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Big Email Lists Aren't Always Ideal · Master The Inbox

• 0:00
  Are you familiar with the saying, it's not the size of the boat, it's the motion of the ocean? Well, it's similar with email marketing. And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk a little about why having a big email list isn't always the best thing.
• 0:23
  You welcome. Come to master the inbox, the podcast where creators, coaches and consultants come to learn how to sell with email marketing in a non spammy, non aggressive way. Hi, I'm your host, Monica Badu. And today I'm tackling one of the biggest things in email marketing. So everybody is so focused on volume and numbers in this domain that we often tend to miss out on the benefits of working with a smaller list. And that's what we're going to go through.
• 0:57
  First of all, let's start with this question. How big should my email list be before I can start sending sales emails? Don't wait. There isn't like a specific answer. A lot of people, they're going to tell you that if you have a big email list, you're going to have better chances of getting the sale. And yes, that makes sense if we only talk about email marketing only from the perspective of volume. And I think this is one of the areas where a lot of people just miss out on a major opportunity because they focus on, okay, let's build a big email list. And once I have twenty k, fifty k, I'll start sending more emails. I'll start selling with email. And I think that's a mistake. First of all, if your focus is to get your email list to a specific milestone, at least make sure that you have developed the systems that keep your audience nurtured and engaged until you hit that milestone. Because if you only focus on the first week, which is the onboarding, hey, you got a free pdf. Hey, get this.
• 2:11
  And maybe an automation, which would be a welcome sequence.
• 2:15
  That's a good start. But what happens after that? How often will they get emails? What kind of emails?
• 2:22
  Because that also matters. Is it just like a weekly newsletter? Is it an email every two weeks, four weeks? Think about what you're actually doing. In many situations, not emailing with the regularity is actually damaging the potential future of building that huge list. Because when you get to who is engaged, you might discover that you don't actually have a list. Your email list is actually smaller. So keep that in mind. And as you build your email list, implement these good practices. And I talked about some of these in the previous episode. You'll find it in the show notes. Think about what you're actually doing with your email list every month, regardless of whether you're selling to this email list or not. Put segmentation in place. Use tags, use surveys, collect information from your audience. And when I say that, I'm not talking about their birthdays, I'm talking about who they are, what are their roles in life, what do they want, what are their goals? Why did they decide to join your email list and what are their expectations from you? This helps you to create very unique segments that you can use when you are ready to start selling more through email or creating more personalized content.
• 3:54
  And yes, personalization isn't all about the first name tag. The other aspect of working with smaller email list is the cost implication. The bigger your email list, the more costly it's going to be. And there are, well, I think the majority of email marketing platforms out there, they do charge by contact.
• 4:20
  So if you have 50k people on your email list, but only five k are actually opening your emails and interacting with your content, then you're basically paying a lot of money to hold forty five k of people who are not engaging. They're not there, they don't exist. They only exist when you have to pay the bill, but they're not doing anything else for your brand or with your brand in the meantime. Now this is a simplification. And of course I'm not saying just drop the dead weight now, but I am saying you should be cleaning up your email list and figuring out ways to keep your audience engaged. Because if you're paying just for the idea of having a big email list, you need to really be aware of all the implications that come with this. And I can give you an example. One of the creators I have worked with, they had the seven figure email list, which is, for any email marketer, both wow, the holy grail. And at the same time a major trigger of anxiety because you don't really know how many of those people are actually there for a copywriter. It's even worse because I can write the best sales emails possible. They can be relevant, they can be contextual, driven, they can be focused on all the exact elements that your audience wants, but then they're not going to sell. So if I'm sending these emails to an email list of 1 million, and the benchmarks say that based on this volume, we can expect this amount of open rate and this kind of a click through rate, and then we also use another benchmark that tells us how many people go from the email list, the sales page, and then actually buy something. So if you're operating your campaigns from this assumption that 1 million people are engaged or that they're active subscribers, and then you do all that work and the results come back and you're looking at the emails and it's like, how is this possible? That's when you actually discover how many people are actually engaged. I know it sounds, but why wouldn't you do that from the beginning? Because a lot of brands, they don't know that they should be doing this. They don't know that they should be cleaning up their email list twice a year and at least one month or two months before a big promotion, they should go through a reengagement and cleanup process because of this specific element. And stuff happens for your audience. I mean, you're not the only person they follow. Maybe they've already completed their quest and their problem is solved now. So they're not actually looking for another solution to their problem. Maybe, I don't know.
• 7:25
  They're in a different moment in their life and they just really don't have time for your stuff right now. So you need to figure out these things before you start blasting sales emails. Because even if they are super value based, you could end up thinking that paying a copywriter to do that for you or investing the amount of time that took you to write those emails wasn't worth it. And you'd be completely right. And that's because you should have done something else. And that something else is reengagement and cleanup. And those actions would have been more profitable for you than sending a sell sequence. And for this creator with like 1 million people on their email list, that's exactly what happened. And it was very disappointing. It was frustrating, it was annoying, but it was a lesson. And that ended up becoming the baseline for starting a reengagement campaign, which did reengage a lot of people. But that opened another problem, which is you might have a good email list where people are engaged and they are opening your emails, but they are not your ideal buyers and they're not buying your product. And this can happen as well. And the bigger is your email list, the bigger is the chance of this occurring. So I'm going to give you an example. When you are a big company and you work with agencies to help you with lead generation through ads, you could discover that some of those leads are actually based in countries speaking a language that you can't really help them with. You might have the unfortunate surprise to discover that the audience you have in that big list is not who you thought they were.
• 9:22
  Maybe the targeting was off. Maybe the goal was to get the lowest speed on a conversion possible. So cheap leads or volume to inflate your email list so that everybody can be happy about working with a huge email list and it's not really helpful. If that email list is big and you can't convert it, that's a major problem. And imagine the amount of money, imagine the bill that kind of an email list would get you at the end of the month and it's several thousands of dollars and not being able to monetize it. Because after a specific threshold, you having an email list and trying to monetize it means that at least you are in the green when at the end of the month you are.
• 10:21
  Okay, I'm hosting a million people and I'm emailing to a smaller audience because they're not going to be all engaged. But when I compare the cost of administering of managing that big list with what I was able to do in terms of monetization, the cost doesn't surpass the revenue. If that happens, then you really need to look at your email list. If it's passive, if it's not there anymore, it doesn't serve you to have a big list if you can't monetize it. And I can understand how this sounds like it's coming from a business analyst, but that's the idea. I mean, we also need to be pragmatic because the cost of having a big list, that doesn't help you. That should be a red flag for you. So here's your action item right now. Go into your email platform. How many people you actually have are opening your emails? 30 in the last 30 days or 60 days. And then if that percentage of unengaged is high, clean up or reengage first if you want, and then go back and look at. Okay, so how am I monetizing this list? If you're sitting on a big list and you're not doing anything with it, you're not selling anything, you're simply holding on to an asset that doesn't help your business at the moment. I know, it sounds amazing. I mean, it's really great to have a big email list just like you would have a big social media following. But if you're not using it, it's easier to just go with a smaller one because that becomes a lot easier to manage. It's more cost effective, it's less time consuming when it comes to segmentation, to operating with ads, sending personalized content and creating different automations to keep your subscribers engaged and nurtured and in the loop. Now, the other element of this is obviously deliverability. If you're working with a big email list, it's going to be harder to keep everyone engaged rather than when you're working with a smaller list.
• 12:46
  Personally, I love working with smaller lists. Sure, they're not as exciting in terms of revenue after a potential promotion, but if you have a small list, you have an opportunity to build the community and you have an opportunity to actually engage into one one conversations.
• 13:08
  I strongly believe that you can get results with smaller lists.
• 13:12
  I've seen it while I was coaching creators and even if they had 5000 people on their email list, or 10,000 or 20,000, they were still able to get results with their email marketing promotions. The idea is that even if your email list is small, you still need to perform reengagement and clean up every now and again.
• 13:34
  How you start building that email list is how you're going to be managing it in the future. So start implementing the good practices from the beginning and don't be afraid to send a sales pitch every now and again. Even if your list is small one, it tells people that you have something to sell, which could be a surprise for them because if you don't tell them, don't think that they're going to know just because they're on your email list. And the other one is even if it's a small list and you make a sell, don't assume that they're not going to buy because you have a small list. If you do the job from the beginning and you make sure that on your email list you have your ideal audience, people who are your ideal buyer.
• 14:30
  Then even if you have a list that's 1000 people and then one person buys, that's still a win in my book. Thank you for listening to master the inbox. Please help share the word and subscribe or follow and leave a comment or read this podcast on your favorite platforms. More people need to know that email marketing can be fun and can be done from a place of love rather than fear. And until next time, see curious.