got, you know, a couple dozen emails in, so you can actually start to look at trends for what's working on your content and data can be skewed. So again, yeah, we always want to look at trends.
On the data though if you are getting, open rate is dictated based upon your subject line like we talked about earlier, nobody's going, if you're not getting emails open, it's because your subject lines aren't any good and click through rate. Error click rate inside of the email is dictated based upon the call to action that can be viewed as a couple of different things that could be, maybe your call to action wasn't clear.
[19:09] Sean Garner:
Maybe it wasn't super obvious, like having a button or the link text that you had in there didn't have a clear call to action, or it wasn't very obvious that you wanted somebody to click on that. So those are the two things to look at with your emails. Is the subject lines for open rates and the call to action for your click through rates.
So those are just some overall helpful tips to think about when you are just creating any type of email content. A few types of examples of types of emails that you can be sending out. Again, our goal would be to work up to where you've got at least. A weekly email going out, the first type would be weekly announcements.
So this could be if your business has something exciting going on, maybe you're an event space or something. You can send out the different events that are going to be happening at your space and something that is going on and you can do weekly announcements. The third one would, or the second one would be something like weekly notifications.
[20:03] Sean Garner:
So maybe, and this is honestly one of the types that we leverage most for our clients and even for our business is the weekly notifications is going to be used to promote some type of a show. So sending out a weekly notification for a video podcast, just like this to let people know what to expect. We always want to create a little intrigue with it to try and get them to click, listen to the episode so we can add value to it in a longer form content like this.
The second or I'm sorry the third type of email that you can create is the easiest for people. It's going to be those weekly tips. So think about like accounting tips you could think of tips to help people save on their taxes, small business growth tips.
With us we send out lots of marketing tips, social media tips. If you're in the health and wellness space, you could do wellness tips, your exercises of the week, your recipe of the week You All of those different things, just creating helpful little tips for your customers.
So again, remember, we're always trying to not sell, but position ourselves as the expert, stay on top of mind and add value to our customers. These again are not weekly sales emails. I get frustrated on business’s behalf whenever I just constantly see week after week, every email is just, this is on sale, buy our stuff, buy our stuff.
[21:17] Sean Garner:
Those are the ones that I end up unsubscribing from. And so are your potential customers. If you are doing that, I started to talk on this and sorry for not finishing it. How often do you send emails? The goal is we would try to shoot for a good standard of a weekly email. You can send more than that, but the frequency of your emails comes down to the amount of the value that you provide.
Again, as you start tracking emails and see things that you like and engage with, you're going to start to see trends as to how often other people are sending emails. There are some emails that I get seven days a week that I will open almost every single one of them because they are full of so much value.
There's other emails that they send weekly. And even then I'm like, man, this one doesn't sound that good. And I won't even open it. So the more consistent that you can be with sending your emails and providing value, one will help you get more opens, but it will also dictate the amount of volume and the frequency that you can send emails.
[22:19] Sean Garner:
Again, the goal is try to get at least a weekly email out there and also make it consistent with how often that you are writing these emails. So a quick recap of everything so far. We know we need to be sending out emails. It's very, very important to stay on top of mine with our clients. We know some best practices and tips for emails.
We know the types of emails that we can send. So the last thing that I want to give you guys is a very simple framework for how you could structure and write all of these emails. Me personally, I love frameworks and templates. So what I have is I have a Google doc with this framework typed out. So then that way I can just have that.
And I just duplicate it for each email that we write. And I just honestly just fill in the blank. This is the framework that I use for writing an email. So the very first thing that I do and I come up with is my subject line. I start with my subject line to create intrigue. I honestly just have a list of just subject lines that I know that I'm eventually going to want to create content and write emails on, and I just come up with really good subject lines.
[23:23] Sean Garner:
Remember the subject line should be nine words or less. It should have an emoji if it makes sense for your business, it should create intrigue and use active words. The next part of the email that I want to write is what we call the hook or the lead. It's the very first one to three sentences on the email.
This going back to the Brand Script and our one liner talk if you remember that, should start with the problem that your customers are dealing with problems are really great to start, to create a story loop for your customers and get them to want to scroll down and read the rest of the email.
So I'll write it in a way that is hopefully intriguing and entices people to want to figure out how to solve that problem, because again, I'm pulling it from my brand script, the list of problems that I know my customers are dealing with.
The next part of the email that's where we kind of go into the meat of it or the value of it. That's where I will give a couple of tips. Maybe it's like, maybe the problem is your website's not converting. And then what I'm going to do in the email is that I'm going to give three tips on what you can do to add to your website, to increase your website conversion.
[24:31] Sean Garner:
So then in that next section, I'm just going to list out and bullet point my three tips. Then after that, I'm going to have a little section to position myself as the guide with empathy and authority. So it could be something as simple as I remember how frustrated I used to be with my business, with my website, whenever I'd spent all this time with the web developer to build it, but it still wasn't converting.
Something like that, just to show relatability to this topic and, or I want to show authority. So I would want to have a one sentence testimonial to again, position myself as the perfect guide. So it might say something like when Jeff added these three things to his website, he was able to increase his conversions by 25%.
That's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to be like this big, huge video or like a picture of their face or anything like that. So really quick line, just to again, show people that you are the right guide for them with empathy and authority. The last, the next section of that is going to be, I'm just going to remind them what I do.
[25:30] Sean Garner:
You know, we own a marketing agency. If you're looking for help to implement tips just like this, click here to schedule your call. It's very, very simple. It's very, very easy. Not salesy at all. And even in every single email that I send, I don't always add that. How I'll also sometimes add it in is just in my email signature.
It'll say, Sean Garner, marketing agency owner, Sean Garner Consulting, and I just put the website address inside of the signature of the email. The last thing that we will always do in every single email that we send out is we will always put some type of a P.S. or something underneath the signature for us.
What I like to use is the one liner statement because that one liner statement speaks to the main problem that we solve. It reiterates our product and reminds our customers how happy their life's going to be after they do that, after they get that problem solved. And there's a link to the website Inside that one liner statement.
[26:21] Sean Garner:
So that's a really great way to end each email. And you can also just build that out into any email template that you're using. So that way, every time you go to send an email, you don't even have to type it in. It's just there every single time. So start off with a really good subject line, then come up with a really good hook or something that entices people to want to read in that hook should have to do with the problem you solve.
Give a couple of helpful tips. Typically I would say three, no more than five, unless like a top 10 list makes sense, but I wouldn't make all the emails that big. That's way too much content. We're going to position ourselves as the expert. We want to sometimes, and more often than not, at least it should be able to be seen in the email, how we help them solve the problem or what service we actually provide.
And then add a P.S. inside of the email. I really like to use your one liner statement for that because it's a great way to remind them of the problem. Tell them the product and they show them the result they get afterwards.
So the main takeaway from this episode that I want you guys to see is that you need to stay on top of mind for your clients.
ACTION STEP OF THE WEEK
[27:21] Sean Garner:
Weekly nurture emails are an amazing way to do it because social media isn't cutting it. Because that is just building your business on rented land. You've done all this work to build this lead list, this customer list. Let's continually add value to them. So whenever they are ready to make a purchase decision, they think of you.
So the action step that I would say from this is start off by doing two things:
One, Subscribing to some newsletters of competition and start just paying attention to things that entice you and save those onto a folder. So you can start looking through ideas.
And number two, create this template framework that we talked about.
[27:59] Sean Garner:
So whenever you do start getting those ideas, you have a simple framework to where you can start filling in the gap and writing simple emails. All these emails should be able to be read. And I would say less than three minutes. So you can quickly scan them and provide lots of value.
Do this in your small business, start creating these nurture email sequences so you can beat your competition and stay on top of your mind for your customers before your competition.
Have an awesome day guys. We'll see you on the next one.
