Let’s gets real about how you’re sabotaging your success with email. Liz breaks down the top six mistakes you’re making and what to do instead to ensure success in the first year of email marketing and beyond.
Links:
Liz’s Freebie: https://lizwilcox.ck.page/4072e76815
Email Marketing Membership: https://emailmarketingmembership.com/
Welcome Sequence Workshop: https://lizwilcox.thrivecart.com/lizwilcox-welcome-sequence-workshop/
Transcript
What’s up, it’s your girl, Liz Wilcox, the fresh princess of email marketing. And you are listening to the email sound booth. Oh my word. We are on episode four. Should I have like an opening sound? Like, you know, most podcasts they have, you know, like opening like a radio show, right? They’ve got music is the word I’m looking for.
LOL at that calling my email. Podcasts the sound booth and I can’t think of the word music. Oh the irony Anyway, you’re on episode four Should we have some opening music? Holler at me, email me at admin@lizwillcoxcom and let me know if you have any recommendations on how to even get that set up Should I get on fiverr or do you know a guy holler at me?
All right, let’s talk about the six mistakes every email marketer makes in the first year of sending emails. Now, if you’re not in the first year, you probably are making these, honestly, I could have named this like in the first three to five years of sending emails. Uh, but coming in at number six is deciding to email just once a month.
Now, I’m not going to come in and tell you, you have to email every week, you have to email every day, but I’m just saying like once a month, do you really think emailing once a month is going to make it possible for you to be top of mind to your customers? Let’s say, you know, you are a local bakery or, you know, you’re just in this weird niche or you think it’s weird where I don’t, I don’t have to email all the time, Liz.
Remember, you do have to stay top of mind so that when your customer is ready, they can buy from you, right? And so I believe for almost every industry niche out there, if you are an online business, if you’re a creator, if you’re trying to have a course or membership, uh, or even sell your physical physical product, you’ve got to mind the frequency.
You have to know when is enough to stay top of mind. And usually even if you’ve just got that once a month newsletter, like a roundup, so to speak, whenever you’ve got a sale, uh, you’ve got something interesting that happened in the business, send that email, right? Say, you know, it’s the first a month, You sent that once a month email, but now it’s the seventh or the eighth and something really awesome happened in the business.
Don’t wait, share it right then and there. It doesn’t have to be this, you know, monthly newsletter format, roundup post yet again. It can just be, you know, Hey, I have this to share today. Now, of course, I would love for you to send out a weekly newsletter. I do think that is a great rule of thumb, but if we’re working within that first year of our email marketing, please build up to that.
You don’t have to start once a week, but I want you, you know, put a date on the calendar, right? If right now it’s November. You know, by March, I’m going to be emailing once a week, or honestly, you can just join my 9 a month email marketing membership. I send you weekly templates, so you don’t even have to think about what you are writing.
I basically write it for you. So if you’re not in there, you can check it out. Uh, that’s email marketing membership. All right. Number five, inconsistent messaging. and mailing. You’re all over the place, babe, which is fine. I get it. It’s your first year, right? But please give yourself a chance to succeed, right?
Just like in number six, emailing once a month probably isn’t giving you a chance to stay top of mind to your customers. Your inconsistent messaging, your constant pivots are not giving you a chance to succeed. I think it was Ramit Sethi. I heard him say something about, you know, most people don’t succeed because they just quit too early.
Right? It was, I’m very much paraphrasing that, but it’s so, so true. Even when I, my very first business was an RV blog. I knew about nine months into that blog, I did not want to talk about RVing forever, but I also knew I needed to make money and I needed to learn. So instead of just completely packing up everything that I did, just kind of letting it die and talk about another topic, I was really into running also at that time.
So I wanted to talk about running, but I didn’t because I wanted to give myself a chance to succeed. I had already started with the RV travel blog. So I wanted to get that up and running to prove to myself that I could do it. Listen, not everything has to be the end all be all. I know there’s lots of advice about follow your passion.
Does this feel good? But at the end of the day, if you’re in that first year of email marketing, you just need to cut your chops. You need to learn. Yes, I am raising my voice. That’s how important it is. If you change your niche or your industry six times in one year, Or even three times in two years, you haven’t really thought anything through and you shouldn’t be emailing anyone at this point, slow down, take a breath, decide and freaking commit until it works.
As for mailing that inconsistent mailing we already talked about that. There’s a theme here commitment already All right, we are coming into the number four mistake. I see every email marketer make in their first year No welcome sequence or a welcome sequence that doesn’t really do anything inside your welcome sequence.
And remember that’s just an automation. When I joined your email list, you send out a series of emails that tell me about your business, right? So I always recommend, and I have a workshop on this. You can go to lizwillcox. com, hit shop, uh, and you can get that workshop if you want me to write it with you.
It. Your welcome sequence should cover a little bit of personality, the vision you have for your students and the values you bring to the table. Okay. And again, I go into that in that workshop, but you can even just get my welcome sequence for free at lizwillcox. com. For the love of all that is holy, please get that welcome sequence up.
All right, number three, forgetting or waiting to scrub your list. Oh my gosh, over in the email sound booth Facebook group, I see this all the time. Well Liz, I’ve been growing my list for a year but I haven’t scrubbed it yet. Now scrubbing is when you take the people who haven’t opened your emails, usually it’s in the last 30 to 90 days depending on your email service provider and how aggressive you want to get, you take those people who haven’t opened your emails and you remove them from your list.
Dude, you’ve got to do this. I know it seems cringe. I work really hard, Liz. It’s so hard to grow my email list. Now you’re telling me to delete people? I’ve got, I’ve got 200 people on my list. That took me, you know, nine months. You want me to delete them? If you have those 200 people on your list, but half of them haven’t opened in the last three months?
Darling, my love, You do not have 200 people on your list. You have a hundred people on your list, right? This affects your deliverability, the ability for you and your emails to get delivered to someone’s inbox, right? So if you’re sending to 200 people, but half of the people are not opening every single time you send an email, basically each time.
Uh, each person that doesn’t open the email is throwing up a red flag, so to speak. And those internet gods, the things that are crawling around checking our emails, etc., are counting all those red flags. You want as little as possible. The smallest amount of red flags as possible. So scrub your list. I recommend doing this.
Yes Immediately, right? Especially if you’ve been consistent you’re sending emails more than once a month. Don’t forget Don’t wait to scrub your list get those people off of your list All right. The second biggest mistake I see people Making in their first year is waiting to sell Waiting to sell for when you hit, I don’t know, a thousand subscribers, a hundred subscribers, insert magic number here, right?
Listen, your subscribers, they have no idea how many people are on your email list. So sell, sell, sell. And they just might buy, buy, buy, right? If nothing else, when you sell, you are working that muscle. You are working out those freaking kinks of your offers of how it feels to sell who you want on your list.
So don’t think of it as, Oh my gosh, I’ve got 20 people on my list and Liz told me I need to start selling. And then when nobody buys, Oh my gosh, what the heck? I feel terrible about email. I don’t want that for you, but I do want you to sell to those 20 people and just see how it feels. Let yourself be disappointed, but know that you’re just in practice mode.
You’re not in the full on entrepreneur, email marketing, you know, royalty yet. You’re just cutting your chops. So let yourself sell, let yourself see how it feels. Oh, I love writing emails like this, or, oh, you know, I use these templates. They didn’t really feel right for me. I’m going to tweak them later.
Don’t wait to sell. Put your offers out there. Especially when you have a small list or you’re in your first year, if you can get replies, you can start talking to people. You’ll be able to craft those offers that people actually want because you’re actually talking to people. All right. Now the number one mistake I see people making in their first year of email marketing and sending emails.
Is, spoiler alert, probably not, distracting yourself or not committing. I’ve already, you know, yeah, spoiler alert, this was, doesn’t come as a shock, right? So dang it, email is lucrative. I want you in on this so badly. If you believe email is lucrative, which I think you do because you’re listening, please, I’m begging you, stop distracting yourself with busy work.
Do the real work. Bye. Bye. Work. Commit to emailing. Commit to your message. Write that welcome sequence. Scrub your list. Work on growing your list in the first place so you can sell to it. Right? Let’s talk about moneymaker vs distraction activities. Moneymaker, building your email list. Distraction, playing in Canva for more than 30 minutes.
Moneymaker, writing your email newsletter and hitting send. Distraction, working on 10 posts for Instagram when you know your reach is small and you only have 30 to 100 followers. Moneymaker going on a podcast to talk about your topic, a distraction, trying to run your own podcast, your own YouTube channel, and a Facebook group all at once, right?
I know we all see people, you know, that we admire that are omnipresent, right? They’re on YouTube. They’ve got a Facebook group. They’re, you know, posting on their Instagram stories. They, you know, they just released a TikTok. Those people are not you. Those people probably have a team and if they don’t, if they’re doing all those things, they’re probably not growing.
I want you to grow and I know that email marketing is the best way to grow your audience, grow your authority and grow your bank account. Can I get an amen? I’m going to say that again. Email marketing is the fastest way. to grow your authority, your bank account, and your audience. Okay? So don’t distract yourself.
If you’re finding it hard to juggle Pinterest and YouTube and the Facebook group and send an email all in the same week, don’t do that. I want you to focus on email marketing because email marketing works. It’s a platform you own. Right? We don’t own YouTube, Pinterest, et cetera. We own email. All right.
Those are the six things. Let’s read those one more time for you. Coming in at number six, deciding to email just once a month. Number five, inconsistent messaging and mailing. Number four, no welcome sequence. Ah, get mine for free, lizwilcox. com. Number three, forgetting or simply waiting to scrub those cold people off your list.
Coming in at number two. Number two, waiting to sell for when you hit some magical number, and number one, distracting yourself or not committing to email marketing in that first year. All right, which one of these made you feel personally attacked? Because I know there’s one. I want you to holler at me in the Facebook group, same name, Email Sound Booth, and I can help you work on it more.
Rooting for you always. See you in episode five.
