Latest / Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention / 4 Email Marketing Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Launch

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4 Email Marketing Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Launch · Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention

• 0:00
  Rachel: Email marketing and launching typically go hand in hand, but it's more than just sales emails that you have to plan for.
• 0:06
  Rachel: We have our ramp-up emails, promotional emails, segmentation emails, and then we finally get into the launch sales emails.
• 0:15
  Rachel: And what we typically see over and over is that launches usually don't fall apart at the sales emails.
• 0:21
  Rachel: They fall apart in everything that was supposed to happen before those particular ones which is why the postmortem always ends up pointing you in the wrong direction.
• 0:32
  Rachel: The offer was wrong, the price was wrong, and the copy didn't hit, and it's usually none of those directly.
• 0:38
  Rachel: It's the four decisions that got made weeks earlier, and every one of them looked like the efficient choice at the time.
• 0:45
  Rachel: Reuse the freebie that you have, skip those kind of extra emails plugged in, send to everyone just in case, and cross your fingers that everything goes to plan.
• 0:54
  Rachel: Every one of those decisions cost you more than what it saves.
• 0:58
  Rachel: So today, we're gonna be walking through the four mistakes and what to do instead when it comes to launching in your email marketing.
• 1:05
  Jessica: But before we get into it, welcome back to another episode of Growing a Deeply Rooted Business podcast.
• 1:10
  Jessica: I am Jess, your sustainable systems growth wizard, and I'm here with Rachel, our marketing mastermind.
• 1:17
  Jessica: This is part of a launch series that we're doing, so if you're just tuning in for the first time, make sure that you go back and listen, because they are all building on each other.
• 1:27
  Jessica: Now, before we get into talking about all the mistakes that you might be making with your emails, let's take a deep breath, ground ourselves, because Rachel just listed a lot of freaking emails.
• 1:40
  Jessica: But they all have a very specific purpose.
• 1:42
  Jessica: We're gonna make sure that you know what that purpose is.
• 1:44
  Jessica: So take a deep breath And then exhale.
• 1:51
  Jessica: All right, so Let's get into mistake number one.
• 1:55
  Jessica: This is one of those ones where you think you're saving time and being efficient, which is pointing traffic at whatever kind of random freebie you already have lying around, when actually we should be more strategic with our freebie
• 2:09
  Jessica: if we're gonna spend our time promoting it.
• 2:10
  Jessica: Correct, Rachel?
• 2:11
  Rachel: This is one I see far too often.
• 2:14
  Rachel: Or even just making a freebie that doesn't really have much to do with your launch.
• 2:19
  Rachel: We really wanna make sure that the damage that's done isn't monumental to your audience and to your target audience, 'cause this is really what's building the momentum for your launch.
• 2:30
  Rachel: So if you're reusing a freebie, the reason why this stuff doesn't necessarily work is because if it is not structured to talk to your specific ideal client or this particular pain point that your offer is serving from the
• 2:45
  Rachel: launch, then it's just gonna inflate your numbers and I honestly think it gives false confidence, going into a launch when as soon as you hit open cart and nobody opens and nobody clicks because they weren't necessarily the primed
• 2:59
  Rachel: audience for it.
• 3:00
  Rachel: It's just like god, dagger to the heart.
• 3:02
  Rachel: So when you wanna make sure that you're building a new lead magnet, it's gonna be aligned, right?
• 3:08
  Rachel: You've heard us talk about our Aligned Leads formula constantly.
• 3:12
  Rachel: You have to look at the pain point, the target audience.
• 3:15
  Rachel: You have to make sure it filters your exact audience that you want to be primed for this launch.
• 3:21
  Rachel: And then just a random one together, Oh my gosh, I've been in lead magnet heaven right now.
• 3:26
  Rachel: I'll say heaven 'cause I love it.
• 3:27
  Rachel: Where I'm combing through and auditing these old ones that people were using for their launches, and the little light bulbs of ah, yeah, No wonder your first launch didn't work because this was not even targeted or speaking to
• 3:39
  Rachel: the right people.
• 3:40
  Jessica: I actually hate the word freebie, and I hate that it's used in this context, and what it actually is, is a lead magnet.
• 3:49
  Jessica: And I think when you use that word, it makes it so much clearer in what that thing is supposed to do.
• 3:56
  Jessica: Where a freebie could just be something random for free that you give away that may be useful but has no job in your business.
• 4:04
  Jessica: We always talk about giving your content a job, and a lead magnet is just another piece of content that needs to have a job in your business.
• 4:12
  Jessica: And your job is to lead, magnetize, and then lead people to your offer.
• 4:19
  Jessica: So that means you need to be starting backwards from your offer and figuring out what needs to happen in that leading section, and then what can you put out there that would magnetize the right people for that specific
• 4:32
  Jessica: offer to it
• 4:34
  Rachel: Yeah, and I think you can go the entire opposite side of this where you're building multiple lead magnets for a launch.
• 4:41
  Rachel: Don't do that.
• 4:42
  Rachel: You wanna make sure that when you are doing this, you can answer two questions: who are you trying to attract with this, and what is it that you want them to believe once they've your welcome sequence, your PDF,
• 4:55
  Rachel: your guide, whatever the case may be.
• 4:57
  Rachel: Because if your lead magnet doesn't, not answer those two specific questions or if you can't answer those two specific questions, you probably should go back to the ideation phase and really try to rework it so that you're building
• 5:10
  Rachel: backwards from the launch versus just trying to get something out.
• 5:15
  Jessica: Moving on to mistake number two is I think maybe planning just to send sales emails or putting overemphasis on your sales emails and leaving a bunch of holes leading up to your cart open event
• 5:31
  Rachel: Yeah I think the thing that so many people forget is that ramp-up stage.
• 5:34
  Rachel: It's really trying to get the little antennas of interest going for the people who have a particular problem.
• 5:43
  Rachel: I hope everybody hears this, everybody is not paying attention at the same time.
• 5:48
  Rachel: So that ramp-up stage of really trying to pique people's interest isn't just one email, and it's not just two emails.
• 5:55
  Rachel: It's a consistent effort, like we talked about in the timeline episode before this, to make sure that you're shaking loose the people who weren't necessarily paying attention but have this problem, and to start capturing their attention more intentionally.
• 6:11
  Rachel: typically, what happens is when you operate without this ramp-up stage, when somebody's coming and reading "Cart's open.
• 6:18
  Rachel: Enroll now."
• 6:19
  Rachel: They're thinking, "Wait, what?"
• 6:21
  Rachel: And they're trying to educate themselves from problem-aware to solution-aware those sales emails.
• 6:27
  Rachel: When those sales emails should be ready to navigate the solution-aware persons', objections.
• 6:34
  Rachel: They should be the ones saying and validating that this is the right decision.
• 6:38
  Rachel: It should not be educating that person's pain point, 'cause that's all before that open cart happens.
• 6:45
  Rachel: So when you're jumping straight to sales emails, you have a whole gap in the awareness cycle that you really should be speaking to, whether that's a live workshop, a live class, a challenge, something like that, that kind of
• 6:58
  Rachel: gets them up to speed a lot faster.
• 7:00
  Jessica: Yeah.
• 7:01
  Jessica: And I think another critical mistake people make, especially when they're doing live event launches, is forgetting about the emails that come between registration of event and the actual live event.
• 7:12
  Jessica: What I'll see a lot of people do is just do straight, like, "Confirmed, see you there.
• 7:17
  Jessica: Reminder, happening in a week.
• 7:18
  Jessica: Reminder, happening in two days.
• 7:20
  Jessica: Reminder, we're starting now."
• 7:22
  Jessica: But those emails aren't doing anything other than reminding, and I think that's a miss because you've got these people's attention, they're registered for your event.
• 7:30
  Jessica: Now, what do you need to do between this time and your live event where you know you're gonna pitch their offer to keep moving them up that ladder so that when you pitch your offer, they know, "Oh, this
• 7:41
  Jessica: is me.
• 7:41
  Jessica: I'm ready."
• 7:42
  Jessica: And the only thing you may have to be doing in your sales is just overcoming any other objections.
• 7:47
  Jessica: But you should be using those reminders to prime, nurture, and then make sure that they show up to your live event as well.
• 7:53
  Rachel: Yeah, and if that person signs up the day you start promo-ing, and then doesn't hear from you until two days before with reminders, you've lost a lot of that momentum.
• 8:04
  Rachel: Sure, they're still probably paying attention on social, but you really do want to just think of all of the elements of getting sticky.
• 8:11
  Rachel: And I do say this in the sense that I know, I'm very aware.
• 8:15
  Rachel: I had somebody tell me straight to my face, they said, "Nobody gets excited when they get an email," or, "Nobody feels special when they get an email," because we were planning a segmented section.
• 8:26
  Rachel: I said, "Ouch, Yes, they do when you do it right."
• 8:29
  Rachel: So you wanna hold that thing at the top of your head being like, How do I make these people who have taken a specific action with me feel a little bit more special or feel a little bit more
• 8:40
  Rachel: educated or still involved after they've done what I've asked them to do?"
• 8:44
  Rachel: And so I think that's the mentality you wanna go into, which is why in the two episodes back when we were talking about the ops and the planning aspect of it, these are the conversations you should be having
• 8:56
  Rachel: then.
• 8:57
  Rachel: You don't wanna be having, I wrote my promo email, I'm gonna hit send," and then thinking about, "Oh, what are the other emails I need to do?"
• 9:03
  Rachel: Because then you are gonna overwhelm yourself thinking or you will say, "I'm gonna not do that because that's gonna take away too much time."
• 9:09
  Rachel: So when you give yourself that proper planning window to map out all of the touch points, you are gonna have a much more successful launch because it's that much more intentional And less stressful.
• 9:21
  Jessica: Especially if you're running cold ad traffic, what do we say?
• 9:24
  Jessica: The 18 to 24 touch points.
• 9:26
  Jessica: If you're not really emailing them or using those touch points in between registration and live event properly, that is a big opportunity for you to get lots and lots of touch points in.
• 9:36
  Jessica: I've seen people do pre workshop sessions to help shift some of those beliefs or get them a little further along, or sending resources beforehand, or journaling, or reflection prompts, or sending them to different podcasts or blogs that you've
• 9:51
  Jessica: written that may be adjacent.
• 9:52
  Jessica: All of that is opportunity to get in front of them again and just continue to build your expertise, continue to build their problem awareness so that once you're ready to pitch their offer, they are more than ready and
• 10:05
  Jessica: willing to listen.
• 10:06
  Rachel: Which brings us to mistake number three, which is something, oh my gosh, I wish every single time I've had pushback on this one mistake is I would be a millionaire and I could retire by now, which is wanting
• 10:19
  Rachel: to email everyone because you're just scared.
• 10:22
  Rachel: You're having FOMO that you're gonna miss a sale if you exclude anybody.
• 10:27
  Rachel: And while segmentation isn't just exclusion, it is also just bucketing differently.
• 10:33
  Rachel: I think this is the one where there's so much emotion attached to it because you're sitting there and you're trying to be like, "It's a numbers game, right?
• 10:41
  Rachel: I need to hit this many people."
• 10:42
  Rachel: And when I'm over here telling you, "We should not send to these people.
• 10:46
  Rachel: We should actually do this over here.
• 10:49
  Rachel: Red flag, red flag, red flag."
• 10:51
  Rachel: We wanna ease that because we wanna make sure that you're taking into consideration some of the things that you can be little bit more intentional about, right?
• 10:59
  Rachel: Like excluding past customers, people that have already taken this action that don't need to see you discounting it or promo-ing it when they've already taken that action.
• 11:11
  Rachel: Not only is that gonna affect your click rate, but you're probably gonna annoy them.
• 11:15
  Rachel: And you want them to stick around and be engaged.
• 11:17
  Rachel: I have a client right now who has a membership, so past clients or past people from this membership get targeted significantly different than the people who have never been members.
• 11:29
  Rachel: You wanna engage or segment out people where you talk to them very different and say, "Hey, come back and do this and take this action," versus "First time here?
• 11:40
  Rachel: Cool.
• 11:40
  Rachel: Let's hang out," blah, blah, blah.
• 11:42
  Rachel: Two very different messages, but it's still really important to just think about the conversation that you would have.
• 11:47
  Rachel: And I honestly think it's a lo t smarter when...
• 11:50
  Rachel: you wouldn't just walk into a room and have the exact same conversation with everybody.
• 11:54
  Rachel: You would want to customize it in the tools that you have available.
• 11:58
  Jessica: Yeah.
• 11:59
  Jessica: My launch client, who I reference all the time, we're actually in the midst of planning.
• 12:04
  Jessica: Their second launch of the year, we don't know if it's gonna be another three million, but it's gonna be some of it.
• 12:08
  Jessica: We'll see how it goes.
• 12:09
  Jessica: But basically, since our past launch, one of the opportunities we recognized was, this client had previously just done a lot of cold ads.
• 12:16
  Jessica: His strategy was cold ads right before the launch for two weeks, spend 250K, get people to a five-day master class day and night, and then to a two-day boot camp and convert, which is great if you have nerves
• 12:29
  Jessica: of freaking steel because that's a lot of money going out that you're depending on to convert.
• 12:35
  Jessica: So one of the things we did after last launch was to start not just waiting till right before the launch to build the list and build the ad.
• 12:42
  Jessica: We've been doing some prayer calls, weekly master classes now we've got this list that's here from the past launch.
• 12:50
  Jessica: We've got these people that have been coming in through prayer calls who are really at the top of that awareness funnel as far as the offer we're trying to sell, and then we have a master class that's very
• 12:59
  Jessica: much more targeted to almost being, solution aware, program aware to them.
• 13:05
  Jessica: So we've got all these people that we've been running ads to in different ways, and if we sent one email and to talk to all of them at the same time, it wouldn't hit at all.
• 13:15
  Jessica: But because we know and because we have them segmented of where they came in or what they've been attending, we can actually sit there and write different emails based on where we know they are and where we need
• 13:26
  Jessica: to get them to in order to be able to convert at that time.
• 13:29
  Jessica: So I hope that makes sense of just seeing it tactical in action.
• 13:33
  Jessica: And then another way that we do is once we get them to register for this boot camp, we have them take a little survey that will also help us bucket them into what particular season of life they're in,
• 13:43
  Jessica: so then when our sales emails start to fire, we can segment them that way and be very much more specific when we're talking about pain points and desires based on what we know and they've told us in their
• 13:52
  Jessica: survey.
• 13:53
  Jessica: So It ends up being a whole crap ton of emails, which is why we have to have a whole person dedicated just to writing these emails for us, but they end up converting better because they're doing a more
• 14:03
  Jessica: specific job, and we're not trying to talk to everyone the same exact way.
• 14:07
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 14:07
  Rachel: And even if one, I'm sure everybody listening to this is like, "Uh, y'all are delusional.
• 14:11
  Rachel: We're not writing a bazillion different emails."
• 14:14
  Rachel: Just the tech side of it too.
• 14:16
  Rachel: If you decide you don't want to go the segmentation route, at least plan the tech side so you're tagging behaviors so that when you're at the end of the launch doing a postmortem and you're like, "Why didn't this
• 14:28
  Rachel: work?"
• 14:29
  Rachel: Or, "Why was this portion of the launch so much more successful than this portion?"
• 14:34
  Rachel: You can at least have some underlying data, like people that registered.
• 14:37
  Rachel: We recently did this where in one of my past clients, we had a master class back in May, and then we did our open cart and everything, and the people that came through that actually converted did not register
• 14:51
  Rachel: for the actual master class.
• 14:53
  Rachel: So we had to be like, "Why was that?"
• 14:55
  Rachel: But luckily, we had things tagged at the Google Analytics level.
• 14:59
  Rachel: We had things tagged flowing into the email platform based off of behaviors, web page visits, and all of that, where we could say, yes, that's so much more interesting.
• 15:10
  Rachel: This is the direction of that."
• 15:12
  Rachel: So you just think about okay, maybe this is your first launch and you don't actually know any of this stuff, where can you put the pieces together to give you more data on the back end so that segmentation
• 15:23
  Rachel: is a lot more intuitive in your second round launch or whatever the case may be?
• 15:28
  Jessica: All right, so moving on to our last mistake was only giving people two options.
• 15:33
  Jessica: Endure these 80 email blasts I'm about to give to you, or get off the list, when actually there's a third option, and I think what we would argue a more ethical option to give people, which is to have
• 15:45
  Jessica: them opt out if they are not interested in this particular offer that you're offering at this time
• 15:51
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 15:51
  Rachel: I typically just call them mute buttons, right?
• 15:53
  Rachel: Mute these promos.
• 15:55
  Rachel: We see a lot of success with this for some of my, clients in the health and wellness space where things around pregnancy can be very triggering.
• 16:02
  Rachel: Things around motherhood or Mother's Day can be super triggering.
• 16:06
  Rachel: And so we give them the option to say, "Hey, just mute me for this, but keep me on your newsletters, keep me on your content.
• 16:13
  Rachel: I wanna see the rest of it, and then bring me back in once this chaos is done."
• 16:18
  Rachel: And we noticed that in launches before we had this option to mute, We were losing, 600, 700 people in email on an 80,000-person list compared to when we put it in mute, we were losing some, but it was
• 16:33
  Rachel: significantly less.
• 16:34
  Rachel: It was less than 100, you know, in that number.
• 16:36
  Rachel: So the saving of 600 people on your list, not only did you just honor their consent and say, "Hey, I'll meet you where you're at.
• 16:43
  Rachel: Don't worry.
• 16:44
  Rachel: You don't need to be a part of this right now," compared to losing them as a subscriber forever.
• 16:49
  Rachel: I think that just honoring the buyer choice and the buyer behavior is really powerful because sometimes we get emails back and we're like, "Thank you for doing this.
• 16:57
  Rachel: I just lost my mom, and I can't even think about opening Mother's Day emails."
• 17:01
  Rachel: And you're like, "Whoa, there's a human on the other side of this email that I just sent," and it just impacted them in a way that we didn't expect to.
• 17:11
  Rachel: And I think that's the more ethical part that we want to participate in, and not have to kinda just blast people a bazillion emails that they don't want and lose them as a person that we're building a relationship
• 17:23
  Rachel: with.
• 17:23
  Jessica: and it protects your sender reputation score, which you've heard my horror story about us getting banned from an email platform because we got too many complaints.
• 17:24
  Jessica: 'Cause if you're not gonna give them the option to unsubscribe, they may unsubscribe, or even worse, mark you as spam and complain as well, which hurts your sender reputation score, which may cause you to not show up in
• 17:41
  Jessica: the right inbox, or may get you banned, because that has happened to us.
• 17:45
  Jessica: We were sending a lot of emails.
• 17:46
  Jessica: So make sure that there's an option for them to opt out.
• 17:49
  Jessica: If they don't wanna read your sales emails, then they're gonna press that button.
• 17:52
  Jessica: There's probably 100% chance they weren't gonna buy anyways, so you're not losing anything other than not making someone sad or mad or all that other stuff.
• 18:00
  Jessica: All right, so let's recap our four mistakes that we do not want you to make, and then what to do instead.
• 18:06
  Jessica: So number one, make sure that your lead magnet is not a freebie.
• 18:11
  Jessica: It is very strategic, and it has the goal of attracting the people that would be right for that offer, and then leading them to that offer.
• 18:20
  Jessica: Don't just use one that you have lying around just because you have it.
• 18:23
  Jessica: Make sure that it is solving the problem right before or a little bit before your offer solves.
• 18:31
  Jessica: Number two, you wanna make sure that you are putting just as much energy, time, effort on the emails that go out before the sales emails versus just your sales emails.
• 18:41
  Jessica: The sales emails can be pretty straightforward.
• 18:43
  Jessica: They're probably just gonna say a lot of what the sales page already says, just written in an email format.
• 18:49
  Jessica: But the emails that do the hard work are those before that, that are speaking to pain points, desires, doing the education and all of that.
• 18:57
  Jessica: That is necessary to get that person ready for your offer.
• 19:00
  Jessica: Number three, make sure that you are segmenting your offer so that you can offer personalization and that you're speaking to the person, where they're at.
• 19:09
  Jessica: You're meeting them where they're at.
• 19:11
  Jessica: And number four, be nice.
• 19:13
  Jessica: Give people a reason to opt out of your sales sequence.
• 19:16
  Jessica: Not only is it a more ethical way to market because you're giving consent, it also will help you to protect your email reputation score.
• 19:24
  Jessica: Make sure that you're landing in the right inbox and all of that sort of jazz.
• 19:27
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 19:28
  Rachel: So if any of this hit home, we want you to share it with your biz bestie who's got a launch on the calendar but hasn't quite planned the email portion yet.
• 19:37
  Rachel: And we want to know when you're launching, if you're launching, and if you have revised your lead magnet, and when was the last time you did it?
• 19:45
  Rachel: No judgment whatsoever.
• 19:47
  Rachel: this is again, the middle of our launch series, so if you're new here, go back and start at the beginning.
• 19:51
  Rachel: Hit like, subscribe, review on whatever platform you're listening to.
• 19:55
  Rachel: And until next week, we're
• 19:58
  Jessica: rooting for you.