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welcome to WP product talk I'm Amber Hines from equalized digital and I'm Katie Keith from
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bony and today we're going to be talking about growing and nurturing an email list for WordPress product
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businesses this is WP product talk the place where every week we bring you
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insights of product marketing business management and growth customer experience
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product development and more it's your go-to podcast for WordPress product
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owners by WordPress product owners and now enjoy the
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show so email marketing well it's a huge opportunity for pretty much all
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WordPress product companies and yet most of us aren't experts in it and we're leaving money on the table and so that's
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why we've brought Laura in to talk to us hey Laura thanks for coming on hey
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thanks for having me so could you introduce yourself and um let us know what you do yeah so my
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name is Laura and I am the founder of a WordPress plugin called client portal um
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I'm actually a I was a freelancer freelance web designer um Turned Creator
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as the term is now I don't think it was that back then turned WordPress plug-in owner which was actually a bit of an
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accidental thing that kind of happened so um yeah but I've been doing that since I've had client portal since
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2016 and uh I went full-time on it in 2017 so it's been around quite a while
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now cool so we always start off this topic um this section why why is the
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topic so important for uh WordPress products owners so I'll go first and
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continuing what I said a minute ago email marketing is a huge opportunity to build what is effec effectively a
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database of warm and hot contacts that you can send information about your products to whenever you like which
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sounds amazing and at Barn two it was our biggest source of in of sales on the
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Black Friday sale recently but you can get email marketing very right or very
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wrong and it's not easy to find the right balance between promoting your products and spamming people and the
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same applies to actually sending the emails and getting people to sign up on your website in the first place
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so you need to think about the ethics of email marketing legislation like data protection and gdpr and all of those
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things are why we I think we should talk about this topic what about you Laura why do you think it's so important yeah
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so for me email marketing is literally how I got started in this world so I um
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I built an email list um actually based on something else I was teaching design to developers and I built an email list
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just I didn't have anything to sell I was just teaching and when I um came up
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with client portal a lot of the things I was doing to grow my email list
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um that was what sort of started client portal so I was talking about this portal you could create for your clients
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and then you know people were really interested in it and I'm not a developer myself and I knew that I needed to get
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like funding to you know grow client portal and so the only way I could um
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get that funding really I didn't want to you know get funding from out elsewhere was I used my email list to do a
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pre-sale to see if anyone would be interested and you know everything for me has always just been through email
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it's like it's everything I know so I can't imagine having a business without email like without an email list without
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um talk it's how I communicate with people I'm not really big on social media um not because I think there's
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anything wrong with it I just haven't cracked it but um I feel like I'm quite good at email and it's how you know I
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pre-old client portal and then when client portal was doing you know getting better I was going on other podcasts and
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getting people to join my email list and then telling them about client portal and then going from there so I feel like
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it's a really good channel to for people to get started because you know it's not
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easy to grow an email list especially at the start but there are things you can do to um grow it uh you know fairly
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consistently and once you've got people on your list they're kind of they're kind of yours like they've opted in
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they've said like I want to hear from this person and that's actually quite a big deal I think it's a bigger deal than
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just someone following you like to for someone to give you their email address especially these days like they're not
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easy to come they're not as easy to come by as they used to so even if you have quite a small list which at the time my
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list was quite small I think it might have only been like a couple of thousand or something um it was yeah it it was
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how I got started in everything and I see now I'm in this WordPress space um
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almost everyone I talk to no one seems to do it so I feel like it's kind of like um like this kind of hidden secret
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or this hidden opportunity I suppose for a lot of Wordpress product owners to to
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try yeah I agree I think you know for me on I I see a lot of that in WordPress
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where maybe they capture emails but then they very rarely send emails so that
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whole nurture part of it that you're talking about like figuring out what the right way to um
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not just grow and get email addresses but keep people engaged because I feel like there's a lot of products where
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they only send emails during Black Friday and and that seems to me like
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Prime way to get people to unsubscribe from your email list um
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yeah important for product owners to think about what their email strategy is over the entire year and not just around
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a sale yeah it's really tough it's like yeah because you don't wna you don't
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want to be known for only pitching because you're just going to get people unsubscribe or not you know listen to
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you so it is really it's important to kind of strike that balance but yeah like you say what is that balance how do
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you do that how do you figure out what people want to know about other than just a pitch so yeah there's definitely
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a lot to talk about yeah so maybe we can transition into story time you gave us
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some excellent notes in advance um and I think it'd be really interesting to hear um some of your own
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experiences with growing your email list what you found maybe worked or didn't work uh I know you talked a little bit
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about how automation can play a role in like emails that are going out to nurture that list um and and if there
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are emails you found worked better than others or maybe things that you sent that you're like oh man I can never send
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an email like that again because I got a lot of unsubscribed so so share a little with us Laura about your personal
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experience yeah so it's pretty it's fairly TurnKey and fairly straightforward so what I what I tend to
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do is because I feel like because my background was more of a Creator so I was more courses kind of info products
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I've always you know sort of had it drilled into me in a way that like you need to give give give give give ask so
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you know growing my email list like I said I didn't have a product or anything to s initially so I just got really good
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at just sending stuff that I thought was really valuable listening to the replies that I
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would get um and that was actually one of the benefits When I had a smaller list I did get a lot more replies the
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bigger my list grows the less replies I get which is a bit kind of you know I don't like that as much because um
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replies are so helpful to figure out what's resonating with people and what's not so I would just kind of teach and
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like get a feel for what people were interested in and what they weren't um and so what I did was the main way that
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I grew my list is I have I still have actually on client portal I have um an
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ebook with an email course that is about um you know really going through your
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onboarding process and really systemizing your business um it's really in-depth like I would definitely um
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charge for it like I think it's worth I think it's worth money but it's completely free it's just you know what it's not free you have to put in your
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email address to get it um so I have that and what I would do is I would just
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go on loads of podcasts for my target audience so Freelancers and agencies predominantly and um I would speak at a
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lot of conferences as well which is really scary but quite a good thing to do as well um and I would do a lot of
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guest posting so I would do for sites like Smashing Magazine or you know whatever was big in my particular
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industry um and everything that I did you know when people say do you want to
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learn if people want to learn more about this topic I would say you know obviously we that we couldn't cover
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everything in this episode but I do have an ebook that you can get if you go to um you know and have like a vanity URL I
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think it's like client experience course.com or something like that um it might not even be that to be honest um
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but it's just redirects to the email um opt-in page and then people opt in if
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they like what they've heard if they think that they want to learn more they opt in they get the download and then I
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just send them lots of uh information about how they can you know improve
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their onboarding and do all that stuff and then I kind of you know introduce client portal and see if they're
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interested and um you know talk about it that way and it it when I was growing
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client portal it did that was exactly what I did to grow it there was really nothing else to be honest it was just
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that guest post podcasts conference talks uh email course and then people
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forward by client portal eventually some of them anyway um so they all point back
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to that one email like lead magnet kind of thing everything you did point to
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that one thing people would subscribe and then you'd have like drip emails that you'd send them after they
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subscribe to tell them about your product is that right yeah so it would be like yeah drip drip fed emails over
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like a few days or something like that um and then you know I'd wait a bit and I'd give them like an extra bonus or
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something like an extra download that would be really useful um and then I'd start talking about client portal if
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they're interested in that as well um but i' sort of teased it throughout the email so you know this is this is who I
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am this is what I do this is my product so it wasn't like you know a bait and switch type thing they kind of knew that
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this is you know something that I have and you know that's what I did at the start that's actually not necessarily
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what I do now because over time um SEO just took over and that became where
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people were coming straight to the client portal website and um you know finding me that way and that
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massively overtook what I was doing because as you can imagine you know going on podcasts and doing guest post
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they're quite timec consuming it's not a quick thing um so I I don't know how
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sustainable it is to just do that but the reason I still really like email is because if I continue to just slowly
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build my email list um when it does come to Black Friday or something like that
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and I have people to talk to so preferably new people each year as well which is you know beneficial for me and
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then um you know I try not to be too saly now I will admit that I have been
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too salesy in the past so obviously I've been around for a few years and I went through quite a salesy year and it was
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not great because I could definitely tell I was being seen as like okay you're selling too much now where's the
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line there do you think like where do you feel like it's okay and then was it
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like certain language you were using or like the percentage of the email that was literally a salesp vers value like
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how do you see that line on being too salesy I think it was the percentage of emails that were value and um pitching
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so I um I took a lot of time off I had uh I had my daughter so you know I was
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off with her so I wasn't able to write a lot of new content so anytime I did email it was it was a pitch or something
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I mean that said I do I do have in my onboarding I have quite a lot of nurturing set up so I do um you know
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everything I write I try not to write something once and have it just go out once I try and write things that are really good that I can then put into my
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Automation and have them drip out um you can have like automations that are a year long or something you know you can
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you know there's there's nothing wrong with doing that because if you've written something good you want everyone to see it not just the people on your
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list today today you want the people who join your list tomorrow to see it you know so there is that um but on my email
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list I do tend to have a lot of people who do follow a lot of what I do so they kind of know when I'm writing something
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new versus like something rehashed and I just it's hard to really explain like I
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don't think there's anything I don't think there's a a number I could give you but I just felt like I was being too
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pitchy and I felt like my and I saw my engagement drop and um it just didn't
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feel right like it didn't I don't know I don't know if that makes sense it just didn't feel like I was give give give
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ask it was more ask ask ask give so with pre-sales emails what do you have apart
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from the course so the course lasts however many days what do you do if they then haven't made a
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purchase so I have like a why didn't you buy question which is super valuable to
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know like hey just one quick question why didn't you buy um I'm planning on changing that
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slightly and having um maybe some trigger links that say because there's usually a few reasons so something like
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you know it was too expensive or it's not the right time or you know a couple of other things um oh I I wanted a trial
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or something like that and then when they click those links I'll send them another email to say by the way did you
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know you can get a trial by doing this or some you know something like that um but the minute it's just a why didn't
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you buy um and then I just kind of send just the the thing about client portal
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I'll just take a little bit of a step back is because and this is where it differs from a lot of WordPress
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products it's a it's a portal that you give to your clients there's really no better way of describing it than that um
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but the the purpose of client portal is to make you as a freelancer or agency look more professional to your clients
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so that's what I'm trying to do client portal is one way that they can achieve
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that but it's not the only way they can achieve that by doing loads of different things so I have a ton of things I can
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write about to help them with that so if that's their problem they're on the right list client portal might be a
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great solution for them it might not be um hopefully it is but yeah it might not be so I do write a lot about that um I
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also write about client portal in general as well because the plugin itself it's you know it's a
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bit misunderstood in some ways so you know a lot of people think it's a project management tool and it's not and
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a lot of people think it maybe does this but it doesn't and it's it's a very it's
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a very difficult product to explain so I did um one of the road mappings with
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Ellipsis and um even they said you know it's it is a it's a very NE it's a very
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like specific product that is hard to explain um so I do take some emails and
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I explain what it is and what it's not as well and those emails are really good and you can get like a feel for um you
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know sometimes I'll send an email I sent one recently um I think I put it up on the on my blog um which was something
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about um do you need a project management tool if you're using client portal or something like that I sent
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that email I got a bunch of replies and a bunch of sales because it was clearly that thing that people just wasn't
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clicking with them as to why a client portal could work for them or really
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what its place was in their toolkit so that was really great so I was like okay well I'm definitely adding this to my
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automation now because this is clearly even maybe to my website you know this is clearly something that resonated with
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people so um I just try and do a mixture of that um a lot of teaching a lot of
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talking a bit of talking about my product um but like I say because of the
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because of the problem that my product is solving there is a lot I can write about with that and I know with some a
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lot of Wordpress plugins there's it's not that clear cut if you see what I mean are you so I'm curious because I
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tried this and didn't have much luck as far as people actually watching the videos but I tried doing videos to
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explain things not with this particular plugin we haven't done that
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but I've been thinking about doing it again but I've previously done videos and I'm curious when you're saying you send out emails to like explain your
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product and what it is to people did you include any videos in those or was it all written and if you did include
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videos did you see people actually watching them so I typically don't do a lot of video um mostly because I don't
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enjoy it rather than I don't know maybe it would work I have done the odd video
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um I guess people watch them I to be honest I don't think I'm that good at video I think I think my strengths lie
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in writing a lot more than it does does in doing a video because I can really think about what I'm trying to say and I
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can spend a lot of time getting the right way to describe something um so
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yeah I go fullon on writing but mostly because that I feel is my strength um as
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such yeah I'd be curious to transition into like Katie sort of hearing what you all do at Barn 2 and your experience but
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I'm wondering if you could give us a quick only because I'm seeing it in your show notes but I didn't hear you say it
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could you give us an idea of what the size of your is right now and how long it took you to get from zero to where
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you are today yeah so it's about 17,000 now um in terms of how long it took me
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to get there um I don't know so I feel like the first thousand took ages like
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the longest time ever um when I got to a when did you start like what year
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roughly did you start trying to grow an email um oh gosh that's a good question
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I guess honestly it would be 2014 maybe something like that it's been
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about 10 years but obviously the growth isn't like evenly distributed across 10 years yeah yeah exactly it was like it
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sort of went really slow at the start and then once it kind of got going it it
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just got going and I was like when it got to 10,000 it's like I didn't even have to worry anymore and at some point the SEO massively took over and actually
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my email list growth is quite small right now um but because I haven't been doing I haven't been doing those things
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to grow it um however my plan for 20124 is to go back and do that because I do
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miss doing that I do think it was really valuable you know like I said I've had like things going on and just you know
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life's just been crazy so podcasts and guest posts are just I have to show up
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and do them it's kind of hard to Outsource that um so 2024 is my year to start doing that again because I did I
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do really enjoy it and I love the engagement that I get talking to people and um you know I try and do a lot of
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you know I I always try to ask people to reply to this email reply to this email tell me tell me and I reply personally
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to like all of them um and I do things like workshops as well so I'll do like
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live webinars to teach them a particular topic about you know I have a background
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in freelancing so I have a lot to teach in that area as well so I'll do something about you know what I've been
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learning about and I have a few other products that are kind of slightly related to client portal that I sell as
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well so it all kind of works in together um but I think yeah the main the main
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thing I as I see myself is that I see myself as someone who's trying to help Freelancers and agencies look Pro more
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professional be more organized and give their clients a better experience and then whatever form that takes uh that's
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kind of what I'll do I feel like I really went on a tangent there and I can't remember I think you just asked me what my list size was so sorry about
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that no it's all interesting story of your list size yeah we'll go with that
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it's way bigger than mine so I'm impressed
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yeah so I'm gonna give a slightly different perspective because I hate email
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marketing kind of do it gritted teeth because I hate receiving marketing
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emails myself but I know how important it is so that kind of underlies all of
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our email marketing at Barn 2 it's my own personal misgivings so that starts
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with how we get people to sign up in the first place and we should talk more about strategies for that later but my
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other pet haate is popups so that comes very close to my issue with email
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marketing because it's quite well known that a good strategy to get people to sign up to your mailing list is to have
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a pop up sign up to our mailing list do you want our free course whatever but we
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just don't want popups on our website and so we've intentionally kind of
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compromised our email list because we just have sort of more subtle ways like
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a sign up in the sidebar or something like that and a tick box on the checkout
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and things uh so our list in theory it's 24,000 subscribers but only three and a
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half thousand of them are on our general newsletter list which means that they've ticked the box somewhere to receive that
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all of the others are people that have bought a specific product so really under gdpr and things we can only
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contact them directly about the product that they've bought so and we we're kind of aware of that if if they don't
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explicitly opt in then at least in Europe um you're supposed you can email them about their transaction and their
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products and updates and new features and things but you can't just just send them your
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newsletter so the majority of our list we can't really email Market to that
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well and um we have like a general newsletter for the three and a half thousand who have opted in but I would
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love to kind of improve on that we sort of just sort of send te company news
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every few months randomly without a schedule and um and it's quite nice
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because we're a multiple Product Company uh um we can sort of cross promote our
23:30
products so we can talk about different products and hope that they'll buy something which isn't what they were
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interested in originally so that's an opportunity but most of our email marketing is post sales and I know that
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Laura you mentioned post sales emails as well earlier so we've got some quite
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indepth sequences for each of our 23 plugins so for each plug-in we have
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emails that send it starts off quite often with onboarding stuff and then it's like every two or three months for
24:04
two years often and the purpose of that is to kind of build an ongoing
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relationship with the customer for the purpose of encouraging them to renew or
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buy additional plugins so we might send like tips or features they might have
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missed um that like they might not be using yet and things like that case
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studies of like real websites using the same product so they can get
24:30
inspiration so we try and sort of think about how to add value to their
24:36
experience of the plug-in post sales so that they're going to keep using it and remain loyal customers and I sadly don't
24:44
have any stats about how much that does Aid renewal rates and I would love to know if it actually makes difference but
24:51
it feels like it it can't hurt and we're always looking for new ways to use email
24:57
to um impress existing customers and show Extra Value like um I know you know
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this Laura that um I've set up a customer Discount Center recently with
25:08
dis where we're offering like discounts that we've negotiated with other companies products in the WordPress
25:13
space so that by being a bar two customer they get discounts for other
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products that they might be interested in and it's just kind of making the whole thing kind of like a club so that
25:24
they have added value beyond the product itself and that's all done through um
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email and other things like we send an email three days after each purchase
25:37
giving 50% off any other product and that actually converts really well I do
25:42
have uh data on that and a lot of people because they're in that process of
25:48
setting up a website by definition often because they just bought it's a good time to encourage them to buy something
25:55
else so we have emails that recommend two plugins which are closely related to
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the one they've already bought so it's kind of tailored so that they're more likely to go for something else um so we
26:08
do a lot of email marketing but I still hate
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it I mean it's not for everyone I suppose it's like it sounds like everything you're doing is just is great
26:19
though like it sounds like you've got a really good system in place so yeah I
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love what you said about um give uh give give give ask I think that's a good
26:30
thing that I need to think about more explicitly yeah I'm curious do you like
26:35
survey your audience ever your email list yeah and they never reply even if
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you send it to thousands of customers asking about a specific
26:47
like yeah it's really bad they just don't reply what do you find Laura um so
26:53
I do quite a lot with surveys because I um I just always want to find out as much as I can about people so I do like
27:00
a mixture of sometimes I'll you know I have in my whether they're a customer or
27:06
a non-customer I have different surveys that go out but they're more like they're not about what would you like to
27:11
see from me they're more like just tell me about you so you know what's you know
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what kind of business do you run and um what are you doing right now what are you struggling with what's like you know
27:23
all the or just all these questions about you know um who they are and what they do and I find that really useful to
27:29
get like an idea of like who because the people who respond are the people who are going to be really engaged so that
27:36
gives me a lot of information on how I can write to people um but the other thing I do that's been really helpful
27:42
for me coming up with content to write about to my email list is as well as those surveys because I get a lot of
27:49
useful information um that I hadn't thought of before but I'll try and do like aot customer interviews whenever I
27:56
can I don't do it as often as I'd like but where I'll just as soon as someone
28:01
buys I'll try and email them straight away from me saying hey I'm the founder
28:07
I'd love to talk to you about you know why you bought client portal and that kind of thing I try and get on a call
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with them um and just find out about them and I get so much whenever I do that which again is not as often as I
28:20
should but whenever I do that I end the call with just so much that I can write about that I didn't
28:26
realize um they might have been hesitating about before they bought client portal or why why they bought
28:33
client portal because why someone bought client portal is going to probably be similar to a lot of why other people bu
28:39
client portal so I'm really big on like knowing my audience and like what it's
28:44
made up of and who are you know agencies who are Freelancers I get a lot of law firms and accountants
28:51
and like coaches and all these kinds of things um and eventually I'd love to
28:56
have like person personalized sequences go out talking directly to all of those different use cases which is possible
29:03
it's just time consuming to set up so yeah I was just curious because um yeah
29:09
I find surveying and interviews have been really helpful for figuring out how I can like give more if that makes sense
29:17
yeah that's a fair point we do have one email that does get a good response which is uh sent seven days after the
29:24
purchase and it just asks like three questions not even a link to a survey of
29:30
like how what did you search for to find our products um can we see a link to
29:36
your website how are you using it and something like is there anything that nearly stopped you buying and they do
29:42
reply to that a lot and they go that's this is the only customer email that goes direct to me now rather than
29:48
support team so that's kind of how I keep my finger on the pulse and um I've
29:53
got a spreadsheet about what are the most common use cases what the most popular features of each of our products
29:59
which are used to directly feed into our marketing so if I'm writing some copy
30:05
about a plug-in then I'll open up this spreadsheet and look at what are the most important features and use cases
30:11
and focus on those for example and I love discovering a new use case that I
30:16
hadn't thought of because that's an SEO opportunity often so I'll send the idea
30:21
to ellipses and who do our SEO stuff and say oh the customer bought our plug in
30:27
after um Googling X and we've never optimized for this and then they'll do the research and the data to establish
30:35
is this a good content opportunity so it directly Fe feeds into future sales as
30:40
well yeah I love but Amber should we move on to your uh email
30:47
story yeah so we are sitting around
30:53
4,500 subscribers right now I think we really started trying in like
31:03
2021 was when we really put effort into growing the email list um ours have come
31:11
from well they come primarily one of our biggest sources is because we run a
31:17
Meetup and it's webinar style so people have to join in zoom and we have an
31:23
optional box that says do you want to hear about other events and so anyone who says yes on that we add them to our
31:29
email list if they say no then we won't um so that's been one of our biggest ones we had for a time um freemius in
31:38
our plugin um and we used to get a lot of subscribers off of that but we ended
31:43
up removing freas for reasons that aren't worth going into now but we are planning when we add an onboarding
31:50
wizard to our plugin to have an optin there because that did get us quite a
31:55
few subscribers um um within the plug-in and then another thing that we did that
32:00
has worked really well um Kim from Paid memberships Pro suggested to me that the
32:06
free version of our plug-in should be available on our website too and not just on wordpress.org
32:13
so we have the free version as a download on in Ed but the URL for it is
32:19
just the wordpress.org URL so we don't have to maintain it on our website it just updates um it pulls updates off
32:27
wordpress.org but a lot of people will opt in to get the free plugin and then it
32:32
says you know we're going to add you to our email list at the same time and so if they don't want that they go to wordpress.org to get it but a lot of
32:38
people still do that and that's helped us quite a bit I feel like I go speak a
32:44
lot but I don't have a good like you were saying Laura that you have a good driver which is here's your call to
32:50
action go get this free ebook or something to like opt in and I feel like that's an area where I really want to
32:56
improve um I've been talking we've been talking a lot about trying to have um like a an
33:03
ecourse that is free with email uh and that is a goal that I have
33:10
for next year to have at least one of those and then I think that would be helpful because it would be something that we drive people to um to grow our
33:18
signups um as far as how we use our list um we're doing a combination so when
33:27
someone comes in and we know that they came in via the free plug-in so either when they had come from freemius or they
33:35
got downloaded the free plug-in from our website they get entered into a drip sequence and it's very much like value
33:41
based so the first email is about basically is like hey did you know about WordPress accessibility Meetup come to
33:48
these and then you can learn more um and then and there's a lot and then we have one that like promotes our Facebook
33:54
group and like different things like that where we're answering common questions or trying to address problems
34:00
that people might have and then towards the end it sort of turns into also like hey if you have XYZ you should consider
34:07
upgrading um and those have worked pretty well and we also built sort of like a scoring system too where if
34:14
people engage with a certain number of them then it Flags them in our CRM and they might then get depending upon their
34:21
email address and we do some research on them if they seem like either an agency
34:26
or or they're a university or someone who might have Enterprise potential then we they'll get personal Outreach too
34:33
because we'll see hey they engaged more with these uh emails that means they might be more interested and they should
34:39
get like personalized sales followup and then otherwise we send every other week
34:46
we send out a newsletter that includes
34:52
links to like accessibility resources from around the web so either articles that I've posted um or other articles on
35:00
other blogs or from other people that we know are experts in accessibility fields
35:05
or news posts or news updates about accessibility um and
35:13
then the newsletter also includes like a a blurb about what we've done in the plug-in recently so it's got it kind of
35:20
it follows this format always where it has news accessibility news upcoming
35:25
events where our Meetup are promoted um and other events that we might be doing
35:31
and and so that goes out every other week we're planning to transition that to weekly uh next year and then we send
35:40
out a I think it might only be 24 hours it
35:45
might well it might be seven days in advance and 24 hours I don't remember because I don't create these emails but
35:51
like specifically for events so every time we're going to have a Meetup we'll send just about that that Meetup one or
35:58
two times in advance of the event to get people to go register for it um and
36:03
those have worked pretty well I mean we we usually will have um between
36:10
60 and over a hundred people that attend each Meetup and a good percent of them come off of they got an email they're
36:18
already on our email list um and I think that's been good that we have these things that feel very value based and
36:24
it's not us trying to sell them but it keeps them connected to us personally and I think like going back to what we
36:30
were talking about about not just doing it around Black Friday I think having that value is what kept people from
36:37
unsubscribing when I'm like okay you're gonna get like seven emails from me in a week because I think most people can be
36:43
like okay this is still valuable I know that this week will end right I feel like what happens is if you don't
36:49
contact anyone at all and then all you do is send them seven emails in a week you're GNA unsubscribe instantly so
36:56
we've been trying to do that like make sure that we provide a lot of value and not just sell um yeah so yeah and you
37:03
can also for Black Friday I usually have like on the first couple of emails I say
37:09
this is going to be about Black Friday this is like how many emails I'm going to send if you don't want to hear any
37:15
more about this click this link you'll stay on my list but you will not hear about Black Friday so that's always
37:21
quite good to do as well and I think people appreciate it because I always feel like if you've given up if you've
37:26
given someone your email address you've sort of given them permission to email you um you just have to make sure they
37:32
know what they've signed up for and give them opportunities to unsubscribe if
37:38
they want to or manage their preferences or something like that so they don't yeah so they know what to expect because
37:44
you know people know that like black Friday you're going to promote your product they know that you know you're not you have something that you want to
37:52
sell and you know they're obviously interested in it so it's it's kind of
37:57
I don't see it as such a bad thing but also I don't mind people emailing me
38:03
because I know that I just unsubscribe if I don't like it if I'm not feeling it and I'm
38:08
like yeah I just unsubscribe and it's gone it's like it's nice that they can't force themselves back into my inbox
38:16
unless you're a really dodgy airline in Asia in which case it's impossible to
38:22
unsubscribe very true yeah um our other co-host Cromwell gave me this tip this
38:28
year about adding a dedicated unsubscribe link just for your Black Friday emails and this brings us on to
38:35
something we haven't discussed which is which mailing list platform to use because I use MailChimp and there wasn't
38:41
a way to do that in MailChimp and I hate MailChimp generally but it would just be such a big project and my great
38:48
everything that I stick with it um so what do you use Laura that allows you to have that extra feature um so I use
38:55
convert kit um I was using drip before um but then drip did this massive price
39:00
increase that kind of priced me out of it so I switched to convert kit which is just as powerful but a little bit rough
39:06
around the edges sometimes but it can do everything so yeah we were so we were using Zoho
39:13
for our CRM and campaigns but we're in the process right now of transitioning over to active campaign um what for us
39:21
because we are doing sales too in addition to just like marketing we needed to have something that has a CRM
39:27
so we like looked at convert kit because a lot of people recommend it but um it didn't really have the CRM aspects that
39:34
we needed in the same way it's more like just marketing email focused um it is a
39:40
huge process to change your email platform but honestly like what one thing I'll say and it might be it might
39:46
be worth it Katie if you're not sure right going away from MailChimp because if you think about that I mean that's
39:53
probably not the only feature that might be lacking on mail chimp side correct potentially um but for us like Zoho was
40:02
right at the time because of price but it just became such a a pain like it
40:07
didn't really integrate with anything and it's been so magical because my
40:12
partner Chris he's been setting it active campaign up and we bought WP Fusion so that we could sync a lot of
40:19
our tags out of Easy Digital downloads and one of our biggest pain points was we did not ever have a really clear
40:25
picture of how many like what our churn was and and like a lot of that kind of
40:31
stuff because the reports that are in Easy Digital downloads I think are not great and then and there was sometimes
40:37
confusion there on like who's active and who's not and and who's buying what and and and that kind of stuff but now that
40:44
we're able to get that into the CRM much better like for us it was it's a huge progress and or project and we're like
40:52
doing it over two months um but I can already tell tell that it's going to be worth the
40:58
effort so yeah it is migrating is so hard but yeah it's it's nice when it's
41:04
done and some it's kind of a nice opportunity as well to clean everything up and go through everything again and just sort of tweak emails that you
41:10
haven't seen in a while but yeah it's not really fun I don't recommend it so
41:17
so we've all kind of talked a little bit about having the automations right after someone buys or downloads a free thing
41:24
I'm curious if either of you have automations that run later on like at six months or a year later or any other
41:32
sort of like triggering event that might make you put them into some automated
41:38
sequence yeah so I well I don't have it fully set up yet but I do have a
41:43
year-long automation that I'm working on just mostly just for at this point just
41:49
for customers um just to help with as Katie was saying earlier to help with renewal rates just to try and increase
41:56
that a little bit so what can I do throughout the year so they don't just hear from me at the start and then right
42:02
before they hear from me throughout but they don't hear from me too much because you know I'm not the only person in
42:08
their inbox so I'm kind of coming up with like a you know and I've got quite a nice outline that I'm sort of working
42:15
towards which is a mixture of um you know more value based stuff um but also
42:21
a lot of a decent amount of surveying as well like surveying at different points just to find out different things um and
42:29
then um offers for you know if they want any like one-on-one help I offer that
42:36
occasionally to certain customers um like close close to renewals or
42:43
something like that um obviously I can't do a ton of one-on-one stuff but um yeah just that kind of thing I really want to
42:49
just have a really nice year-long um sequence I don't really know what to do after year one if if to
42:56
do anything at all because I think it sort of gets a bit like wonky how do you make sure everything's going at the
43:02
right time but I've got um someone helping me who's just really good at this stuff so um that's not too bad
43:09
there and then for the non-subscribers not the non-customers um
43:15
I do what my husband actually calls a shadow newsletter so um my husband
43:21
actually has a course on convert kit so he knows everything about it
43:26
um and he talks about a shadow newsletter which is basically where you write a weekly or fortn nightly or
43:33
however long newsletter and then you basically add it to like the back of the queue for automation so new subscribers
43:41
can get sometimes years of content um without necessarily seeing anything new and there's like a way to make it so if
43:48
you want to send a broadcast email but you don't want them to also get the shadow newsletter you like pull them out of that send the broadcast email
43:56
and then um restart the shadow newsletter or if say you want to do a promotion you pull them out of the
44:03
Shadow newsletter again because you don't want to be promoting and giving value at the same time it's too much you
44:09
pull them out of that to do the promotion and then put them back in where they left off and they just keep
44:14
going through and just getting this content and stuff like that so that's something that's quite nice because you can just do it slowly over time like
44:20
once you've set up the shell you just every time you write something new you just add it to the back of the queue um
44:26
so yeah that's kind of what I do at the minute but um yeah like I said I'm working on the postp purchase one now to
44:33
get that really set up yeah we go for about two years um by
44:40
the end it's only emails every three months but we make sure it ramps up a bit prior to each renewal and Beyond two
44:48
years it's just like General newsletters Black Friday whatever but obviously only
44:53
a small proportion of customers customers are going to renew more than twice um because renewals drop off each
45:00
year with any um products so but I think by capturing the vast majority of
45:05
customers for that time that's kind of the most important priority yeah yeah I you know I think
45:12
the thing about the Beyond two years for us and you know we're only really hitting that point
45:19
now um but I do think that's part of where us doing the events is helpful
45:26
because yeah at that point you don't really need to send them instructions about how to use your product unless you
45:31
know maybe you've added a really big new feature but but otherwise they probably know how to use it they know how it fits
45:37
in their workflow or not right um and and so I think that's why the events is
45:44
helpful because it gives a reason to keep them connected and and that kind of thing so what are the events aimed at
45:52
new customers like or potential customers or
45:57
longstanding uh so for us we strive to do events that are beneficial to both I
46:04
think different different different events so when we're talking
46:10
accessibility sometimes we end up with a talk that is so developer focused I mean we had
46:15
one a month ago last month that the whole time they were talking I was just like like it was just like going right
46:23
like she was uh the speaker was was really going into code and and I was
46:28
like barely following along right it it was very technical um so we have some that are you know it really depends on
46:35
your your level um but our goal with the events just in general is it maybe is
46:41
partially more new people because it's trying to increase awareness about the importance of
46:48
accessibility um so it does bring in new people but that said we're also you know a big thing that we have found and I've
46:55
talked about this before on the podcast is that um there can be a learning curve
47:02
with using our product or our product could just overwhelm people and and they
47:08
won't know what to do because it Flags problems and they don't know what to do and so part of the idea behind having
47:13
educational webinars that people can attend is it it helps them to understand
47:19
what to do with the things that my product Flags which I think could help with existing customer staying customers
47:27
because if you just install a plugin and then you don't know what to do you're going to go away um so it's it's kind of
47:34
both um I don't know I also just kind of I just en enjoy it it's kind of it's like one of my fun parts of my job like
47:40
I like to go there and hear from other speakers and and I learn stuff too at them so it's it's fun and you get lots
47:47
of people coming so it's obviously providing a lot of value yeah yeah I I mean I think so I
47:53
think the the community enjoys it which makes me feel good so yeah but should we
47:59
transition into best advice yeah so I think we've covered tons of different aspects of email
48:05
marketing which is great so to bring it all together let's each give our best advice to um other WordPress product um
48:13
owners Laura do you want to go first what are your most important top tips
48:19
yeah so for me it's really knowing who you're talking to so make sure you know who's on your list what why they're on
48:26
your list what they want to hear it's kind of like with SEO when you're trying to match search intent you know you're
48:32
trying to match email intent like why are they here and give them that and um
48:38
you know write as if you're writing to one specific person and just try to give
48:45
as much as you can to help them and you know give give give and then when the
48:51
pictures happen if they're ready to buy they'll buy and yeah that's basically
49:00
it what about you I'm up next uh so I
49:05
think I'll Circle back to my you know just start sending regular emails I
49:10
think probably monthly should be a minimum um and try to think about what
49:17
you can provide that is value so you're not only talking to people at during
49:22
sales so yeah definitely my top tip is to map out the
49:30
journey from the users's perspective so do a different one for pre and post
49:36
sales maybe even more subgroupings depending on what you do and think about where they are in their experience with
49:43
the product whether that's Discovery or using it and what they need at each stage and um create your email system
49:51
with that in mind so that they're getting the targeted relevant information exactly when they need
49:59
it sounds like great advice well that's a wrap thanks for joining us so much
50:05
Laura of course thank you for having me yeah we're glad to have you next week we
50:10
are going to be off on holidays with our families and then Katie and I will be back on January 3rd to discuss uh
50:17
audience growth unlocking more customers with your for your WordPress product with special guest Mike Stout
50:26
yep and special thanks to post status for being our green room if you're enjoying these shows then do us a favor
50:33
and hit like subscribe share it with your friends add us to your email newsletters and most of all we hope to
50:40
see you next time in two weeks bye bye yeah bye