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<inaudible> You’re listening to the sweet life entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator, a probate. Hi, you guys. And welcome to episode 179 of the sweet life business podcast. I’m April beach, your host Development mentor, and strategist. And today it’s just me and you today.
We’re diving into what I would call a sweet life business foundation show. And I’m going to tell you the background as to why I chose to deliver this training. I can actually share with you why this training was important to deliver in just a second, but before we get started, let’s make sure you are in the right place. Today’s show is for business owners that are struggling to understand how to use email marketing,
when to use email marketing and why you should even be using email marketing at all. Now, this isn’t something that is only for new businesses. As a matter of fact, our company helps more established companies that have been around forever, but just haven’t really caught up to how you can grow your business through email marketing and online business development, yet more than anybody else with this problem,
there are more established businesses in the marketplace today, both in person and local businesses and online businesses that are either not using email marketing at all or using it totally incorrectly. So in this show, we’re going to make sure you know how to use email marketing correctly. So regardless of your local or online email marketing is a must and you’re going to fully see and understand that by the end of this episode,
if you’re struggling to understand how to use email marketing, to connect with your clients, increase your sales, and the difference between all the different kinds of email marketing you can do, then this show is for you. And at the end of this show, you’re going to know the difference between your business email and an email marketing manager. You’re going to know how to set up your business email and what to use that email option four.
And you’re going to know how to set up your business, email marketing manager and when, and how to use that option to grow your business. So we’re covering a lot today, but this is a foundational training. It doesn’t mean your businesses has to be new. Like I said, this could be for established businesses and actually more often, that is the case of the companies that are coming to us that need email marketing in place.
So what really actually made me decide that this was an important episode to do because frankly, having my sleeves rolled up in business for so long, sometimes these foundational trainings, they’re just kind of the back of my hand, just like, I’m sure you’re so close to your area of expertise, those basic questions. Sometimes you overlook because you know them so well.
You just automatically think that everybody else knows and understands them. And so here’s a little background story. I was teaching a group masterclass of businesses that I consult internationally yesterday. And during this class we had open questions and answers and one person asked a question. It was a very basic question about email marketing and really the whole rest of this business group coaching session turned this pivot to be all about email setup,
email marketing managers, and a lot of things that people were struggling with with it wasn’t necessarily the content that I had planned to teach as far as business development strategy, but it made me realize how important this topic is and how many companies are missing it. And then in my private Facebook group, this testimony from yesterday’s training came along and I’m just going to read it to you.
This is from a client of mine. I’m not going to mention her name, but if this testimony resonates with you, if you want to feel this way, then this podcast is definitely a good episode for you to stay tuned into. So this is what my client posted. She said for many years, one of the things that held me back, or to be brutally honest,
shut me down entirely is tech and the daunting tasks of building a landing page and opt in whatever hiring someone is not an option for me. And I prefer to learn it just now, as soon as I got off this group training call, I signed up for the software that I’m going to tell you in today’s episode, I was just blown away after watching the tutorial and how to create a simple opt in and how to connect my email responses,
et cetera, after so long filling step, this process brought tears to my eyes and I finally broke through, excuse the tears, but I’m so happy and I feel so much better now. So that was a testimony from one of my clients based on the business coaching session we had yesterday about this topic. And it really had me thinking that this is an important topic,
and I apologize to you as it foundational and advanced business training podcast. If I have skipped over this, I know we recreated a lot of episodes in the beginning. I think episodes number 12, 13, and 14 were all about how to set up your email marketing manager and what is a list and how to use this. But it’s episode number 179.
So years later, I haven’t covered this in a long time. And for that, please forgive me. And I apologize and let’s go ahead and dive into today’s training. All the show notes, all the resources I’m going to share with you can be found by visiting Sweetlife podcast.com forward slash one seven, nine<inaudible>. Okay. First things first, there are two types of email platforms that you should have for your business.
You should have your personal business email, and you should have a separate email marketing manager, totally separate from each other. They are not the same thing. And I think this is where some of the confusion comes in. So let me break down the difference. The personal business email is something. For example, like mine is april@sweetlifeco.com. That’s my personal business email.
It’s where I email people. One-on-one maybe I might send an email to copy and CC some people at the most five, that would actually be a very large group to send a very personal email to my email marketing manager is the software that it holds my list of leads, clients and partners in my email marketing manager is the one that sends out weekly. Sometimes biweekly broadcast to everybody on my list.
I cannot do that nor do I want to do that from my personal business email, that needs to be done separately through eight email marketing manager. So that is a very basic foundational difference. And I was shocked again on this training yesterday and really overlooked how many businesses didn’t understand the difference between those foundations. So let’s go ahead and dive a little bit deeper into each one.
So your business email, this is for sure. Number one, rule number one has to be, and I don’t care if I’m not supposed to say has to be on the show. You guys know me. I’m always going to just lay it out there. The way it is. It has to be at your domain name. It can be cindy@theworld.com.
It can be april@sweetlifepodcast.com. It is never going to be april@gmail.com. You should never for professional branding purposes, have your business email, not in end in your custom URL domain. If you take nothing away from this show, except for this one thing, I want you to run as fast as you can. And I want you to customize your email so that it is your first name at your URL at your company domain name,
no matter what, please do not send anybody in email from podcast@gmaildotcomoryourbusinessnameburstatyahoo.com. It is incredibly unprofessional and it will immediately disqualify you. And frankly, it’ll make your brand look like shit. And so I don’t want that to happen to you. That’s why you’re here. And so it’s my job to tell you to fix that first. Now let’s talk about how to fix that.
We recommend as a company using G suite Gmail for business, there are a lot of different options out there that you can use. G suite does cost right now. Currently I think I pay $5 per month per customer email that I have, but it’s really important because accessing G suite as a business owner allows me to do a couple of things. Number one,
it allows me to accomplish that professional email that I want and need to have for my brand. So again, mine, and you’re welcome to shoot me an email. If you want. Mine is april@sweetlifeco.com, but then I also am able to create custom email addresses for my team. So I have my assistant, I have my editor, I have my marketing manager.
I have my podcast, guest relations person. They all have their own separate email addresses. And all of them are@sweetlifeco.com. It has the same ending having a G suite account enables me to do that. Now I’ve put some links in the show notes for you. You can go and create your own G suite business email right now for five bucks in email address.
And it will customize your email for you. G suite will also give you access to tons of other software options like spreadsheets and different advanced business bundle options that are really important to have to grow your company and to manage your communications. So we love G suite and no I’m not making any money. I’m telling you to go there. I’m telling you to go there cause it’s easy and it’s cheap and it’ll make you look good.
The second thing I want you to know about this business email is this is where, like I said, previously, you email people one-to-one. So if I’m going to shoot an email over to my business partners at this other company, it’s coming from me personally, and it’s coming out of my G suite business email. Here is a tip. As you’re setting this up,
I want you to do a couple of things. Number one, I want you to customize your signature line within this email, in my signature line, under my personal email, I have my logo. I have links to where people can listen to the podcast. I have my title and I have some other quick action things like my phone number is in there as well.
This isn’t something that I’m just going to email everybody in the world, but these specific people, I want them to know how to get in touch with me. Hence sending them a direct personal email. These are people I want to work with people whose business I want to have and people I want to help and serve and support. So it’s important that they know how to connect with me.
And I make sure that my signature is set up. So every single email I send, whether it’s from my mobile phone or whether it’s from my desktop or my iPad is all looking really spiffy and professional and giving people what they want and need from me now, really super expert tip, if you are just a solo entrepreneur. So if there’s only one of you and you don’t want to manage all the emails yourself in your personal email inbox,
then I actually recommend you create two different emails. And one of them could be your first name at your company URL. And the second one is something like hello or support or info or help or welcome, create a separate catch, all email for all of those other emails that are going to be inbound emails. But frankly, they’re just, you’re not really sure you want to give those inbound emails access to your personal business inbox.
So that means you would connect two separate business emails, one for you personally. And one is a catchall for all the other inquiries, and you should still have that. If you have a team in our company, we have a catchall email. We have hello, it’s Sweetlife co.com. And then we have very specific email addresses for different functions in different divisions within our business.
Like I said, for example, podcast@sweetlifeco.com is where people pitch us to be a guest on this show. I want those emails only landing in one inbox because frankly, I personally hate reading emails. I would rather do anything else all day long than sit in my inbox. So we actually create many different emails. So when I’m looking for something specific, I don’t have to dig it all out of one whole email.
I can go just to the podcast@sweetlifecode.com, email inbox, and find exactly what I’m looking for as an example. So that is the first kind of business email that every single business should have out the gate. Like I said, don’t be that person that has an at Gmail or at Yahoo or heaven forbid had AOL. If you have an at AOL, indeed,
then you haven’t listened to any of these podcast episodes. And I just don’t even know what to say to you at this point in time. But I actually did get an email from somebody that was at AOL and I’m not even sure how technically that is even possible anymore, but I did receive one a couple of months ago. All right. So that is the first type of business email manager you need.
You’re just going to use it to email people one on one, and to receive inbound emails. The second type of email manager you should have is what I call an email marketing manager. An email marketing manager is what manages your outbound communications with either your entire list of leads. So all of the people in your database, or with only a certain section or a certain subset of people on your list.
So an example of this is let’s just go back to that same case study. I shared about my international group of entrepreneurs that I coach on Mondays. I want to, for example, send them an email saying, Hey, don’t forget, meet me for a group coaching session register here. I am not sitting down to write individually emails to go out to each one of those people.
No, I’m writing one email and I’m sending it to only the people who are in that group business mastermind. So my email marketing manager is capable of segmenting, who I want those emails to go to and managing the outbound emails for me, my personal business, Gmail, number one at a one at doing that. Number two. If I did that out of my personal business,
Gmail, I would probably be flagged for spam email marketing managers are strategically developed so that they are compliant and you are not spamming people. That’s why it’s incredibly important to have one. As we talked about here, a lot on the show, we’re always talking about grow your list, grow your list. And frankly, I realized that there are many of you guys that don’t even know what the hell that means.
That’s fine. And don’t, let’s talk about that as it relates to email marketing manager. So your list is a list of names and email addresses that are either leads for your business partners, for your business clients, for your business, or they fall into another miscellaneous category. But where do you grow your list? Where do you collect this database? In a lot of companies,
we call this a CRM. It’s a client relationship management software, but there are so many businesses that don’t need a full fledged CRM. A lot of CRMs managed billing and communications back and forth and workflows and all of these bells and whistles that frankly, most businesses don’t meet. So that’s when we scale back from a full fledged CRM, and you only need an email marketing manager to manage your list,
segment your list, and continue to collect names and email addresses to add to your list. That’s what an email marketing manager does. And in this particular episode, we aren’t talking about the marketing side of how to gather those names, how to increase the leads to land on this list. I’m simply talking about the software and where to put this content, where to put this information in your client database.
So now let’s chat a little bit deeper about what else your email marketing manager can and will do for you. That’s incredibly important. And you must have, again, doesn’t matter if you are a local business, if you’re a brick and mortar business, if you’re an online business, you need to be using email marketing in order to grow and connect with your audience.
Because here is the goal. Here is the magic. An email marketing manager also utilizes artificial intelligence. So we utilize AI in the form of automation to connect, connecting, communicate with the people in your database automatically without you having to be there sitting down at your little iPad when you would rather be at the beach or wherever and typing out emails, having an email marketing manager sets up automation.
So what we mean by that is when somebody clicks a certain place on your website, or when somebody clicks a link in one of the outbound emails that you send a correct email marketing software will identify that they’ve clicked a certain link or taken a certain action, and it will do a number of things. It could either add a tag to that individual person letting you know that that person is interested in the certain link or whatever it was that they clicked on.
It will send that person an automatic email saying, Hey, we just noticed that you visited our scheduling page, but maybe you didn’t actually schedule with us. How can we help you get on our calendar so that we can serve you better? These are the crazy, amazing things that only an email marketing manager can do for you, that you can’t do yourself.
At least after a certain point, if you ever want to grow a profitable business, you are way too busy serving your clients and dreaming up awesome things. And not some ways to grow your business, connecting with partners out there, shaking hands and kissing babies. You’re not going to be sitting in there typing these damn emails, one for one. And it’s really important that you’re utilizing the software that we have available to us as business owners,
to create automation, which is going to build a deeper relationship with your clients. It’s preprogrammed. It utilizes artificial intelligence and you aren’t even there, but they feel like just send them a personal email. That is not something that your individual business email through G suite is capable of doing. So to summarize today, we talked about two different email marketing platforms that every business needs.
We talked about the fact that you need your personal business email in it’s your name or whatever word you can do, your first name and you know, like your first initial or whatever combination you want to do at your custom business domain or URL. And then we talked about having a separate email marketing manager that manages your database. It’s not a full fledged client relationship management software.
So you’re not diving into investing thousands of dollars sometimes into something like Salesforce, or even hundreds of dollars a month into something like 17 hats or even cheaper dub Sato. There are so many different software out there that they’re incredible. And if you were my client and we sat here face to face and I heard your business and what you need, I might actually recommend that.
But on today’s show, we’re just talking about basic email marketing in the that you can leverage it right now and you should be leveraging it right now without even having all the bells and whistles in your business. And the number one email marketing manager that we currently are turning our clients to granted. This could change a year from now. So don’t come hunt me down if I’ve found a better one.
But as of right now, the best email marketing manager that we have, that we love to recommend that super easy to use is called convert kit. We also have numerous clients that use active campaign and Ontraport. And I’m going to go ahead and put links to all of these in the show notes with free trials for you. And there are numerous different email marketing platforms that many of our clients use.
A lot of our clients love MailChimp. We, and I’ll keep it honest here on the show. We do not believe MailChimp is a good option for new businesses. It’s actually confusing for more, most businesses that we find based on the way that they have engineered the growth of their platform. So it’s just, isn’t a manager that we recommend currently, but I’m going to go ahead input all of the links.
Like I said, in the show notes for today’s show, I hope this helped clarify some business foundations. Again, I don’t care if you’re a new business and established business. I don’t care if you are a local business or a restaurant or a salon or a spa or a hotel. I don’t care if you’re a marketing manager or a speaker or an author,
you should be utilizing email marketing to connect with your audience, both from a personal business side and from an outbound route marketing and messaging through an email marketing manager. And I hope this show cleared up any confusion that you might have had about this, just like it did for my client and many on yesterday’s business development call. And if you have any questions about this at all,
you want to jam on email marketing managers, or maybe this actually opened up a whole entire bucket of new questions for you over and connect with me in my free Facebook community and tagged me in any questions you have. I’m always in there supporting businesses it’s totally free, and you can join that community by going to sweet life community.com and all of the show notes that I mentioned can be found by visiting Sweetlife podcast.com
forward slash one seven nine. Alright, have an awesome week. I’ll talk to you.