Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This is the season about marketing. Today, I want to talk about email marketing and specifically having an email newsletter. There are so many benefits to having an email newsletter. And here's just one of them today, literally earlier today, my client told me about a past client who got reactivated because of her newsletter. So her staff has been kind of grumbling about having to do a newsletter. And yet today, in response to one she just sent out a client that she worked with four years ago, contacted her to admit we really didn't implement the things that we'd done back then, does that sound familiar? And so we need to work with you again.

So she signed him on for a $24,000 engagement and she thinks he'll probably continue on to 120,000$ package. So that is super and it should quiet down those who are grumbling about it, because, as you know in the world of high ticket consulting, we don't need a lot of clients, we just need, you know, those few to come through and it really justifies the effort that she puts into this email newsletter. So today I am going to share with you seven reasons why it is so great to have a newsletter, these are really big benefits for you. I'm going to share a few of the kind of grumbles or excuses I hear from people about why they don't do them and then I'm going to have an action plan for you depending on where you are in your newsletter journey.

So let's start first with when we have a posting on social media or when we have our groups out there, they're usually on platforms that we don't own. And so if something were to happen, we would lose access to those people or group members, so an email subscriber community, I don't refer to them as a list. A subscriber community is on our CMS, it's in a place that we own that list and in offline businesses, it's very often known that all of the value in something like an insurance business or one of those kinds of service businesses is in the customer lists, financial services. That individual agent’s list is where the money is and so in our businesses as consultants, this list or this subscriber community, that's so much of the value in our business is the potential in this community. So what I especially like about having a subscriber community that we can email is, if you'll remember back to the episode I did about the three kinds of marketing strategies you need to have in your business. We talked about lead generation, keep in touch and follow up. So an email newsletter is actually all three of those, if it gets forwarded to someone and the right person sees it, you can generate new leads from it. If you have somebody who is interested in something but they haven't bought yet, it's nurturing them so that's doing follow up and if you have, let's say, a past client who has been around for four years but didn't really implement that is keep in touch, so it keeps you on their radar screen. So it's just a little bit of work that you do on a regular basis that generates such a powerful return.

Having an email newsletter or any kind of email capture is a great way to save visitors who came to your website and might otherwise go away forever. Most of the visitors to a website will never, ever return to it and so it's a really great idea to have a way to capture their information, usually by having like a really enticing, free thing that you offer them in exchange for their email address. So we can talk later about those free things that I'll probably do an entire episode on free things. But the mere concept of having email capture on your website is a really great way to make sure that you don't just have traffic that's just cycling through that you never see again. They join that subscriber community and then you can, you know, follow up with them and potentially turn them into clients.

So those are already three things,having an owned community of your own and sort of being out there on social media, nurturing them, meaning having all three of the marketing strategies done in one fell swoop, capturing visitors to your website.

And the fourth thing is having basically sales on demand or the potential for sales on demand. Many years ago, I heard someone refer to his email list, he wasn't thinking of them as a community, as like an ATM machine, like he sent an email and then he would get some money. So he was like, anytime I need to make some money, like I want to go on vacation, I just send an email and sell something. And I feel like ok, it's works a little differently for consultants, but you can nurture relationships so effectively here that when you announce that you have something to offer, a new program, an opening for clients or something like that, you can generate revenue on demand practically. So the last two programs that I've filled, I did it by just sending out emails to my subscriber community. So they're already there, they hear from me on a consistent basis and it was very easy for them to raise their hands and say yes to that. So it is a super powerful strategy in that way in terms of building for yourself revenue potential in a situation or something that you own.

The fifth thing is that you can activate past clients. So besides the example that I just shared, I can't tell you how many times I've been working with someone who has said kind of the same thing well, gosh, it's a lot of work, I'm writing the same thing all this time, I have to write all these articles and then one fine day they will write to me and say, oh, my gosh, just heard from so-and-so with either a past client or and a lot of cases that’s somebody who didn't quite convert and then they get an email which has just the right message that they needed to hear and then they write me and they're like, hey, I got a new client from that email.

It happens numerous times, it's one thing for it happened in my business where I kind of have a hybrid of a of a consulting business and, you know, a marketing business in more of the Internet marketing sense. But these are pure corporate consultants saying I'm sending these emails out to people and they're responding and turning into clients. So it works.

The sixth thing is that you generate when you write a newsletter consistently, you generate a body of articles. The first, I don't know, three or four years I had a newsletter I wrote every other week, I wrote Consistently without fail, did not miss a week. And I have a ton of articles over the years from those same articles I have generated. Well, first of all, I've made some of these videos based on those original articles that I did back then, whenever I'm in client work and I have, you know I'm like, well let me just send you this thing quickly, I sent that over. Some of them, I think are, you know, pretty good Interesting information so I've turned them into freebies of their own and on and on. It helps you to get clear on what you know and what you want to share, you really kind of build the brand for yourself in your own mind, the more consistently that you write. I'm using the term write, I can't say generate content you know, you can speak your email newsletter, you can do a video based one, although I don't think that's as effective. But definitely creating content on a regular basis is super helpful for you to understand what you believe about your own work, like clarifying your own point of view, creating assets that you can share with your clients and, you know, just building up a bottle of a body of work that you can use.

Last of all, an email newsletter, and you've heard me say this before, email newsletters are an intimate medium. Email comes into my inbox, my inbox for most people comes to their phone or right here to their work desk. So what I love about that is you're creating a relationship with an individual, if it's a Facebook or a LinkedIn group or a social media post, you know, they're kind of out there in the public square and you're saying your thing and yeah, you're interacting with individuals in the comments and things like that but it's still kind of a public medium. Yes DMs and PMS and things like that, that's when that kind of chat is when you get a little more intimate, but what's beautiful about email marketing is it's at scale, right? So it's not a one on one D.M. conversation but it is, it feels like it's a personal conversation that happens in the inbox. So I really like, you know, writing high value articles that go into someone's inbox and creating that relationship and sharing your personality like people really bond to you. If you think about the newsletters that you read consistently, you have a relationship to the person sending them like you probably know a few things about them personally, you have expectations about what they're going to send, you know what you're going to learn from them. You know that when you open their emails, it will be valuable for you. So that's the kind of thing I want you to create as a relationship with your own subscribers.

So why don't more people do email newsletters? So probably the number one thing I hear is my clients are too big and important to not subscribe to this and I will say nonsense, I do have some clients who don't subscribe, but there are, you know, there are CEOs of global multinational corporations and I can assure you that they get some email newsletters that they read and pay attention to and maybe it's, you know, Tim Ferriss or maybe it's something else over here but they're looking at something in their inbox on a regular basis, so go ahead and give yourself the benefit of the doubt and write something anyway.

Their influencers and advisers most certainly are reading things so you're probably going to be able to get in their inbox. And what I will also tell you is when I go in and kind of mouse around inside my email system, which I don't do very often because it's a mess in there, I see names of subscribers in my subscriber community that I'm just so impressed that they're reading my newsletters and I'm so honored that they subscribe. So you'll be surprised, you'll be surprised who will subscribe to your stuff and read it. I have clients that we send email newsletters for, and when I see the subscribers on there, I'm like, look at you, that is like major corporation and major high level person there. So give it a shot and you will be surprised at who does subscribe for you.

I also hear the technology is overwhelming, so keep in mind that this is not something that you should do on your own, you can do it on your own but I would not advise it. This kind of tech, you can, you know, set up your article, find your photo, get somebody to design a template, keep it plain, text whatever you need to do in order to get it out on a regular basis. The key thing is send this thing every other week, every week if you can, no less than every other week, because if you send it monthly, people forget who you are and you're going to end up with a bunch of spam reports. So every other week is a cadence that most people can handle and the tech is something that you can outsource. This is not a difficult or expensive thing to do, find yourself a freelancer who can give you a few hours so we can do this.

The last thing I hear is like, what am I supposed to write, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, it's like every twice a month there is a lot. Here's what I would say is, last week I talked about being ‘you’ focused and ‘you’ oriented, so put your focus on your perfect client. What do they want to hear about? What questions do they have? What problems of theirs can you solve? Can I reveal too much? Can I share too much in an email? Listen, it's an email, it's not a dissertation. If you can explain to somebody how to do so much stuff that they don't end up needing to hire you and you can do that in like a 600 word email, go for it.

However, I think you know that that's impossible, so I would say, sure as much value as you can on a topic that's on your mind that week, that's in the news that's relevant to them, that is in answering the question that they've asked you about. That's the kind of thing that I want you to do in your writing and in the information that you're sharing. You can have an editorial calendar we'll talk about that in another episode and then write specifically on those topics that month, if you choose to do that, if you want to be super organized about it, what's really critical is that you commit to doing it twice a month, you allot time on your calendar for this, sit down and make this happen and that way, you know writers write to deadlines and there's a reason that journalists and authors and everyone else writes to a deadline because creative work really needs to end at some point. And so give yourself time to be able to do this and bang these articles out or newsletters out and then have your tech helper help you to get them sent out but to me, there's no excuse that is valid when the opportunity is to bring value to your subscriber community and to potentially reactivate or activate clients.

So now we have potentially three scenarios, if you do not have a newsletter yet, I am speaking right now to you start. Your job is to start your newsletter and here's what you're going to do, you're going to hire some tech help, it is not expensive, a freelance virtual assistant or someone who can help you with that. You're going to invite friends, family and colleagues to subscribe to your newsletter, you may start with seven or seventy, and that is just fine, it's a starting place and from there, you can ask them to invite other people, you can grow it from there and you're going to write every other week a valuable article no matter what, that's your job.

If you have an email newsletter already and you're just not quite happy with how it's going, here's your job Engagement, I want you to go for engagement and here's how you're going to do it. You're going to ask questions in your emails that you intend to get a response to, you're going to request action like click this link, go comment on my medium article or on this post on LinkedIn or hit reply and share with me right? So questions, links, something that demonstrates engagement so you can get them to take action and if you practice that over several newsletters and you notice that you're able to get more action and engagement from them, you're going in the right direction, engagement is super important with a subscriber community.

And another way to do it is with a pattern interrupt. So try an unusual subject line, try an email newsletter that, instead of being a long article, is actually an image with some thoughts about it and their request to comment. Pattern Interrupt is something that doesn't look like everything that they've had before from you. So be creative, send them something and see if you can get engagement.

And the third category, if you have a newsletter and it is rocking it for you, yayyy! me too. I love my email newsletter, it's amazing to be able to connect to your subscribers and to share value and to hear back from them. I love when people respond to my newsletter and share like agree or disagree. I want to hear what it meant to them and what's going on with them. So that's a super benefit of being in someone's in an intimate meeting medium in someone's inboxes that they could just hit reply on that phone and then you get, like a real message from them, not this, like, formal thing, it's just like a real message from the heart. So if this is you, then your job is to grow your newsletter, ask your subscribers to forward it to someone else who would like it. Maybe you want to redo your freebie so you get subscribers to, you know, reactivate, get them more interested in something new and then taking action on a new thing, so like a new free thing, but focus for the next few months on growing that subscriber community.Again if it's working for you, you'll never regret having that community be bigger.

So today has been about having an email newsletter and making this thing work for you. So I hope you have enjoyed the information that I've shared. I would love to answer any questions you have and if you want to subscribe to my email newsletter you'll find a link to do so in the show notes. With that, I thank you so much for viewing or listening, and I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.