Episode 1: 7 Complaints about Email Marketing and Why You Should Ignore Them

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I guess this is the first episode of my new podcast?? Help me name it! Then tune in and hear the biggest complaints around email and why I think you should ignore them and do it anyway!

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Here is the link to The Email Sound Booth Facebook group: 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/emailmarketingwithliz

And here is the link to become an affiliate:

https://lizwilcox.thrivecart.com/email-marketing-membership/partner

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Transcript

What’s up? It’s the fresh Princess of email marketing, speaking. Liz Wilcox, and I love electronic mail so freaking much that I decided to start a podcast about it. I’ve been seeing so many, I don’t know, myths and complaints and just hemming and hawing around email marketing lately. And honestly, I am fed up in the best way, because I want to help you get over that hemming and hawing. I want to help you move on from that and get going. So get over the hemming and hawing and get on to email marketing that works.

So welcome to my podcast. I don’t even know what the name of it should be. Maybe we should take a vote. I’ve got a Facebook group called the email sound booth. You can join that Facebook group, and we can vote on a name. Maybe the name is the email sound booth. I don’t know. All I know is I want to help you with your electronic mail marketing. I love email. It changed my life. I want the same for you. So welcome to Episode One.

Speaking of hemming and hawing and complaints and whining, can I say whining? I don’t want to call my listeners whiners, but email feels really hard, and I want to help you get over it. Episode One is the top seven complaints about email marketing that I hear and why you should ignore them and get going with email marketing in the first place.

All right, at number, well, whatever. Let me just get into it. I don’t know. Patricia, can you edit this? Patricia is my admin assistant. I doubt she was going to edit this. This is episode one. It’s supposed to be sloppy. Just like the first email you send, or even the next email you send, is probably going to be a little sloppy.

All right. I’m just going to go with number one. I was thinking about counting down, actually, let me count down.

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All right. Number seven: it takes forever to work. I hear this complaint all the time. “I don’t want to do email marketing. I’ve done it for a long time, and it just takes forever. I can sell in the DMs much faster.” Well, guess what? I know it takes a while, but when somebody joins your email list, they don’t know how long you’ve been email marketing, and so you can just sell immediately. It doesn’t have to take forever to work.

You just need to know how to find the right leads and how to sell to them the right way with the right products. Think about your customer journey, right? If your customer journey is six months long in the DMs or in advertising, then email marketing is probably going to take the same amount of work, right? So it’s not that email marketing takes forever to work. It’s that your customer journey might need some shortening, might need some tweaking to shorten it.

Also, it might take a while for you to learn the ins and outs of email marketing, but you should ignore this complaint and do it anyway, because you own your email marketing list, right? We don’t own social media. We don’t own, you know, TikTok, Instagram. I don’t even own whatever platform I decided to put this podcast on, right? They could shut my podcast down if they wanted to, under their terms and conditions, but with email marketing, we own our email list, right?

These people opted in. They consent to join our email, and now we have their email address. And so no matter how long it takes you to figure out email marketing, it is worth it because you own the list, right? You’re not building on someone’s land, so to speak. Raise your hand if you were alive in 2022 and you remember a billionaire buying a social media platform, right? We all remember that little blue bird formerly known as Twitter, and then keep your hand raised if you were alive in 2023 and you saw that social media platform lose all of its sponsors and advertising dollars and half of its users, right?

So yeah, sure, email might take forever to figure out, but guess what? You own it, and it’s the one thing you can decide, “Oh, today I’m going to use Active Campaign. Tomorrow I’m going to use ConvertKit,” right? So it is worth it because you own that email list.

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All right, coming in at number six: another complaint I hear about email marketing is, “Oh, people unsubscribe, and it is just too much pressure. I get triggered when people unsubscribe. I’m a people pleaser. It’s too hard to see the unsubscribes.” Oh my gosh, the unsubscribes are one of the best parts of email marketing.

Remember, I mentioned in the number seven complaint that email is consent-based. People opt in to hear from you, right? And when things are consent-based, you should be able to, as the user, take away your consent at any time. And so people unsubscribing is just their simple, easy way of taking away their consent, of saying, “You know what, I hopped on board with you, but it looks like I’m not ready for this journey yet,” right?

So imagine your business is a bus, and your email list is that bus, right? And I, you know, maybe you’re a crochet blogger, and I get on your email list, I’m all excited about crocheting, and then a couple of weeks later, I say, “Oh my gosh, actually, my kid’s sick. I became the president of the PTO. I gotta hop off this bus. I need to take away my consent.” That’s nothing against you. It has nothing to do with you not pleasing them, and it has everything to do with them.

So, you know, let them go. Be like Elsa in Frozen: let it go. They weren’t going to buy. So just like *NSYNC: bye, bye, bye, let them leave. This is one of the best parts of email. This is what makes it so effective: only the people that want to hear more, that are, you know, hopped on the bus, they’re strapped in, they’re ready to go, should stay.

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Complaint number five: email service providers cost money, and I don’t have a lot of money to spend, Liz. Oh my goodness, I totally, totally get this. Listen, when I started my business, my then-husband at the time, he was so unsupportive. He didn’t want me spending any money. I had already spent money on WordPress, already spent money on this and that. Y’all, I didn’t even have internet on my phone or a laptop when I started my business.

So I get it when you say, “Hey, I’m on a limited budget.” But here’s the thing: your business has expenses, and that’s what your email service provider is. It’s an expense. There’s a difference between investments versus expenses, right? There’s a difference. Expenses are mandatory purchases. Investments are like the nice-to-have or very-nice-to-have things you have to put into the business, right?

Like, for example, if you joined my email marketing membership, it’s a $9 investment. It’s not a must-have. It’s a very nice-to-have. It’s going to help me. If I invest in this, I’m going to see a return. But your email service provider is an expense because email marketing, especially if you have an online business or you have something like an e-commerce store, is something you must have in order to grow. And you have to have software for it. You cannot do email marketing from your free Gmail or Hotmail account, right? You have to have software. You have to have an email service provider.

So this is an expense. Let yourself spend the money on it.

Now, that’s first. Second, there are so many options for you that are low-cost nowadays. One of my favorites is Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. I’ve been using it since 2018, and nowadays, at the time of this recording, they just launched a 10,000 subscribers for free option. So don’t tell me you don’t have the money for an email service provider. I know that you can find something low-cost or free, maybe a freemium.

And I’ll put my affiliate link in the show notes here. Dot, dot, dot. What I’m trying to say is it’s an expense. Spend it.

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Complaint number four is, “I’m not a writer. Writing an email is really hard. It takes up too much of my precious time. I can’t come up with anything of value in that time.” Listen, I know writing is hard. I know you probably didn’t get into business to write, but here’s the thing: the number one skill you can cultivate in your business is learning how to write for your business, aka copywriting.

Email marketing feels hard because it’s copywriting, and a lot of us didn’t exactly get an A+ in English and go on to be English majors. I totally, totally get that. But if you want your business to succeed, you must master this skill. And besides, business is not supposed to be easy. If it was easy, I’m looking around, y’all, we would have so much more competition. So do the hard thing. I say it with love.

If your email writing feels too hard, if it feels like it takes too much time and too much effort, go easy on yourself. Start simply, right? You’re trying too hard. You’ve got to find value in the little things. You don’t have to write, you know, “Seven complaints about XYZ and why you should ignore them” for your email list. You can go with one complaint and write one email around it. Or there is value—even if we think we have to have value-based emails—there’s value in telling stories to our audience.

There’s value in just showing up every single week and saying again, if you’re a crochet blogger, “Hey, I hope you got your crochet done this week. I hope you found time to finish that blanket you’ve been working on.” There is crazy value in just showing up and supporting your people. You don’t have to write a long story, you don’t have to write a long blog post. There is incredible value in just showing up for your readers.

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Complaint number three: “You know, Liz, I tried email, it just didn’t work.” You tried what with email? What didn’t work, exactly, right? I want you to be specific. If you think, “I tried this, Liz, and it didn’t work,” I want you to join my Facebook group again—Email Sound Booth on Facebook—and tell me what didn’t work. I want to work this out with you.

Have you been consistent? Aka writing every single week, showing up, showing how invested you are in your readers, showing how relatable you are, staying top of mind with those consistent newsletters? Have you been growing your list? An email list grows stagnant so quick, just like water. How do we make water fresh? We get new water flowing into the old body. It’s the same with email.

Are you growing your list, or do you have the same 300 people for the last six years, right? If you’ve launched a product, is it selling somewhere else and it just didn’t sell in email? How are you talking about it somewhere else that you didn’t mention in your emails? Right? How long did you work on this email? Did you try for three, six months, and it didn’t work? But also, at the same time, you weren’t growing your list or actually selling anything when you launched? Did you give up halfway?

If you’re selling your product or service somewhere else, I know email will work. Email has a much higher return on investment than anywhere else on the internet, in person—hands down, email is a best seller. So if you can sell your product, and you are selling and connecting in other places, I know email is for you. So if you’re not selling, if you feel disconnected on other platforms and in other avenues, maybe you don’t have an email problem. Maybe you have a marketing or a sales problem. Maybe you have a connecting problem, okay?

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And the number two complaint I get is, “Well, you know, Liz, I just hate getting emails. I don’t want to send them. Well, I don’t want to clutter up somebody’s inbox. I just, I hate email.” Listen, we already said this: email is consent-based. I love email because I consent to it. If I sign up for your email list, I wanted to hear more from you. We don’t hate email. We hate email that doesn’t, you know, use our consent. We hate spam, right?

We hate people that abuse the inbox. Where, if we consented, like let’s say in the workplace environment, yeah, I expect I consent to get emails from this person once a week. Now they’re emailing me three times a day. That’s what we hate about email. That’s what we hate about email marketing, right?

But these people that you, as you grow your email list, you get a freebie or some sort of lead magnet, they consent to hear from you, right? They said, “Yes, I want to hear more about XYZ. I want to hear from you.” So why aren’t you giving them the thing they asked for? We got into this business not because we’re sleazy, not because we want to make a quick buck, but because we want to help people. Or, you know, if you’ve got a physical product, you want to get that into the hands of people who will love it.

You didn’t get into this because you’re sleazy. So why would you think your emails would be sleazy? And also, side note, asterisk, ding, ding, ding: people can unsubscribe again if they want to get off the bus. They can get off the bus at any time. You’ve got to do you. You have a responsibility to your readers to do the thing you said you would do, which is email them, right? But they have the responsibility of managing their own inbox, and they can unsubscribe at any time.

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And the number one complaint I get about email marketing is, “Liz, no one joins my list. No one buys when I sell anyway.” Which I have this to ask you: what are you doing to get visibility? What are you doing to get people on your list? It’s not enough to just post on social media. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I have a YouTube channel, and every week I invite them to join my list.” Well, what are you doing to get eyeballs on your YouTube channel?

It’s not enough to say, “Well, I’ve got a podcast.” Okay, well, what are you doing to get that podcast in front of people? You know, you can have an invitation to the Last Supper, but if you’re not passing out those flyers, no one is coming to that dinner party, right? So what are you doing to get people on your list in the first place? You’ve got to have a visibility strategy. You’ve got to have a list-building strategy.

For example, I do a lot of podcast interviews. I get on summits. I do in-person speaking. I go to events where I know my customer is going to be, even if I’m not speaking or selling something. I go as an attendee. Yes, all of these things cost time and money, but guess what? That’s business, right? Our business is gonna cost us time and money, and we’ve got to pick those things that are going to give us back time and give us back money. And one of those things is list-building, is growing your list and selling to them.

And I know part of this complaint was, “Nobody buys when I sell something.” Again, I want to ask you, when you sell somewhere else, are people buying? Are people buying in the DMs? Are people buying face-to-face? How can we mimic and emulate what we’re doing in those other sales conversations into our email list? One of those ways is, again, grow your email list. Make sure you’re finding the right person to get on your email list. If no one’s joining your email list, maybe your lead magnet or the way you’re trying to get people on your list is wrong.

And if no one’s buying, then maybe the way you’re getting people on the list is not the right way, because you’re getting the wrong people on there. So again, if no one is buying from that email list, you might just have a lead generation problem, right? You’re not getting the right people on your list. Or maybe you have a sales problem. You’re not talking about your message or, you know, you’re not talking about your product the right way. You might even have a marketing problem—you’re not actually getting in front of people.

“Yeah, I’ve got a podcast, but oh, Liz, you’re right. I don’t share my podcast in places. I’m not getting new listeners.” So maybe it’s a marketing problem and not an email problem.

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All right, that is episode one of the yet-to-be-named podcast. Maybe we name it The Email Sound Booth. Maybe we name it something else. I am the fresh Princess of email marketing, Liz Wilcox, and that was the seven complaints about email marketing and why you should ignore them. I am so excited to go on this email marketing journey with you. I hope this was helpful to give you some ideas on how to grow your list, how to sell to your list, and even how to start email marketing in the first place, if that’s your issue. All right, I’ll see you in episode two.