Author: Jennifer Roland Cadiente

  • Don’t Know What to Send Your Email List? Start with These 7 Ideas.

    One of the biggest reasons small business owners and solopreneurs stop emailing their list is because they run out of ideas. If you’ve ever stared at a blank screen wondering what to send, this video is for you.

    Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below.

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    Got questions? Email me at jen@emailmarketinggal.com or check out my Services.

    Transcript

    Have you ever sat there and wondered, oh my God, what am I going to send my email list? If so, you’re not alone, because that is the most common question that I get from solopreneurs and small business owners is what the heck should I send out? I’m Jennifer Roland Cadiente. I’m your email marketing gal and the host of the email marketing gal podcast. And that’s what I’m here to talk about this week.

    I’ve got seven ideas for what you can what you can send and some tips for how to actually, you know, create. You don’t need to create a full editorial calendar like someone like me might for your business. But, you know, just a list of these are the things that I can email about this month because this is what we’re promoting.

    This is what we care about. This is what’s happening in in my life. And we can make it much, much easier so that you don’t stop emailing because that’s one of the biggest things that I see happen is you get a great email list.

    You’ve been doing all the right things, but then you just run out of things to say. So you stop emailing until you’ve got something to sell and then they don’t know who you are. They don’t remember why they signed up.

    So your sales don’t go the way that you want them to go. So let’s get into the seven. So one of the things is what are you teaching people give a quick example.

    You know, what’s one thing that you explain to a client this week. That’s an email. What’s one thing that happened in a live meeting that you had or one question that came up in an email reply.

    That’s something you can email about. You may also notice like a trend, you know, like everyone’s asking about, you know, this one thing right now. That means I best email about it.

    Number two is just some frequently asked questions. If you’re not seeing any trends or there’s nothing really that you feel like was new and exciting when you were working with people this week or this month. You know, just go back to the things that people ask you all the time.

    Like that’s how I came up with the idea for this. This video is. It’s the thing that I get asked is what what should I send.

    So, you know, maybe go through and think of the top five things people have asked. You can even send an email saying hey. I want to do a mailbag email.

    Send me your questions so I can answer them. Because if, you know, if one person asks it, chances are everyone else is wondering it too. Another thing that, you know, that people really like.

    Number three is a behind the scenes look at your process. And that can be a lot of fun. Like if you’re doing videos, you can have someone film you while you’re doing stuff.

    And that can be a ton of fun. If not, you can just, you know, walk people through it. You know, you can take pictures or screenshots of things that you’re working on.

    And, you know, blur out any, any private details. And so that people love to see that sort of thing. Number four is a client win or a case study.

    We all love success. And we can all learn from other people’s successes. So if you saw something great happen, like, you know, you help the client with a launch.

    Or you launch something and you did something different and you saw great results. Explain what happened. You know, talk about the challenges that led you to do things or you’re planning to do things this way.

    Talk about how you came up with that solution and then the outcome, you know, dollar figures always, always win. You know, and then if you put in your subject line how so-and-so increased their income by $70,000 this week or whatever, you know, whatever number you think is going to, going to really communicate how successful things were. Number five, quick tip.

    You know, emails don’t have to be super long. You know, that’s one of the things that I have really committed to with these videos is keeping them short and easy to digest because we don’t have all the time in the world. So a quick tip.

    You can write it quickly. You can schedule it to send. People can read it quickly and ask them what they think of it.

    And they can get back and that will keep your, you know, keeps your list healthy, keeps it engaged. It’s a great way to do things. Number six, a lesson you’ve learned.

    These can be some of your most effective emails because you’re talking about you. You’re sharing your personal stories and that builds trust and it builds connection with your people so that they look forward to hearing from you. You know, they’re curious about what they’re going to learn from what you learned.

    They’re curious about what’s going on in your life. You know, I see this a lot in particular with, with solopreneurs because your business gets so tied into your personal life that it becomes part of your business persona and people really love it. You know, like I will talk about how I like Taylor Swift stuff.

    And, you know, I shared a while back, I shared a shadow box that I made of the, the bracelets that I got and my, my memories of when I saw the errors tour in Seattle. I’ll throw a picture up in here since, you know, this was before I started the email marketing gal podcast. So a lot of you wouldn’t have seen that.

    And then, you know, you get people who respond because they’re like, hey, I like Taylor Swift too, or hey, I saw her in, you know, X City or I saw her back when she was brand new. And you get people who don’t like Taylor Swift and I like right back to you and say, why are you talking about her. I can’t escape her, especially right now because they’re all the, you know, speculation about the, about the wedding. So it feels like that’s all I see, you know, on my social media. But you know you can use things like that, things from your life, things you care about. I’ve talked about my son’s track needs.

    Like it’s not, you don’t need to hide your, hide yourself from your emails. And point seven, email that you’re not selling anything, you know, if every email you send in the sales pitch we talked about this before, nobody cares anymore. Your emails need to help, they need to educate, they need to create a connection.

    So say, hey, I’m not selling anything right now. I’m just talking to you. And then next week you can sell because next week maybe it’s time for a big promotion.

    But the key is to just make sure that you’re sending something. So I hope that these seven tips have gotten you thinking, you know, if you are looking for more help. Figuring out email content, you know, you’re not alone.

    I help small business owners and solotrepreneurs plan right and manage their email marketing so they can stay consistent and focus on running their business. So I’ve got some links to my website and, you know, getting signed up for my email list down in the comments or the show notes, depending on where you’re consuming this content. And, you know, always feel free to email me.

    It’s jen@emailmarketinggal.com and I’m happy to answer your questions and figure out if I can help you. So I will talk to you later. See you next time. Until then, happy emailing.

  • Why Your Email List Isn’t Making Money

    I go over the reasons your email list isn’t the cash cow you were expecting — and how you can easily fix the issues.

    Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below.

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    Got questions? Email me at jen@emailmarketinggal.com or check out my Services.

    Transcript

    Hi there, I’m Jennifer Roland Cadiente and I am your email marketing gal. Welcome to my YouTube channel. If this is your first time here, I talk about email marketing and the ways that solopreneurs can make it make it happen more easily.

    So this week I want to talk about why most email lists never make money. I’m sure that you’ve heard that statistic that for every dollar you put into email marketing you get back 35 dollars or 36 dollars seeing 47 dollars but a lot of people aren’t making anything and you know if they’re paying for that email then they’re actually going negative each month and a lot of people you know they take that field of approach. If you build that email list the sales will follow but an email list doesn’t make money just because it exists or even just because it gets really big.

    It makes money because it’s engaged. I’ve seen business owners with thousands of subscribers struggle to generate sales while others with just a few hundred subscribers consistently get clients and customers and the difference isn’t the size it’s what happens after someone joins and I’ve done you know I’ve done all of these things too with my email lists it’s hard sometimes to keep up and you know you don’t have time it feels like every week especially when you know you’re busy with your other work and you don’t always you can’t always think of what to say it gets really rough but here are some of the big mistakes that you’re making you may be making and why your list isn’t earning you money. They only hear from you when something’s being sold and this is huge and this is the one that I know I have done because again it gets hard to keep up and send something out consistently so you realize oh no I need to make money in my business I’ve got this new offer and that’s the first time you email people for three four five six months chances are they’ve forgotten that you exist so they don’t even open the email it may go into spam because they haven’t opened it or they may just be like I don’t even know you why would I want to buy from you second the content that you’re sending out isn’t relevant to what your subscribers actually need so that is a really easy thing to fix: ask people. You can do a survey monkey for free and just ask people what they need to hear you know you can give some multiple choice questions of the things that you typically write about um short answers where they can fill in the things that are you know that they actually care about and would buy if you don’t feel like you’re getting good response to that survey which you know if you haven’t been emailing consistently you probably aren’t then you can ask on social media ask you know ask your friends who are close to your target customers um just whatever you can do to get your content closer to what your people actually need the third mistake is that there’s no clear path from the free content to the things that people could pay you for and i was reading earlier today that you know those of us who’ve been in email marketing for a long time feel like you just you know you have to do all of these things you have to give all this stuff away for free before you can start charging and people who are coming in who are new they just start charging from day one and they’re making a lot more money than some of us so make sure that you’re always offering something paid so that your list can generate money for you so if you think about it you know your email list is more than just a collection of names it should be a tool to build relationships with people that know like and trust you because those are the people that will buy from you so every email is an opportunity to provide value solve a problem share a story guide your audience toward a solution and find a way to allow them to pay you for things so here’s a question are you focused on growing your list or are you focused on nurturing it and as i think you know we talked about early already nurturing it is what is going to get you sales and help you make money so let me know if you’ve made any of these mistakes post in the comments or if you’re getting this on my website go ahead and email me at jen@emailmarketinggal.com and we can have a conversation if you’re ready to build an email list that actually supports your business growth go ahead and connect with me by email and we can maybe set up a discovery call and and you know see how we can work together to help your email list start making your money. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

  • Email Marketing Mistake #1: You Don’t Preview Your Emails

    Post #1 in a series on the email marketing mistakes I see in the real world. This one drives me absolutely insane. Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below.

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    Got questions? Email me at jen@jennifer-roland.com or check out my Services.

    Transcript

    Hi there, and welcome to the YouTube channel for the Email Marketing Gal. I am Jennifer Roland Cadiente, and I’m the Email Marketing Gal. Today, I want to talk about something that I have been seeing a lot, and it makes me think that people are not testing their emails for different platforms before they send them.

    So I’ve gotten emails where the text is super, super tiny on my phone. They look fine on my computer if I read emails there, but 90% of the time, I’m not reading emails on my computer. I’m reading them on my phone.

    And if the text is coming through at like six point on my phone, that is just not readable for me. And a lot of them, like even when I flip my phone sideways, you know, they don’t expand. They just stay in this little tiny, tiny thing with teeny, tiny text.

    So I want to talk about how to preview. One way that I do it is just to send a test email, and you can do that in, you know, any of your email marketing programs. Let’s see, I’m going to share my screen.

    Okay, so if you see, send a test email. So I’m here, I’m in MailChimp on this one. So you send a test email, send it to yourself, then look at it on different devices.

    If you don’t, you know, you don’t have your phone with you or what have you. When you get it in your email, say getting your web browser, you can make it make your web browser smaller so that it starts to look like a phone, and that that can give you a good idea of what, what it looks like. The other option is to preview.

    So all of the email programs have this. So it shows you what it looks like on desktop and on mobile. And again, you can also send a test email from this one.

    It shows what it looks like in an inbox. That is usually, you know, something where you might have to pay more and upgrade your, your service. So, let’s see.

    So this is in Kit, and it has the same option here to preview. It shows you what it looks like if, you know, someone clicks that link to look at the web browser version, your email, in your phone, and see these, these are reasonable. You know, if you look at, look at the way that the text looks, that’s something that someone can read.

    I’m getting, you know, I get these, they’re just tiny. And I think that people have chosen designs that are not mobile responsive, and then they’re not testing them. I’m going to go ahead and stop the sharing.

    And it just makes the email unusable for, you know, for me. And I don’t know if it’s because I keep my phone on dark mode, if that makes it, you know, less easy to, to change, you know, based on how the person has designed the email. But sometimes I feel like, you know, we spend a lot of time designing things, so they look good, you know, in our, our own browser, and not enough time making sure that it’s going to work for everyone.

    So, preview, send yourself a test email, see what it looks like. Let’s see if I can, so like, you know, if you look at that, like that text is tiny. And it doesn’t change when I flip my phone to the side.

    And it’s, I’ve gotten that from, you know, from multiple lists that I’m on and, you know, I like to be on a lot of lists because it’s good research for me. So if you have any questions about, you know, how to preview in the specific, you know, email marketing program that you’re using, go ahead and shoot me an email at jen@emailmarketinggal.com Or you can find me at email marketing gal. It’s just, you know, click the, click the links in the comments area or the description of the video.

    And if you would like to keep up to date on what I have to say about email marketing, go ahead and like and subscribe. I’ll see you next time.