Hey sound boothers! 🎙️ Welcome to Episode 111 of The Email Sound Booth, where Liz Wilcox chats about her first digital event since 2020. Spoiler alert: this episode is beyond engaging (prepare for all the feels and laughs).
Episode Highlights:
- Stirrings in the Summit World: Liz spills the beans about hosting her virtual event at the beginning of March 2025 after a hiatus since the pandemic. Her sleepiness can’t stop the gold that flows from this convo. 😴✨
- Survivor Stories: Liz loves taking trips down memory lane with a fun side story about her time on Survivor. Hint: it involves professional singers and making unexpected connections. 🎶
- Virtual Summit Wins:
- Audio only – Liz did audio-only content because she’s all about simplifying and conserving energy.
- New leads – Liz was feeling those vibes with new subscribers and lots of interaction! 📈
- Established authority – The summit helped Liz feel re-validated in the email marketing space.
- Engagement – Tons of fun chats and interactions in the Facebook community she loves. 💬
- Changes for Next Time:
- Promotion requests – Liz’s current dilemma: Should event speakers be required to promote?
- Hello Audio hiccups – Some tech challenges gave participants a few unwanted surprises, prompting a possible switch-up.
- Sneak Peek: Another summit announcement! Mark your Calendars for August 2025. The theme: The Sales Email Summit.
Catch ya next episode, fellow email enthusiasts! 🚀💌
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Transcript
What’s up? Liz Wilcox here, the fresh princess of email marketing. You are listening to episode 111, what I loved about my virtual summit and what I would change now. Please forgive me. I’m kind of in this weird funk this morning. My brain is. I don’t want to say my brain is foggy, but it is tired. I am tired. Are you tired? If you are, thanks for listening. Anyway, I’m gonna keep this light and bright. You know, we’ll learn something, but it won’t be like a class, right? We’re just having a combo. So if you don’t know. The beginning of March 2025, I hosted my first digital event since 2020. So since the Pandemic, I don’t know why I said it like that. Maybe I just needed to make myself laugh so I could wake up. The pandemic. Say it with me. Are you walking? Are you doing the dishes? Say it out loud because it might make you laugh. The pandemic.
Oh, my gosh. Side note, before we get into the virtual summit, when I was on Survivor, I was with these two people that loved to sing, and they were, like, professionally trained, right? Tevin and Soda, for those that have watched. And they would say. I mean, they would sang. Okay. And I got real nervous about it. I was like, they’re making this connection because they are singers, and how can I get in on. How can I get in on this without it being obvious that I’m, like, the annoying little sister that won’t let them play alone? And so I. I cannot sing, but I can go low, right? Like, it’s. Honestly, I have a really, like, high nasal voice, so it kind of surprises people, right? The Pandemic.
And so they made up this song about, like, morning time in Fiji. And honestly, you can watch it. I think it’s like, episode three or something. They’re singing it, and then Tevin says, come in with that bass, Liz, and they cut it. Like, they literally put a bass over my voice. But I’m going Fiji. Fiji. Oh.
Anyway, side note, that’s a bonus for listening to the email sound booth podcast. You get weird random stories about Liz’s life. So that. That concludes my Survivor story. Is that the first Survivor story I’ve told in 111 episodes? Oh, it’s like a hidden gem. All right, so let’s talk about what I loved about hosting a virtual summit and what I would change.
So I’ve just got a few notes here, and again, we’re gonna keep it light and bright. Okay. This is for all my nosy peeps who just want to know everything about the biz. I don’t normally say that. That’s so annoying. When people are like, my biz, it’s like, business. Is that really that long of a word, y’all? I am on one today. There goes that singing again. Maybe I got it from Tevin. Anyway, I loved that. I did like the Mini Micro Audio Summit. I think there’s a lady named Wendy Breakstone. I believe she kind of teaches this method. I’ve been noticing it for a couple years now in the online space, and I knew if I was going to host a virtual summit, I knew it was going to be audio only, number one, y’all, I love myself. I just mentioned I’m tired, right? Like, I don’t want to do that much work.
I used to host a very large digital summit in the RV space, and it was all video. And I would go. I would go live all the time. It was just a lot. And right now, that’s not where my capacity. My capacity is much more full. So I couldn’t do that. So I loved that. I decided audio only. I loved that I decided, like, hey, we’re just gonna get on Voxer. And you know, I. I text every single person or on voxer, right? I text them on voxer, all the speakers. And I was like, hey, you know, here’s how to start. Maybe make an outline so you don’t, you know, ramble and have to re record. You don’t have to send me the outline. Just introduce yourself and what you do and, you know, start with a cool way. I grew. My list was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It worked so well.
There were a few people. I won’t name names, but if you are an annual passholder, you can go back and listen to list building live and you’ll hear, like, who has better sound? But there were some people that refused to record on voxer, not in a negative way. They were just like, girl, this audio is terrible. Terrible. I’m going to record and just send it to you. And that was great. That was fine. And I just. I just love the audio only part of it.
I also love. So that’s number one. Audio only was definitely the way to go. I loved lots of new leads at once. Just full transparency. I feel like my list has been stagnant for about 12, 13 months. But again, like, I was on Survivor, right? Like it. When I say that, it sounds so pretentious. And I don’t mean it that way. I just mean, you Know, that was like a real wild thing that took a lot of my attention away from The biz.
Away from the business. Right. So that’s like a valid excuse to me. And so I wasn’t really focused that much on growing my email list. I was just focused on maintaining. That was actually my word of the year in 2024 was maintain. So. And I did. The list literally is about the exact same size as it was a year ago before the event. And that felt fine. So it was awesome to get a lot of leads at once.
I, we had, I told everyone on my email list. This was another thing. I loved everyone on my email list. I said, you don’t have to sign up for this. You’re already on the list. I’m going to send you the content. And y’all, this, this virtual summit was only three days long. I don’t feel bad about sending three emails over three days about content that I literally created for my email list. Right. Like you need it if you’re on my email list. You want to know more about email marketing? One of your biggest problems is list building. I created this for you. I’m, I’m not gonna. And if you’re not watching YouTube, you can’t see my face, but I’m like, I’m not gonna not send you that. This is what you need and I’m gonna give you what you need because that’s what a true leader does. All right.
Anyway, I loved lots of leads at once. It made me feel good. It made me feel validated. Oh yeah. So we had, we had, oh over 1100 people sign up over like a two week period. And of course, you know, it was like four or 500 people. The first, you know, 10 days and then the last four days of signing up it, you know, it doubled, tripled, whatever. I also loved the super fun engagement. I am the type of person that loves interacting with their audience. I love being in the inbox. I love chit chatting in the Facebook group. If you haven’t noticed over on watchlist.com that’s my YouTube. YouTube channel. I’m doing lives all the time. Like I love it.
So, so awesome to have that super fun engagement to get to know people in the live co working and in the Facebook group and to see them actually, you know, watching and listening and you know, talking in the Facebook group about their favorite stuff. That was so, so cool. That was another thing. I didn’t start a brand new Facebook group for the event. I already have a very established Facebook group called the Email Sound booth. That’s. It’s literally this podcast is named after the Facebook group and it already has, you know, over 6, 000 people now. Over 7, 000.
And so I loved that the Facebook group was on and popping and I loved that that was able to show new people, like, oh, wow, Liz actually has an engaged community. The people are awesome in here. So I loved that.
I also loved that. I feel like it re established some authority in my space, right? So like I said, I last year was all about maintaining, right? I didn’t really do any giant things. In fact, I mean, I barely even launched my annual pass last year. I only did it one time at the end of the year. And so I felt like this was me getting back into the swing of things, right? So that was super awesome. And I feel like it’s also gotten some attention. Like a lady that was that I asked to be part of my summit. April Franks, she was like, oh yeah, I would love to. And she was like, oh yeah, by the way, why don’t you come speak at my conference?
So I feel like it got me a, you know, again, re establish that authority and got me that speaking gig. So I’m gonna actually put that in the show notes. It’s called Epicon, and I think it’s like meetmepic.com but I’ll put it in the show notes. I’m speaking May 23rd or something like that.
Anyway, I also, I love that I got to know people quickly, right? I talked about that super fun engagement. So I got to know all those new subscribers really quickly and then was able to look at the metrics of the event and see what people were really interested in, right? I could see that. You know, the talk that Chad Allen gave on freebie swaps was super, super popular, right? So maybe that’s something that I write a series of emails on. Maybe that’s something that, you know, I could create a mini course on and add as a bonus for my annual pass holders. Or, you know, it’s like a twenty, thirty dollar thing that I could teach freebie swaps. Or maybe it’s something, you know, start a collaboration post on Facebook, right? I’m able to look at those metrics, see what people are searching for and help them accordingly.
And side note, that’s the key to freaking customers not making shit up in a silo, you know, talking to your customers, doing stuff like this so you can have metrics that say, yep, I know this was my most popular watched thing, so I need to create more content about that. And you can hear me click, click, clicking. I’m actually gonna go look at my stats. How can I look at this, y’all? This is why I shouldn’t go off beat, right? I’m going off beat.
Yeah. Like this. Working with local groups to host live events had over a thousand downloads, twelve hundred downloads. People watch that. Who. I never would have thought that was going to be a super popular one, but that was super popular. And so maybe I can, you know, find out who watched that and send them more info or connect them with the speaker. Right.
And suddenly I’m off to the races with affiliate income. Right.
All right. Anyway, what else did I love? Oh, I think that. I think that’s it for my. For what I loved. I mean, I just loved it in general, and I loved that we kept it simple. I love that we got. You know, my goal was to get a thousand leads. We got about 1100, so that felt good. And we got over 22, 000 downloads. So there were what, 26. 26 speakers. So let’s do the math on that. 22,000, y’all. I really just be doing this off the cuff. So on average, over 800, almost 850 downloads per episode per speech, whatever session, whatever the hell we want to call it.
And one thing or one thing that I would change, and honestly, I hate to do this, but I feel like I’m gonna have to, is I didn’t require any promotion from any speakers. And I don’t know, I. I don’t think I would ever require an email, which, of course, email is the most valuable thing a speaker can do for a summit like this, But I think I would require some sort of promotion, whether it’s social, email, a PS Doing something with me like an Instagram Live. I did one of those with Roger Coles. That was awesome. There’s got to be something. I mean, I put in my team, really, my team put in a lot of work, and I think, you know, it would be an even greater success if more people would have promoted. Now, I don’t require promotion because I hate when I’m required to promote. I think it’s. It’s like I’m the one giving you free content, so why are you asking more of me?
And that’s why I didn’t ask. So there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere, though, because I really did put in a lot of work to promote these people, so that maybe that’s one thing I would change. I also. We used hello Audio. We had a Terrible time with it. So if you, if you attended the event, you know what I’m talking about. Like people were trying to get it on YouTube music and it just. Half of the people were had no problem and the other half, it just never moved over to YouTube Music. Like people would never got it.
So either we don’t use hello audio next time or we can add Spotify, which we didn’t add for some reason. I think it was because it made it public or something like you can’t have private on Spotify. Something like that. I can’t remember the exact reason, sorry. But we would probably just add Spotify. I don’t care if it’s private or public, you know, we can unpublish it later. So yeah, that’s probably the two things I would change. Make it mandatory to promote some type of way and then you know, get off of hello Audio or change up how we were doing it on hello Audio.
And honestly we’ve got another summit coming up. Let me look in August called the sales email summit. It’s going to be all about the best performing sales emails from probably. We’ll probably do about 20 speakers again. You know, five to 10 minute episodes like we did. I think, I think we might even just publish that on Email Sound booth because we had over 22000 downloads. Right? But that does nothing for me. Right. My podcast Email Sound Booth which you’re listening to has almost 40000 downloads. But I would have liked those 22 000. And maybe this is just me being vain, but aren’t we all when it comes to metrics? You know, I’d have over 60,000 by now if we had put that. And I can unpublish those episodes if I want or I can keep them up forever.
I don’t plan. Oh, another thing I loved is I didn’t sell like an all access pass or the recordings. Right. I did sell the annual pass and you can search through episodes and I’ll put, I’ll put one in the show notes of what my annual pass is. I’m not going to go into it but I, I sold the annual pass and that was fine. But I liked that we didn’t have like an all access pass. Anyway, that’s the summation of list building live. Overall I think it went well. I loved it. I can’t wait to do it again. I’ve already started planning sales email summit for August 2025.
If you have any follow up questions, go to the Email Sound booth Facebook group. I’m going to link that in the show notes as well. And, you know, ask me any questions about the virtual summit you’d like and let me know if you attended and if you loved it. All right. I’ll see you on the next episode.
