294: I haven't engaged with my mailing list in a while... what do I do?  

Ghosting your email list? It is one of those tasks you know you need to do and you feel guilty every time you think about it. 

No more, it stops here. When doing research it was found that at least 50.7% of the people from this study were buying something from a marketing email monthly. 

But more than that, it is about building your brand, creating trust and community. 

No need to feel bad anymore, we just make it happen, straight after this episode. No more excuses. 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

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KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

✨ How to reengage your email list  

✨ Why you need to be more strategic with your mailing list (and how to) 

✨ How to get started if you don’t have a mailing list 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 294, and we're talking about email lists. If you haven't engaged in yours for a while or you don't have one. This episode is for you. Welcome to the Content Queen Podcast. I'm your host, Mariah, entrepreneur storyteller, digital nomad, creative content bootcamp, and founder of Content Queen.

I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content, and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you. Each week I'll deliver a story, tell you connect to a powerful strategy. Around marketing business and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey, along with actual steps to help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling, powerful and marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it. Tell again. All right.

If you're watching any of this video, I wanted to feature our blanket because we finally. S finish sewing all the patches. So little souvenir hack. Grab a patch, sew it to a blanket. If you go anywhere fancy, go anywhere on holidays. So since Mitch and I started traveling to Vietnam in 2022, we have been collecting patches and then we now have a blanket full of our patches.

So I'm gonna hold it up and if you can't see it, we'll put a video on social media. So fun. Anyway, that's zero relevance to anything

email list. I wanna know if you have one or you don't have one. So I've popped a poll in Spotify. If you're on Spotify, you can click which option, yes or no. Uh, I'm always curious to know, because I've been having a. Doing lots of workshops, having conversations, and a lot of small business owners do not have an email list or they do not engage in a mailing list.

And when I've had these conversations, a lot of 'em go, oh, well I might like use Gmail or my Outlook to like email clients. And that's not email marketing. Email marketing is utilizing a platform, you know, whatever. There's MailChimp, there's mail alike, there's loads of platforms out there. To directly and bulk communicate with your audience.

So I send a weekly email out to my list and it's to my newsletter list, and that is exclusive content that you wouldn't get on my social media. And I dive a little bit deeper, and obviously you can reply and get any support from me. Lots of business owners have these. A lot of them. One, use them just for direct sales and sell too much.

Even Mitch was saying recently he bought a jacket and he really liked the jacket and he really likes what the brand's all about, but they keep just sending him promo and sales stuff. Whereas because he's already bought from them, he should be getting emails about their story and their journey and how he can be involved in the community and they haven't done that.

And they're basically just repurposing what they're using on social media. So. Whilst you might not be at that stage to get really strategic and in depth with your email marketing, it's important to understand why email marketing exists and why we should be using it. And then of course there is email marketing, which is.

In two parts, right? You've got your marketing element, which is the nurturing part. So how can we keep people up to date with our story, what we're doing, what we know, our knowledge. And then the other part is sales. Now, a lot of business owners might do a lot of the education and the value and the chi chat, and then don't do any selling, and then wonder why they don't make.

Any money. Now you might have noticed, or if you have some sort of downloadable setup in your sort of email marketing, you would have what's called an email sequence, and that can act as a sales sequence. So once they've downloaded something from you, you just take them on a journey of how you can support them.

Right. So when it comes to email marketing, we wanna be doing both, not too much of one or the other, just so that we can get a good balance of nurturing our list and also providing them with what we actually sell. So I had a client that came to me and we've sat, we've been working together, and they had a pretty decent list, right?

They've been in business for quite a while, and they hadn't done any. Engaging style emails in a really long time. So, and I get this question sometimes, oh, I email my people and then I ghost them for a few months. Like, what do I do? How do I reengage my list? Now, if you don't have a mailing list. This is a great sign for you to have a think about getting one.

And if you do have any questions about setting up a mailing list, you know, feel free to drop me an email. I do one-on-one sessions, uh, with people on various content issues or content, things that they wanna do, so we can do a session on that. And I've been doing these one-on-one content clinics off the back of one of my workshops and 80% of them and all the strategies I've done have included mailing lists and a lot of them didn't have one.

So it's just a really good time to talk about this. 'cause even like the hold is email marketing dead sort of topic is coming up, right? So this client, as I said, going back to this client hadn't engaged in a mailing list in a while, so kind of like what do we do? The first thing is to understand there's like.

At least 50% of people are buying from marketing emails every month. So the first thing is sort of that mindset shift of why I should be doing this email thing. If you wanna reengage your list, you don't necessarily have to say like. Because every time you potentially ghost your list or even on social media, you don't have to go on and say, oh, you know me again.

Haven't heard from me in a while. People don't really know, to be honest. Maybe on social media, they're like, oh, I haven't heard from such and such in a while, and they might go to your page, but. They're not really, they've got emails going through their inbox all the time. They don't know how long it's been, but you can set the expectation.

So what we did with this client is we just said, this is what I'm doing from now on. This is what you can expect from me. This is what it's gonna look like. It gave people the opportunity to opt out if they wanted to. And also it wasn't like a, oh, sorry, I haven't emailed you in a while. It was a, here's what I'm doing, here's how I'm helping you.

So shift that mindset around, oh, I haven't emailed them for a while. Like, how do I even get started? Just set your sort of email marketing strategy with like what you're gonna do, how often you're gonna show up, and what types of things you're gonna have in your list, and just communicate that with your list and give them a little bit of a teaser into what they can expect from you.

You could name your mailing list something. I have various emails in my inbox from marketers and bits and pieces, and they've sort of given their email a name, so it's like. You know, Chitty Chats with X, Y, Z, or the Roundup, or you know, whatever that people have names for their email lists. And you can name yours too.

So you might give it a name. You might give it just this really fresh bit of life, but then you've gotta make that commitment. So how can you keep that commitment? You set the expectation of what you're going to do, right? Then the second thing is sort of thinking about, okay, if I've, I've sent out my email, um, I'm set the sort of cadence of how often I'm gonna speak to them.

Then we want to utilize social media, I guess, to leverage what's happening in our. Newsletter. So with one client, we do a couple of stories to promote that weekly newsletter. You could do it via a free downloadable, but sometimes actually just promoting your mailing list can work. Although some people want value.

So you have to test with your audience, right? Because remember, social media is getting harder for people to actually get to your website. So they go to your page, they go to your link bio. Maybe your link in bio is a list of links from Instagram. Maybe it's like a link tree, so you wanna get a clean cut between your social media page and your website.

But if lots of people are scrolling on reels, they have to then get out of their scroll hole, go to your profile, go to your link, and then go in the rabbit hole of your website. The beauty of an email is it goes straight to their inbox and they get your link and they can click through to wherever they need to go.

Social media borrowed channel. Email marketing owned channel. So how can we bridge that gap rather than making it a really big commitment for someone to purchase from you on social media? How can they join your mailing list? How can they get on your list? You could do this through, if you're a product based business, exclusive launches through Build It, you've just gotta build community, right?

And then your community is gonna wanna be where you are hanging out. In other places. So give people a reason to wanna hang out with you in other places, but make sure you tell 'em about it. So once you've yet set the cadence of how long what you're gonna be doing, share it with your social media community and try and build up your list.

And then obviously you can use things like ManyChat, which is like automations DM me X, Y, Z, and I'll send you a link. There's many ways you've gotta play around with it. I did to my mailing list. Do a call to actions email last week, sort of giving them advice on. Playing around with call to action. So whilst that has already gone out, you can join my mailing list and you'll get those in your inbox every week.

And I'll put the link in the show notes for you to join. So then, as I said, step two, keep growing that list. Use social media because yeah, purchasing on social media is getting a little bit harder unless you're, you're using paid advertising, so we wanna give them somewhere to go. I'm a big fan of using.

Meta stories. Uh, we've got TikTok stories now, but stories because they are the things that are very reactive. They're in the top of people's sort of newsfeed, and you can get a direct link straight to your website rather than link in bio or DM me something. It's like a quicker action. So that's the second thing.

And the third thing is thinking about that direct inbox approach. So. When you are emailing someone, the beauty of it is it goes direct to the inbox. Now, yes, it could be going straight to spam, so you've gotta be really careful with those things. Um, looking at all the backend settings of your email platform, testing it.

When people sign up to your mailing list, ask them to save you as a contact so that they keep getting your emails. Just keep checking on your stats so that you can improve. But having that mindset of, I'm going to direct to someone's. Inbox and I have about a 15 to 25% chance of them opening that. How can I increase that?

So we use things like our subject line to entice people. We keep building trust by adding value. If you are selling to someone all the time, maybe they're not gonna wanna open every email, but if you're giving them stories and lessons and you know, value or things about your. Your process or really helping them, they're more likely to continue to open your emails.

So then once you've kind of got that direct to inbox approach, you wanna play around with, yeah, how you can increase your open rates, how you can increase your click rates, and then it just becomes those two stats and how we can improve them the most. Open rates is obviously how enticing your subject line is.

Play around with those. I found things like when I use the I or someone's name in it or. You know something about Instagram or TikTok, people open it and then once they've opened it, how are they clicking? So have you got some buttons or some hyperlinks or some images? But some of your emails, the intent might not be for them to click and go somewhere.

It could be trust building. So that's why it's important when you are going to reengage your list or start with email marketing is have a goal of the cadence of you sending out emails. Sales versus marketing, what that looks like and creating that strategy. So I tend to go through a flow of some weeks I wanna get them to do something versus some weeks I just wanna add value so you can start creating a little bit of like a plan for yourself.

And that's really helped me in the past. So. With that re-engagement, just really trying to keep that consistency and then playing around with the metrics to strengthen your email marketing, and you'll find that you it. It's a lot easier actually to tweak and change things to improve your email marketing versus social media.

So if you haven't got a list or you haven't engaged in a while, I really want this too. One motivate you to reengage and start looking at that again. Or two, start thinking about how you can build a mailing list, how you can use your social media to get people to your mailing list and how you can really own this space.

I had another client who was. I was mentoring her. We built an email list from the very beginning of her starting her business. 'cause I was literally there from day one and she fell off the bandwagon a little bit. She found it a bit hard to keep up with. So we created a little bit of a plan, like, okay, what do the emails look like?

How's that gonna go down? Then she was consistent, right? She fell off the bandwagon again because she made a slight tweak in her business and she felt like she didn't know how to reengage that list. So I helped her with, okay, this is how we do it. We explain the situation that you've sort of changed your niche slightly.

Um, same value, same mission, all the things. And if they wanted to continue on, you know. Is what's gonna happen, but if not, here's how you can unsubscribe. Because she was really unsure of how to create that sort of connection between the non-engagement and the business change to where she wanted to go.

So just be honest with your audience. Just share what's happening. I went to a summit on Friday with lots of massive business owners in Australia, lots in the product space, and a lot of them were talking about that just sharing what's happening. Sharing the experience, sharing the journey, because people love being involved.

That's how you build community. Email marketing is about getting direct to your customer's inbox and making them feel part of something. Obviously they don't know the other people on your list, but they feel like you are talking directly to them. 'cause it is. That really can be that really personalized approach, right?

You are going direct to your customer's inbox with something that's quite personal. So it is just such a missed opportunity. When done right and when done with intention and strategy, of course. But if you haven't emailed your list in a while, please make it a task for at least the next month to do it.

If you haven't got a mailing list again in the next month, just put down a project for you to start. You don't have to have your first email out, but just start thinking about building that list. It is so valuable and so important for the sustainability of your business over social media. 'cause what if tomorrow social media, go now.

Well, we've had a good run. Gimme some money. Or, we've had a good run. We are closing down. We have no control, but with an email list, it is owned. It's an owned channel, owned media. So start engaging with the list. Start small and build and nurture, and then create your sales plan and your sales strategy behind it and just keep testing and iterating.

Like as I said, the thing I love about email marketing is actually. There's kind of those two key metrics apart from obviously sales, so probably three key metrics. As opposed to social media, which has so many different elements or website, which have so many different elements. So it's, it's really good to be able to utilize it and go, oh, that's not working and I know directly because of the subject line, or because I'm not having enough clicks.

So then it's so much easier to make little tests and trial things and strengthen your email marketing. But if you do have any questions on Spotify, you can pop 'em in the question box or the comments, and I'll be more than happy to answer. You can email me. information@contentqueenmariah.com or content Queen Mariah on Instagram.

Ask me any questions and if you did wanna have a one-on-one session, I'll put the link in the show notes as well. If you really wanna kickstart your email. Marketing. Been doing it since. 2020, and I've learned a lot. So I've got a lot to share. Be a content queen or king, and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Insta Stories and tagging me at Content Queen Mariah, or just tell 'em about it. If you do rate review on whatever platform it does help me get amazing guests on, continue to strengthen the show and deliver amazing content to you.

So if you have five seconds. I'd really appreciate it. Follow me on Instagram or TikTok and let me know if there are any topics you'd like me to talk about. I've had a few come in. I've got a bit of a list happening, and also from the summit. There's lots to talk about, so there's endless ideas, but I'm always looking for more and I will talk to you next week.

Bye.

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment