147 - Marketing for Life Coaches Part 5: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a direct line to the inboxes of your target audience. It's a great way to make a personal connection, and if done right, it can be a very profitable way to market your business and nurture your subscribers. 

In today's episode of the Life Coach Business Building podcast, I'm talking about funnels and how effective email marketing can be for your coaching business. In the previous episode, I shared about my experience on what worked and what didn't when it comes to building my own email list. This week, I will be sharing the ways to nurture, provide value, and convert your email subscribers into loyal customers. 

Don't miss out on the opportunity to master email marketing. Why? I’ll say it again, “There’s money in your list.” 

Tune in to the episode and learn simple strategies that will take your email campaigns to the next level. 

Transcript

The number one most important thing that you can do in your email marketing, the number one thing is to have a subject line that is so compelling that people click and open your email. That is it. That's the number one most important thing you can do. All right, so go make your list of topics that you're gonna talk about. Decide how often you're going to email, whether it be once a week, more than once a week, or whatever that's gonna look like. And then just get to doing it. Don't overthink it. You will not get good at email marketing until you do it.

Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

All right. Let's talk about marketing. I'm so glad to have you guys here with me today in this marketing series. We are finally gonna be talking about email marketing. I am going to talk to you about sending your first email. And I'm gonna talk to you about your first email list, one that you probably are not utilizing. We'll talk about funnels, and be addressing those questions kind of about how often, when, all of those details that you have about your emails that you send. 

The first thing I wanna say is your first email list before you even do an opt-in is your own personal email list, and I know you're like, what? But it is true, you guys. That is your first email list. You want to let the people in your world know what it is you do. Now, most of the people around you think maybe you're a coach, but I suspect they think, oh, isn't that cute? She has a coaching business. we want to really let people know exactly what you do.

So you go into your personal emails and you go and download that contact list. And you can either email from your personal email address or your business email address, and I'll explain that when I have my clients do that. The first email that they send, I actually have a template that they use. They copy and use it for themselves, but the very first part of the email says, I wanna bring you up to date, and you're welcome to unsubscribe if you don't wanna know what's happening.

Now, some of my clients are like, well, why would I ask people to unsubscribe? You know, technically when you add people's email addresses to an email server like Flow desk, technically they're supposed to opt in. And that's really the way that it should be. But some of my clients are like, look, if these are my friends and family, I'm not gonna ask them to opt in or opt out.

And I do think that most people that are already your friends are not gonna mind. So you can do that again through like flow desk with your personal Gmail address, or it could be with your business email. But the idea of that first email address is to tell people what you do, who you help, and really explain what has happened to you as far as coaching, because you want referrals and you wanna ask them to, you know, tell people about what you do to refer you and then also invite people to connect with you because maybe they actually want coaching. They won't come and have a consultation with you unless you ask. So that is your first email list. What's beautiful about that is those people generally are the most engaged for a long time.

Many of my customers, in fact, everybody really does this, and those first many months, as you're building your email list, you're gonna find out that your friends, the email addresses that you added through that first email will be the people who are most engaged. They will click and they will read your stuff. And my goodness, your ego needs it. It's so nice to have people engaged in what you do. 

So I often get a question right away about how many times should I email? And let me tell you when it comes to email marketing, I don't think you can email too many times or too little. But what I will say is whatever amount of time, you know, whether it's once a week or once every other week or three times a week, I don't care what the time is, I just want it to be consistent. So most of my clients, I recommend that we do a weekly email to get started because it's hard to learn how to write those emails.

And it takes some time to learn how to put 'em into flow desk or whatever other tool you use and to just get comfortable with that. You guys might be thinking, you know, it takes like 20 minutes to write an email, but it doesn't take 20 minutes let me just tell you. Because it might take that long to actually write it, but then you have to put it into a flow desk. You have to, you know, make it look good. You have to send it back and forth to make sure all the links work. It takes time. So whatever amount of time that you feel like you can give to writing your emails, then let that be like, I'll write an email once a week. And again, that's what I really recommend for the first couple of months until you get regular and consistent.

Now, one of the other questions that I get a lot is, well, what am I gonna talk about in the emails? And I want you to create kind of a topic list. Now, inside of the business building boutique, we create like a roadmap or a guide, or your process, and we get the topics from that process. But you can simply make a list of the most common things that you'll be talking to your clients about.

Also, I just wanna tell you, many of you guys have books that you got from your certification. I know at the Life Coach School, we have a couple of big books that we got with our certification. There are lots and lots of concepts in there that you could discuss in your first emails, and so I would refer to those as well to help you just learn how to do this and get started.

The other thing is, is that you can create a format for your emails. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I had a free training and I talked about a format for social media, but it's also a format that you can use for email marketing and that is to have a hook. And that's just kind of the thing that gets people engaged, a hook, a story, or supporting information that supports the hook and then some kind of offer or call to action. So that's a super simple way. I will talk about that more next week when we talk about social media, but that's a simple way to do it. 

You guys also might go subscribe to James Clear. He's the author of Atomic Habits. He has an email format that's called the 3 21. So where he shares three pieces of advice from him, two things from other people, and one question. That's not exactly what it is, but you should go subscribe so you can see it. That's a super simple way to not have to really feel like you have to write very much. You're gonna just share a quick tip or a question or a quote from somebody else. That could be a way you could format it. 

You could also just decide yourself that each week, let's say in a newsletter you're going to share, like three different things in each newsletter. One might be a coaching concept, another might be something about you personal, and then the third might be an action step for your clients to take. So if you think about that in three different categories of content, that will help you be able to simplify when you sit down and you're like, what should I write about? It's like, just write about those three content categories and that will help you simplify it. 

Now, shorter emails are better. I am not great at writing shorter emails. I tend to probably go on a little bit longer than I should, but honestly, when you think about people reading an email mostly on their phone, you want the emails to be skimmable and scannable which means that you should have double spacing, means that you should have short sentences. It means that you should have easy-to-read fonts and an easy flow in your emails. 

All right, let me talk briefly about funnels. Now, a funnel is just like step one, step two, step three, step four. It's just the way that you move people. I call it through a pipeline from one place to the next place. And so when we think about a funnel, let's go back to your email opt-in that we talked about in the last couple of weeks. To get the opt-in, you basically create a funnel. So they fill out a form that says, I want that particular thing that you're giving me, and then you have to deliver it to him.

So from the form to delivering the freebie, that's a funnel. What I would like for you to do is take that just a couple steps further. You might know about Nurture series. I talked about that. Some people call 'em sales series. But it's a, the next few steps after they get their freebie that you create a mini marketing funnel.

Now in this particular case, if somebody is new to you and they have opted into something new, like a growth checklist like I have, or my Canva workshop. I wanna be able to introduce people to me, what it is that I do. So that could be an email. Another email could be about the types of problems that people have. I call that poking at the pain, the types of problems that your ideal client has that they get coached on. Then another email could be about client testimonials, about results that you get. 

So you could deliver the opt-in in the first one, say, here's your free gift. The second one you could tell about you. The third one you could tell more about the type of coaching you do, you know what that's all about. And the fourth one could be about client results. That would be a very basic email funnel. That's how simple you guys can think about it. 

Now we wanna think about all the ways that people connect with you, and we wanna think about what do they need to hear from you in each touchpoint that you have. So if they have a consultation call with you after the consultation call, what do they need to hear from you? Maybe it's an email that says, Hey, you know, here's some additional information about my offer if they did not sign up. Or here's some client testimonials, or here's an extra bonus to take action, something like that. You also would have a funnel at the front of the scheduling process, which is like if you schedule a consultation with me, you first get a consultation, you have a form that you fill out which answers some questions. Then you get a confirmation 24 hours before, and then you get another confirmation right before we start. That is another version of a funnel. 

Now, if you guys have something like a workshop, you're gonna have a couple of emails that lead up to the workshop that are the invitations that begins the funnel. Then once somebody signs up, they go to the form to sign up. They'll get a confirmation email, Hey, we've saved your seat. That is part of the funnel. And then you're gonna have the reminder emails like, workshop starts today, workshop starts in one hour, and we're live now. And then a replay will follow. 

So today I just want you to know about the concept of funnels. And I want you to think about all the ways that you can nurture people when they connect with you, because that's what email marketing is. It's nurturing, kind of loving up on the people that are on your list. It's educating 'em. It is giving to them. It's helping them trust you. And yes, it is making offers to them. 

So that brings me to another question. How often should I make an offer or a call to action? Now, some of the people that I work with, they have the same call to action on every single email, and I wanna tell you that's not the best practice.

You actually wanna kind of switch things up. So if you've been using the same button at the bottom of every email, let's change things up a little bit. You can have a call to action in the PS at the bottom. You could have somewhere in the content that you write. You could have words where you click, like, schedule a time here that could be linked.

But I also just wanna offer that you don't need a call to action every time. As you're building your business, why not just give value without asking anything? And I typically say, give two emails of value and then ask. Now it's up to you if you wanna have an ask every time, or if you wanna have in the bottom of your email something, you know, where they've got, connect with me on Instagram, schedule a time to talk and you know, here's my website link, something like that. Or in your email signature, maybe you've got your scheduling link, you can do that as well. But I think it's nice to not be asking every single time. We'll talk about that when it comes to social media next week. 

Now let me just briefly talk about trends in 2023. I did a little research, for this podcast, and what I found was that the trends are going to gamification. I don't think Debbie Shadid is going to gamification anytime soon, but that's where the trend is going. Now I can understand that because people wanna have things that are more engaging, more entertaining, and so that could be with polls or quizzes. Those kind of things are gamification. You wanna get people to interact with you and give you their opinion. It's kind of more than hit reply. 

The other thing that is trending is putting gifts or little videos in your emails. And those are fun. You know, if you go search how many different gifts there are, there are so many fun things that you can do, and those are entertaining and those are pretty fun. 81% of the emails, and I would say probably more depending on the niche that you're in, are opened on your mobile phone. So you've got to make sure that they look best first in a mobile format. 

Oh, one other thing I wanna mention is that I don't want you to get hung up on your analytics. Now I want you to go look at your analytics, whether that's in flow desk, or whatever format you use. Go look at those to see what's working and what's not working. But I don't want you to get too hung up because Apple is doing some changes and not every apple click is recorded correctly.

So depending on, you know, who's opening your emails and what email service provider you're using, those open rates could be inaccurate because Apple is working to protect your privacy, and so they're not documenting all of those opens. 

I wanna close with reminding you that the number one most important thing that you can do in your email marketing, the number one thing is to have a subject line that is so compelling that people click and open your email. That is it. That's the number one most important thing you can do. 

All right, so go make your list of topics that you're gonna talk about. Decide how often you're going to email, whether it be once a week, more than once a week, whatever that's gonna look like.

And then just get to doing it. Don't overthink it. You will not get good at email marketing until you do it. Then once you've done it for a long time, you can start to see, look at your analytics and start to see what emails are my audience most engaged in? What things are people clicking on? And then you can start to fine tune your email marketing process. 

All right, you guys now go download your personal email contacts. And even if you don't do it through Flow Desk, just create an email in your own email service provider, Outlook or whatever it is you use for your regular basic email, and send an email to all those people and tell 'em what you do as a coach and how you can help them or who you help, and then ask them to forward that email to a friend. Make sure you include some way for them to connect with you or a freebie that you wanna provide so that as they forward it onto a friend, their friend has the way to opt in to you as well.

All right, you guys, there's money in your list, so get to your email marketing and be consistent. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.

Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.