Email Newsletter Marketing Strategy with Cole Schafer

[00:00:00] Monique Idemudia: Hi, and welcome everybody to a new episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Monique, and you're listening to episode number 46. And in today's episode, you'll learn all about email newsletter marketing and how you can craft the perfect email newsletter marketing strategy for your small business.

[00:00:23] And I have a special guest who's joining me for today's episode. he is a writer and by day he works in advertising and he's running a small writing shop called honey copy, where he helps brands both big and small

[00:00:39] Monique Idemudia: right? Pretty words that sell. And by night he moonlights as a poet. Building a Raven is readership on Instagram, where he has released three books of poetry and prose under the alias of January black. his blog boasts nearly 500 articles that enjoy a hundred thousand pairs of eyes each month.

[00:01:04] and he runs three weekly email newsletters that have over 15,000 subscribers combined. Welcome Cole Schaefer. Hey Cole, how are you doing today?

[00:01:17] Cole Schafer: I'm doing wonderful. How are you doing?

[00:01:20] Monique Idemudia: I'm doing great too. Thanks so much for joining us in today's episode. And the topic is email newsletter marketing and how you can craft the perfect email newsletters.

[00:01:32] So you stay in touch with your audience and stay connected with them.

[00:01:37] Cole Schafer: Yeah. I'm excited to jump

[00:01:39] in,

[00:01:39] Maybe we can start with a definition. What is newsletter Marketing?

[00:01:46] Cole Schafer: Sure. So. in, in, in my mind, newsletter Marketing is an email that is sent out either daily, weekly, monthly bi-monthly and it's generally not just to one person, but multiple people.

[00:02:00] So it might be to a hundred people. a thousand some lists are as big as a million and They are, they, they, they generally are like created around a specific topic. and then you also have to think about monetizing them. Right. So which we can get into later, but that, that's whatnewsletter marketing is for me.

[00:02:19] Monique Idemudia: Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is. It's the practice of sending out content in the form of letters to a list of subscribers who are in your target audience, meaning your potential and your existing customers. And the most popular form of newsletter marketing. It's obviously by email, but theoretically you could also send it on WhatsApp or other, you know, messenger apps or even on social media.

[00:02:46] But email is definitely the most popular and the most important, because you own email, you own that as a channel, which is why email marketing and newsletter marketing, leveraging email is the most important one, yeah.

[00:03:00] Cole Schafer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's well, you touched on there is really important to even underline.

[00:03:06] I think sometimes when we build large audiences on Instagram or Twitter or other social medias that's awesome. And it's great, but we have, we're building our. House on somebody else's property. Right? Whereas with email, when you are building a list of emails, you own that list, completely someone can't come in and take that away from you.

[00:03:27] if Twitter, all of a sudden says, Hey, we're going to change the algorithm. Or Instagram has done that over the past three years, where a lot of people. We're getting their posts seen by thousands and thousands of people. And then Instagram started rewarding brands, you know, who were paying for their posts to be seen all of a sudden, like their visibility got cut in half, whereas with email, as long as you own that list.

[00:03:51] Cole Schafer: And as long as you're being smart about what you're sending and the subject lines and all that, you can really monetize that for, for a long, I mean, someone can't come in and take that away from you.

[00:04:01] Monique Idemudia: Exactly. Yes. That's exactly right. Yeah. It's funny that you say that we, because yeah, it happened around the time when Instagram got bought by Facebook and that's exactly what Facebook did to, right.

[00:04:14] So the organic rage on both of those. platforms has just drastically been going down and you have to pay money to reach your audience basically. Versus with email, you can reach your people whenever you want to reach them and send them messages. That's right. So why would you send emails?

[00:04:35] I think that really depends on, I guess what you're doing as a brand. So you might send an email because you want to sell more of a product or service. You might send an email because you want to. Entertain your audience? I think like if we're talking strictly marketing and content marketing, those to me can be broken down into three different buckets.

[00:04:56] I think when we're doing a newsletter or any form of content, Generally we're doing, it's either entertain the person to educate the person or to inspire the person. So like Grammarly, the tool that everybody uses to make sure that they don't have typos. If you go over to their blog they have built an entire blog.

[00:05:14] Cole Schafer: That's really impressive around education. just educating people on right. The correct grammar to use, you know when, when it's appropriate to use like the various forms of there. then if let's say we go over to a brand like Nike, you know, if we joined one of their newsletters, their newsletters are probably going to be primarily around inspiring their audience.

[00:05:35] Right. and then the last one entertainment something like buzz feed or the the total sorority move. Frat move those, those kinds of media companies, those are built almost entirely around entertainment. So I think one of the first things you do, if you're starting a newsletter is probably deciding, is this newsletter meant to entertain someone, educate someone or inspire them?

[00:05:57] Monique Idemudia: Yes, exactly. So how do you go about writing a newsletter? Where do you start?

[00:06:04] Cole Schafer: So I think you probably begin by deciding what what lengthy ones. So there are a few. I think that it really falls into two different formats. So there's one newsletter style. That's really just an email and it might be 250 words and it might be your brand kind of a jumping in, or if you're an influencer or just a single one-off person, just jumping into your customer's inbox, your subscribers inbox, and just saying, Hey, this is what's going on.

[00:06:31] the type of newsletter I run as much longer. And it starts with like a 500 word intro and then it shares three to five articles that I wrote that week. and so it kind of functions more as a curated sort of newsletter where I have the intro. Then I have, you know, I wrote this article about John Steinbeck, this article about Charles McCalsky this article about a really cool piece of marketing I saw dollar shave club do.

[00:06:57] Cole Schafer: So I think you just decide what length you want. the newsletter, like the standard newsletter, where you have multiple sections. If you want to do that? I think it's awesome. Just keep in mind, like it, it's probably two to three times the work compared to doing a shorter newsletter.

[00:07:14] yeah, you have to get clear about that in the beginning.

[00:07:17] Monique Idemudia: Think about it, map it all out, make it strategy. And that's how you also gonna decide the interval that you send your email newsletters in. So you can, you know, merge a bunch of topics together in one newsletter. And we get a weekly newsletter for example, but if you want to keep it separated, keep it shorter and have, you know, one.

[00:07:40] Email campaign that you send out for just one dedicated topic, you might want to send out more emails and yeah. Have a higher frequency of sending things out. So it depends on what your audience wants to see. Obviously they like to read. If they injure your emails, you can have different campaign types as well.

[00:07:57] So you'll definitely have to tailor that to your business.

[00:08:01] Cole Schafer: For sure.

[00:08:02] Monique Idemudia: How about the content strategy? How do you go about creating a newsletter content strategy? So you've mentioned a couple of objectives that your email newsletters can have, like being entertaining, being, educating, being informative, being convincing as well.

[00:08:18] How do you go about that?

[00:08:21] Cole Schafer: Yeah. So the content strategy, I think that that is built entirely around you or your brands tastes. So I would recommend before anyone starts a newsletter, just take them take two to three weeks of subscribing to your favorite brands, newsletters in, you know, fill up your inbox each week with those newsletters and just do like, and what you don't like, then what you'll find is there's, there's some newsletters that are super, superconversational.

[00:08:47] Right. And it's easy to read and they're great. And then you have these other newsletters that maybe they're they're short and they're to the point. And they might be four or five sentences. Like someone emailed me the other day about starting a newsletter where they said, you know, podcasts are, there's so many podcasts episodes out there.

[00:09:05] How cool would it be to start a newsletter where you just receive one. Podcast recommendation each morning with a short write-up on like, here's why you should read. Here's why you should watch this episode. That's like an example of like a content strategy where you're, you're, you're sort of deciding what you're building the newsletter around.

[00:09:23] So obviously first and foremost, you got to come up with tone. like we talked about, then you have to decide obviously like, okay, is it informal? Is it educational? Is it entertaining? Is it inspiring then? I think you kind of like dive into, like, what is the. what will I be giving the audience?

[00:09:38] You know? And like, if you're the podcast newsletter, it's a one really awesome podcast each day. If you're a writer like me, it might be, here's all the writing I did this week. If you are a like let's say you're a car or let's say you're a company that changes oil for like cars. You might have a weekly newsletter that.

[00:09:55] Breaks down like a really cool vintage vehicle that you saw, or like a fun fact about like a specific model of car for car lovers. If you are someone who does health supplements and stuff, your newsletter might be kind of like this week in health, you know, what, what are, what are what's some like really interesting news, you know?

[00:10:13] So I think you just have to make sure you're tailoring it content to your business in, in what your audience is interested in, in reading.

[00:10:21] Monique Idemudia: Yes. Exactly. So I think most people already have a bunch of content. you can obviously get inspirations from your black posts, from your podcast episodes, things that you see things that you read in magazines or other newsletters, people that you follow and other brands that you follow on social media.

[00:10:41] And yeah, everything that inspires you to create content around then, and then you can repurpose everything too as well. So you already have the content and then depending on your campaign goals, you decide what content to share in that specific campaign. your goal could be lead generation. It could be sales, you know, if you're selling or you're making an offer or it's like upselling or cross-selling, which is directly related to something,

[00:11:08] That they've already bought. it could be lead nurturing. It could be a brand awareness campaign. It could be customer retention or customer loyalty, or just like, Hey, happy birthday, whatever here's a discount offer, whatever it may be. and that's how you decide what you do. And here's a great tip.

[00:11:26] Keep the text image ratio to 80% texts and 20% images. This is what people like to see the most. So you have the perfect text image ratio, so people have enough to read, but they also have some images that visualize the content that you're talking about. If there's too many images, you also increase likeliness of your email landing in a spam folder.

[00:11:51] Cole Schafer: Yeah, I like that. I think that that's a good, a good rule of thumb.

[00:11:54] Monique Idemudia: Right. What about newsletter marketing strategy? What tips do you have to crafting your strategy?

[00:12:00] Cole Schafer: are we speaking more on the basis of like tactics to get newsletters open and read and all that, or, yeah. Yeah. so I think one, one rule of thumb to think about is always like just the subject of, of your newsletter or every email.

[00:12:16] a lot of times I think that sometimes as writers. or marketers or whatever we get into this mentality of like, okay, if we spend three hours on this newsletter and we're putting a ton of energy into it people are just going to naturally know, we put that amount of time in, and they're just going to read it.

[00:12:31] Cole Schafer: When in reality, like people are getting bombarded with all kinds of newsletters and emails and offers. many of them are Landing in people's inboxes with just terrible subject lines. And so to, to stand out, we have to make really, really strong subject lines. So kind of like what you said about the 20, 80% rule with pictures and text.

[00:12:51] I try to challenge people to abide by that same idea with subject lines. So if you're in a spin. Let's say you're spending 10 hours putting together a newsletter, which obviously that's probably too much time. That's a lot of time, but let's say you're spending 10 hours. I just challenge people.

[00:13:08] Like two of those hours need to be spent writing the perfect subject line and preview text, because if people aren't seeing the subject line and they're not wanting to open it, you can spend. Three weeks on a newsletter. It doesn't matter because they're not actually opening it and seeing what you've, what, what brilliance you've written.

[00:13:27] Right. And so just follow like the 20% rule of, of that, and that, that applies to headlines too, for sales pages or titles for blog posts, it's the 20% rule, you know, 20% of your time writing anything needs to be spent on the title because it kind of, it kind of functions like a mini billboard, right. Where it's like you're.

[00:13:45] like when you go into the grocery store and you walk by the, the meat section, there's like always a little label that that's popped out of the ribeye or the salmon to kind of label what it is. That to me is what a subject line is for an email. And so it's really important to make those descriptive, make thempique people's curiosity, make them entertaining that way they can get in the email.

[00:14:08] Cole Schafer: And then you actually have a chance at them reading it and you selling them on whatever it is.

[00:14:13] Monique Idemudia: Yes, that's right. So the subject line and the preview texts are just the key components because they decide whether or not you get the open. And if you don't get the open, obviously then you also can't get the click through of a person hasn't even opened your email in the first place.

[00:14:29] So that is really, really important. You have to nail that and put a lot of. Thought and time into that. So you're really increase your open rates and you see the overall marketing effectiveness of your email newsletter Marketing. Go up. If you do that too, that's a great tip.

[00:14:46] what about Marketing newsletter names? You ran three newsletters yourself and they're called sticky notes, stranger than fiction and chasing Hemingway.

[00:14:56] Right. how did you come up with those names and how do you choose the perfect name for your newsletter? Do you even need a name for your newsletter?

[00:15:06] Cole Schafer: Yeah. I mean, I think newsletters or like anything like any sort of product or brand or whatever. I think when you attach a name to it, it creates this sort of personality around it and you can kind of create a brand around, around a newsletter.

[00:15:19] So with sticky notes, I just was thinking it was like the flagship newsletter for honey. Copy my My sort of writing agency and it just felt really natural. so that's why I called it sticky notes and then was stranger than fiction. that one is centered around sort of crazy marketing ideas that brands have done to make a lot of money.

[00:15:40] so the idea of like stranger than fiction was kind of going with like a cooler old school vibe, but the name kind of. Brings in this idea that like these ideas are like stranger than what you've read, like even in fiction books and stuff. And then the last one chasing Hemingway is a paid newsletter that I run, which we that's kind of an interesting subject, like the whole thing, the whole idea around paid newsletters, but thatErnest Hemingway is one of my favorite writers and that newsletter is focused around writing in life.

[00:16:08] Cole Schafer: Been kind of how the two sort of mesh together and people have enjoyed that too. But I think naming your newsletter is really important because in a way it's it's its own product, even if it's free and it just allows, it makes it a lot easier to brand what you're doing.

[00:16:22] Monique Idemudia: Exactly. Yeah. If you have a catchy name, that's easy to remember.

[00:16:27] It's like your brand and people are going to remember that. And when they refer to you or they forward your emails they can always use your newsletter name, like you're podcasting, for example, and you can keep everything on brand and it helps you a lot. If you give it a name.

[00:16:43] Cole Schafer: For sure.

[00:16:43] I think the podcast example's great where there's, there's podcasts that we see and they have really catchy names and I think newsletters need to be treated the same way for sure.

[00:16:53] Monique Idemudia: Yes, definitely. I agree. And how do you get your ideas? Where do you get your ideas from?

[00:17:00] so a lot of it comes from reading but then, you know, life experience as well. So like just to start with reading. I try to read one book every week or every two weeks. So I definitely am a voracious reader just because like, I love reading, but also as a writer, I think it's really important to read.

[00:17:17] Cole Schafer: I mean, I imagine for you, like hosting a podcast, you probably have gotten better at them as you've started listening to more podcasts, right. To kind of hear like what people are doing right. And what they're doing wrong. And so a lot of my ideas come from the books that I've read where for example, like.

[00:17:33] I was digging into a Tom Robbins book called still life of woodpecker. And in that book the author it's a piece of fiction, but he kind of writes about how, at one point in time, Hawaii had a really bad rat problem. And so they shipped a bunch of mongooses to the Island. But since mongoose isare awake during the day and rats are awake during the night, the mongoose is in rats, kind of just missed each other.

[00:17:57] So it didn't, it. At all. And today, like those mongooses hunt seven out of the top 10, most endangered bird species in Hawaii. So it's like a really big problem. So now, now Hawaii has like a rat problem and a mongoose problem. But anyways, I read that, I thought it was super entertaining and I thought, huh, I wonder if I can kind of create, turn this into a blog post.

[00:18:19] And the moral of the story is. Be careful you're not trading out your problems for bigger problems. Right. and so I did that and I think that that's the magic and reading is if you're reading with a pit in your underlining, A lot of the work is you're going you can just have like a, an article each week, just write in those pages where you're pulling inspiration from, from them.

[00:18:40] another one is just like living and exposing yourself to new experiences. That's where I get a lot of my ideas. I have a motto, it's all material in kind of what I mean by that is like, if you're. Spending time with friends or like even in a romantic relationship or a bar or whatever, like there's constantly material, that's sort of inundating your mind.

[00:19:01] Cole Schafer: You know, whether it's an interesting thing that someone says or a a strange, like, drink that you ordered at the bar or whatever. And so I'm constantly just trying to like live my life in such a way where I'm just paying attention. So that's the, that's where the ideas come

[00:19:15] Monique Idemudia: from. Yes, exactly. Just make sure that you stay woke all the time.

[00:19:20] And if you love what you do, you're passionate about your industry. You're constantly picking up new things. Anyway, you know, things are changing. almost constantly, nothing stays the same for long. So if you're constantly learning, you're staying on top of your game. You're reading a lot. I read a lot too.

[00:19:37] I think that's just a huge thing that. it will always keep you inspired and you see stuff and read stuff that you can write about and add your own personal touch to it and then share it with your audience. So those are definitely some great tips.

[00:19:53] Cole Schafer: Thank you.

[00:19:55] Monique Idemudia: So now let's talk about monetizing your email newsletter. How can you monetize your newsletters?

[00:20:01] Cole Schafer: Sure. So I think that there's, so I think there's kind of four, I mean, I only want to say there's four ways. I'll just give some examples. One example is you can have a really big newsletter that is, let's say a 10,000 people and that's free and that goes out every week.

[00:20:19] but for your super fans you can create another new. That's very niche and very focused and you might charge 10, 20, 30, 40 bucks a month for them to be, to subscribe to that newsletter. So the idea is like you know, one to 10% of the people in the big newsletter will trickle down into that smaller newsletter where you focus on like, kind of a very specific part of marketing or a very specific part of writing.

[00:20:41] so that's one way and brands like the hustle have done that, where they have like this really big newsletter. Butter. And then they offer a specialty newsletter at $300 a year called trends. and that's like for everyone who are like super fans to the hustle and want to come up, like want to learn kind of behind the scenes, really awesome business ideas.

[00:21:01] Cole Schafer: So a paid newsletter is one way. Another way is Just kind of treat you your treat, your product, your service, sort of like an advertisement at the bottom of everyone, one of those emails. So you might write an email and then at the bottom you might say this email is sponsored by this product that I offer.

[00:21:18] so in all of my newsletters, I always have one section where I'm trying to sell one of my copywriting guides or freelance. So you're paid newsletters or poetry books or whatever. so I think that's the way you monetize it to where you have if you're offering like a product or a digital product, you just have like, kind of an ad placement at the bottom of that newsletter, where you're pointing people in that direction.

[00:21:40] Cole Schafer: If you're a service type of brand, like let's say. A coach like a life coach or a copywriter where you're offering your freelance services. Another great option is at the bottom of that newsletter, kind of having a Calendly link where it says, you know, I take calls during this time there 15 minutes, just hit a time and we'll jump on the phone and we can talk about how I can help your business.

[00:22:02] And that's a little bit more hands on that are at work where you are having to get on the phone and sell more. But you're getting on the phone with warm leads who have been reading your newsletter for weeks at a time. They know they want to work with you. and it's, it's much easier to sell that person than it is like just a, kind of a cold sort of outrage.

[00:22:18] and then, you know, another way too, is. There's brands that do kind of the donation idea where, Hey, this newsletter is completely free, but it takes a lot of time feel free to donate here. And so an example of that is brainpickings.org. I believe she runs an amazing like newsletter and blog with thousands and thousands of blogs.

[00:22:38] Cole Schafer: And she has what she calls kind of like monthly contributors. So people love her work so much that they're willing to pay one, two. $1,000 a month just to S to support her work. I think I do it, honey. Copy. That's similar to that. It's I have A product called buy me a Moscow mule. And it's just 15 bucks where like, let's say someone reads me, they might not have the money to buy like a $97 guide or like pay thousands to work with me, like as a copywriter, but they might love my work and they just want to say, thank you.

[00:23:09] So they can just buy me a $15 Moscow mule. So I think treat the, treat, the pricing and the monetization as like a really as something fun, not as something you're ashamed of. And I think that that energy will kind of like. Shine through for your readers too. Like they'll, they'll be like, okay, like they're, they're clearly having fun.

[00:23:29] Absolutely. Yeah. And you, there's no reason that you should be ashamed of it because you're providing value and you're asking for something back, but you've been giving something prior to that, to people. So that's why we do it. Right. It's the principle. Well, a first deprecation, we're creating content, we're providing value.

[00:23:48] And then we ask for something in return and we're not doing cold outreach to a cold audience that doesn't even know anything about ads and has never heard anything from us, but they're, you know, Your warm audience, they're your loyal fans. So your existing customers that have already purchased something from you and you present them with new opportunities that are just win-wins and it makes sense for them because you know, your audience, you know, what problems they have, what challenges they're facing, and you're offering solutions to that.

[00:24:20] Well, your products and your services. So if you have the right audience that subscribe to your email newsletter, right? They'll just make sense and it'll be natural and yes, you gave us some great tips. And another way to monetize your email newsletter is by leveraging affiliate marketing. You may come across a lot of softwares and tools or whatever it may be that you really like.

[00:24:45] That you're using yourself. You have a positive experience with, and you know that your audience can benefit from that too. So you can share your affiliate links in your emails and then receive a commission for the referral from the company. So it doesn't even have to be your own products and services.

[00:25:03] You can also get into that and monetize your newsletter that

[00:25:06] way. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the affiliates are really interesting route and especially if you're already using the product or service and you like it and you dig it. I think you are doing your audience a disservice if you're not sharing that with them.

[00:25:21] Yes,

[00:25:22] Monique Idemudia: exactly. So, how do you promote your newsletter? How do you go about that and get new subscribers and yeah, just do some promo and some work getting free.

[00:25:33] Cole Schafer: Yeah. So, so my, my strategy there is I try to write You know, anywhere from three to five articles every single week. And then I take those articles and I really try to put those in the best position to pick up new subscribers.

[00:25:48] So for a long time it was medium. I don't, I don't like medium anymore. I feel like it's kind of a dying platform, but for a couple years it was really great to republish on. another one is like LinkedIn. Twitter Instagram. So I'll, I'll write an article, I'll put it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, like just put it out there into the world.

[00:26:06] and then I'll also make sure, like I'm keeping SEO in mind with that article. And then in that article, I will add several links to the newsletter sort of landing page. And then they'll get to the landing page that has converted for me at like 80%, which has been great. And they'll drop their email. And then I have like an actual sequence that they go through. So an onboarding email sequence of five to seven emails.

[00:26:30] and yeah, that's how I, that's how I get it. Or it's just writing tons of articles, but I think it's also important to keep in mind that if you don't have the time to write a lot of articles, if you run a podcast, that can be a great way to get email addresses. If you are on Twitter, Instagram, it can be as simple as doing like.

[00:26:45] Cole Schafer: Throwing it, every time you write a tweet and you put it out there, commenting on that tweet and saying, Hey, if you want other great content like this, just subscribe here. Same with LinkedIn, like post an article or a picture, or like a quick write-up and then the first comment can be, Hey, by the way, I run this daily newsletter champ.

[00:27:02] Check it out. So there's, there's multiple ways you can go about Marketing your newsletter. Yeah,

[00:27:07] Monique Idemudia: absolutely. Share it, spread the word, put it out there. leverage social media posts, links to your landing pages, where you offer your free lead magnets and entice people to sign up for your newsletter on social.

[00:27:21] And then also you can encourage your existing subscribers to share your emails and four with them to a friend or three friends offer an incentive to do that. So, you know, they're more likely to do it when they get something like a 10% discount or whatever they're forwarded your email newsletter to three of their friends.

[00:27:41] those are all things that you can do. And those are also all things that your email tool can track for you.

[00:27:48] Cole Schafer: Absolutely. Yeah. On the three friends front, I was reading something the other day. That was really interesting, but the. He's a really famous director. He did directed a lot of plays and acted as well, but his name was Andre or his Andre Gregory.

[00:28:02] And when he was crowdfunding his first theater back then it wasn't done on like a platform. It was done in person. And so he would he talked one person into throwing three dinner parties. And then at those dinner parties, anyone who was inspired, he just said, Hey, if you're inspired, All that I ask is like put together three more dinner parties for me.

[00:28:21] and over the course of like two years, he spoke at 200 different dinner parties. And that just shows you like the. Power of compounding, right? Where one person can lead to three people and then those three people can lead to nine people and so on and so forth. So I think the same thing can apply to email marketing, where you might tell your subscribers, Hey, if you like this, don't feel like you have to share it on social media.

[00:28:47] Cole Schafer: Like just share it with three of your best friends. and that goes a long way over the course of a year.

[00:28:53] Monique Idemudia: Yes. That's right. So people have also ask, what is the difference between your email marketing and a newsletter?

[00:29:01] my email marketing and a newsletter. I think it's probably important to. Recognize like the contrast between a newsletters, like a weekly newsletter. So it's like an aunt, like each week you check in, you send the newsletter, but let's say I'm launching a new product. Like I'm, I'm about to launch this community of writers and marketers and entrepreneurs.

[00:29:19] I will do sort of a email campaign. So it'll be like email marketing where I send to my list three or four different emails, Marketing that new community. so I think. Email newsletter to meet like the email newsletter to me, feels like a marathon where you're going to run it for several years.

[00:29:37] I hope I run mine for forever, you know, like I really love it. But inside of that, when you're marketing something, you kind of need, it need to view it as like sprints and miniature, where. Once or twice a year, you have these sprints where you're trying to really market the crap out of like a single product or service that's like been released.

[00:29:55] Cole Schafer: So that to me is the difference. Like a newsletter is a marathon. Whereas email marketing is more sprints to kind of drum up sales really quickly.

[00:30:02] So your newsletter is like an ongoing activity. You keep on sending out your newsletters to your subscribers on, a regular interracial, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly.

[00:30:16] Monique Idemudia: Yearly people are going to forget about you. We sent them an email. So a year, a lot of people will do bi-weekly too. If they feel like they can't do weekly, but monthly, what leg not be enough to stay friend of mine. So you can find like the perfect time for you there. And it's part of your email marketing.

[00:30:34] It's just a component of it. So you can have other email marketing campaign types, like promoting your products, like you said, you're launching something or just, you know, thank you emails. Thank you for your purchase. Thank you for attending this webinar or confirmation email a lead magnet delivery email, where you deliver that ebook or PDF or whatever you downloaded.

[00:30:55] There's so many. Emails that you send out reminder emails so many different campaign types and your newsletter is only one of them. So it's part of your email marketing. Yeah,

[00:31:07] Cole Schafer: exactly.

[00:31:09] Monique Idemudia: What are the best practices when it comes to newsletter marketing?

[00:31:15] Cole Schafer: and say consistency is first and foremost.

[00:31:17] I mean, where a lot of people struggle with with starting newsletters is they'll be on it for, you know, a couple of weeks. and they, they write several in advance and then a month goes by and you never hear from them again where I found the power in my newsletter is like, I have been doing it for three years and I surprised send out 50 to 70 each year.

[00:31:40] I just never miss a week. and obviously in those weeks where I'm marketing a product, I send more But I think consistency is the biggest thing that, that like the biggest practice where you can make a newsletter successful is promising to yourself and the people that you're sitting at to that I'm going to show up at this time each week or each month or biweekly.

[00:32:00] and if you do that regularly, I think you'll be really surprised at where in a year.

[00:32:06] Monique Idemudia: Absolutely. You know, it also helps people to build a habit around it. So they expect your emails and they're like, Oh, every Thursday morning at 8:00 AM when I'm having breakfast and I'm having my coffee. I'll read that newsletter.

[00:32:20] It gives me inspiration for the next day. Week, and yeah, just keeps me up to date about what's going on in the industry or whatever it may be. So people expect it and kind of like incorporate it in their routine and they open it and edit. It becomes just this regular practice that they do. And that helps you out a lot.

[00:32:40] So it's not unexpected. And what's also important is when a new person signs up to your email newsletter. Sent them a welcome email right away. And not like later, sometimes I, when signing up to a newsletter and like two weeks later I get a welcome email and then I'm like, wait a minute. I haven't even signed up.

[00:33:02] Is this a scam? Is this being an email? And then I'm like, Oh yeah, I know. I remember it was this in bad from LinkedIn. And they're only sending me the first email now. So make sure you find a setting in your email marketing tool that sends a person a welcome email instantly. yeah, I speak enough email marketing automation, and also sends them the first campaign instantly.

[00:33:26] For example, you send out your newsletter every Monday, a person signs up on a Tuesday. They will get your welcome email, but still six days not receive any news, but that's what they've been looking forward to. Right? That's what they wanted. Something has resonated with them and you're copywriting somewhere.

[00:33:43] And they were like, Hey, I need to sign up to this newsletter. I need to, you know, stay up to date and I want to get all this information. And then they hear nothing from you for six days or even worse. If your newsletter is not even weekly, it could be longer than when you from you. So you want to send the last campaign that you send to your list.

[00:34:00] Plus the welcome email, right away, set up an automation like that. It's really simple. And yeah, it'll help you out a lot because if people don't recognize you and your email, if you wait too long until you send it, they feel like they haven't like ever signed up kind of market is spam or unsubscribe immediately.

[00:34:20] Cole Schafer: So true. I think like to underscore something you said there on like making sure that you're sitting them like a, your first campaign or whatever if you go back through like, whether it's MailChimp or whatever you use, you can kind of see your campaigns that have been the most successful, the most open, the most forwarded to other people and just like come up with.

[00:34:41] The top three, four or five of those and make that your email sequence, you know, where they have their welcome email, then they have three or four of your most popular emails ever sent out. and then obviously they're going to get your first email, like on that Monday, where they're actually part of the newsletter.

[00:34:56] but that's, that's exactly what I used for my, for my onboarding sequence.

[00:35:01] Monique Idemudia: Exactly. Yeah. That's even more advanced having a full onboarding sequence, which is not just one email, but a sequence of emails that just prepares them for what they can expect. You can introduce yourself as a person and just boat back connection there.

[00:35:16] Right. Absolutely. Okay. is there anything else that you'd like to say in this episode, like one secret tip that you have and you haven't shared it yet?

[00:35:26] just strive to be the best thing that the person reads all day in their inbox.

[00:35:30] I think like as long as you're doing that, like you're going to be just fine in the whole world of newsletters. So.

[00:35:36] Monique Idemudia: Yes, absolutely. It's all about your target audience, tailoring everything to them. Personalization is huge. make it sound like one-on-one communication. You don't want the recipient to notice that you've just sent the same email to thousands of other people really make it seem like a one-on-one message.

[00:35:58] right. Like you write, like you would write yourself to write use emojis. Of course, if it fits to your brand and you don't have to be super corporate and professional and just yeah. Make it just natural human personal. Yeah. but don't get too creepy with the personalization. I know that you can track a lot of things and add a lot of personalization, tokens and variables in there.

[00:36:22] you don't want, you know, your subscribers to full stalked or whatever and make it feel creepy. Find a healthy balance there. That's what I would add as some more tips and best practices.

[00:36:33] Cole Schafer: You don't want to go over the topic and it can Marketing can definitely get creepy with like all the analytics and over personalization.

[00:36:39] At the end of the day, people recognize that you're sending the newsletter to hundreds, if not thousands of people. And you don't have to like use their first name at every opportunity you can and stuff. So,

[00:36:50] Monique Idemudia: yeah, that's right. So Cole, when people want to reach out to you and learn more about, you know, what you do, what is the best way to contact you?

[00:36:59] Cole Schafer: Sure. So if they just go to honeycopy.com I've made the site very easy to navigate, but you know, far right hand corner of that side are my newsletters, so they can subscribe to any of those newsletters. And I'm also on Twitter at honey copy. And then I'm really active on Instagram too. Just.

[00:37:16] Cole underscore schafer and then I'm on LinkedIn as well. which I'll be easy to find. They're just my name. so yeah, I I'd say if they're going to do anything, subscribe to one of my newsletters and eventually they'll find me on everything else.

[00:37:28] Monique Idemudia: Okay, perfect. Will link the link to your website as well as to all your social media accounts in the description below.

[00:37:36] So make sure you check it out. It's definitely worth checking out and I hope you're going to be inspired by Cole's content for your own writing as well.

[00:37:46] Wonderful. Okay. It comes to email newsletter Marketing. It is super important that you have the right tool who has all of the features that you need. As a small business owner, you want to reach and engage your audience and use precise, targeting to find the right prospects and grow your audience. And you want to capture their attention with messages that match who they are.

[00:38:12] And you also want to nurture and educate your audience. You want to grow your relationship with your audience by providing tailored guidance and to help them learn what's available to address their needs.

[00:38:25] And then you, of course also want to convert and close deals as their confidence and you grows. You can provide your individual audience members. With well-timed calls to action to take the next step with you and you want to support and grow and delight each customer by knowing what they want and when they want it, you want to make them so happy that they buy more and more and tell others about you and what they did.

[00:38:56] And the perfect tool that helps you to do all that is active campaign. Dragon Digital Marketing has partnered out with active campaign because it's an email marketing and marketing automation tool that has been specifically designed what small businesses and mind that means it's been specifically created to help small businesses like yours and mine, because we use it ourselves here.

[00:39:21] Dragon Digital Marketing.

[00:39:23] To automate and activate our entire customer experience. tough campaign as the number one automation platform out there, there is literally no better tool. So I highly encourage you to sign up and try it out. If you haven't already, there's a free trial for you to get started with active campaign,

[00:39:45] there's not even a credit card required to sign up for your free trial. So make sure you go ahead and check it out. The link is in the episode description.

[00:39:56] thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode today. I hope that you've learned a lot and if you need any help with your email marketing, you need an email marketing strategy. You need some consulting and help with your email newsletters to see a better performance there, you can always reach out to our agency, Dragon, Digital Marketing, and we're happy to help you out.

[00:40:20] And of course, we also offer other digital marketing services. So if you're ready to expand your online presence across the board, you can always reach out to us. We're a small business, digital marketing agency. , and we're dedicated to helping your small business grow.

[00:40:37] And if you want a summary of everything that we've covered in this episode, you need to check out the show notes on Dragon dash digital dash Marketing dot com. They you'll find links and further resources and a summary of everything that we've talked about in this episode. So you always have it accessible right there.

[00:40:58] Don't need to take any notes and there's also some further tips and more free resources that you can grab and download for free on the website. So make sure that you check out the show notes on our website. Again, its Dragon dash digital dash Marketing dot com. I also leave a link to the show notes in the episode description.

[00:41:16] So you can go ahead and check it out.

[00:41:20] I hope you've enjoyed the episode and you've learned a lot and I'm looking forward to see you. And the next episode until next time.