Britney Gardner 0:02

All right, Robert Kennedy, I am so excited to have you here on the know, like and trust show,

Unknown Speaker 0:07

high running.

Britney Gardner 0:09

So how, how did you guys get to the place where you talk so much about email, because most of the people I talk to you like email is a part of what they do. But there aren't a lot of people that really focus on on just email,

Unknown Speaker 0:24

right? Not pretty good at anything else

Unknown Speaker 0:28

is good at it. In our opinion, nothing else gets the results, the email designer, we were talking about this the other day saying, what's the thing that you're going to do today to make sales in your business, and then what's the thing you're gonna do tomorrow that will make sales in your business, and then the next day, then the next day, and then then then the next day. And the truth is that if you sit and look at the digital marketing landscape, there's not a lot of other stuff that there's nothing else that gets the same results, that email does, like, for example, sure, you could go and post on your Instagram story every day, and make one of those posts have a link to go and buy from you. It's not going to make you sales every day or you know, posting on the grid even less. So you could go and do a webinar every day. But you've got to fuel that webinar with people from somewhere. And that's a lot of work. You can run Facebook ads, your thing but that takes lots of refining. And it's a bit of a show you can retarget people but like somebody lands on your page, and if they bounce other than paying Facebook or whatever, more money to get them back again with retargeting, that person's gone now, whereas when the minute you get them onto your email list, so the thing that really interested us when we started out our first ever businesses, which was as entertainers as a hypnotist, in my case and a mind reader, a mentalist, in Kennedy's case, the one thing we knew we could do that we'd get ourselves all the time consistently, was email. And at the time, we were lucky, I guess, because the reason why we knew that is because that was 15 years ago, more than 1516 years ago, and there wasn't really anything else you could do, like email was what marketing putting videos on a web page on the internet was really hard. Like that was barely doable at the time. So if you think about how far we've come, unfortunately, the distractions that have been thrown at us as alternative possibilities. And up to this point, they're much cleverer than people than us, like, you know, statisticians and people who work at Big email marketing platforms, and all that have figured out that up to this point, nothing gets the return on investment that email does. And that's the best both on time investment, money investment. So yeah,

Britney Gardner 2:23

I've seen some stats, and I'm not gonna claim that any of these stats are well researched, or entirely accurate. But, you know, I've seen stuff that say that, you know, you make five times as many sales from email as any other venue, or, you know, you're gonna get, you know, well, depending on what your open rate is, right, you're gonna get a, you know, anywhere from, you know, 15 to 30%, you know, opens on your email, whereas, you know, on Instagram, since that's what you mentioned a little while ago, you know, you're lucky if 1% of your follower account is actually seeing the content you produce.

Unknown Speaker 2:53

Yeah, that's a, I think one thing you got to remember is that you also control and own the data with your email, like, it's a bit scary when you think about oh, we know, because we've put a lot of work into growing our Robin Kennedy Instagram, like, you'll see that and we've put a lot of work into that. But that makes it more scary to think that at any point Zooks can get out of bed and be a bit grumpy that day. And he can twiddle the little knob of that, because that's what the algorithm is. And it's the little, little little knob in the back of his, the back of his the back of our draw, just twizzles out and it changes the algorithm. And if he does that, you suddenly have a different reach, there's different rules of the game. And if something's really grumpy, we have a really grumpy day, you can D platform, you can switch you off, you're gonna end up in Facebook, jail, or whatever. They're calling it these days. And if that happens, you can't download your Instagram followers, and go over to MySpace and upload it there and go, that's okay, I can still talk to my audience imagine, you just gotta do it. Whereas, if you fall out with your email marketing provider, let's say you're with active campaign right now, and you're doing some stuff, and you make a mistake, because you're testing some stuff out, which happens, you know, happens, you play miss stuff, and you fall out with them. Well, you just download your data and you go across, and you open a, I don't know, keep account or something, you upload your data, you still got a business, you are building and putting all this effort into something and you own that debt. So you can go and do something with it for the for if that platform has a problem or anything like that. So that's a really important thing. We want to be building something we can rely on as well.

Britney Gardner 4:34

Yeah, 100% I know way back when I first started in the online world, and this is, you know, gonna date me here but it's been a while and I actually was using Active Campaign I was one of those early users and I was sending something out and I was using like the same, you know, newsletter II style email template for all of my emails, and there was some lorem ipsum texts like down at the bottom that I just missed one day. I just didn't see I sent my email I was not, you know, double checking things clearly. But they closed my account. They didn't close my account, they banned my account from usage for a week. And I was like, I'm so sorry, this was a clear, honest mistake, like, look at my track record, it is not bad. I don't send spam. And they were like, no policy. That's how it is. And I understand why they have that policy in place. I get it. And you know, that was back when people were sending spam with lorem ipsum text, right. So it probably didn't look too great. But it gave me a really good slap in the face, like, oh, one I should probably, you know, check things more often. But to, you know, this isn't necessarily something that that I can just slap together, I need to actually put some strategy behind it. And, and, you know, like you said, maybe have some backup plans ready to go.

Unknown Speaker 5:51

Go Rob go. That sounds funny reasons. It's one of the reasons why we simplify everything that we do, you know, so like, if your newsletter is so complicated that you need to have like a prebuilt template full of lorem ipsum stuff in it. For us, it's too complicated. Whereas if you can sit down and have anything other than like a hello, and you know, how do such and such and signed off by you? Then for us, that's a really simple thing. Like we write emails that you can write in a few minutes a day, even if you're a terrible writer, Kennedy's dyslexic. That's why he started sending daily emails years ago, before we had a business together. And so even if you're a terrible writer, you can write them in a matter of a few minutes today, because they are so simple. And you're just, it's a bit like it's, you know, it's easier than sitting down on holiday and writing a postcard and sending it back to your loved ones at home. Even though you know, you're probably going to land back in the right in your country before the postcard lands, because postal services and stuff. It's easier than having to think of what you're going to write in this postcard that's going to be the Son is lovely. And everyone is nice. The food is delicious. Like you remember that like the struggle you have to go through to figure out what the hell do I even write on this postcard to send back to my grant, right? It's easier than that. Because, like the sort of structure that we start with, as a starting point is really easy to implement.

Britney Gardner 7:08

So I think it's a really good transition to talking a little bit about making email an enjoyable process, because most of the clients I've worked with, and then also the greater audience of the show, I know that one of the reasons they are not regularly and consistently emailing their people, is because they have that feeling of not knowing what to say. And because it doesn't naturally flow from them, it starts feeling a bit like a chore. So how do you guys handle that?

Unknown Speaker 7:35

I think the first thing to remember is to have this switch around in mindset, we don't want to email people to tell them about what they can buy. Right. In fact, one of the best things we can all do is stop emailing people to tell them about our products. Because if all we ever received from you, is an email to tell us what we can buy. The only time we're going to open emails from you, is when we're ready to buy so it doesn't matter if you get he'd become an amazing copywriter some of the best emails ever. No one's gonna see those emails. If the only people who are opening the emails anyway are people who are going to be wanting to buy anyway. So like it's kind of a waste, we want to do instead is we want to email with really genuinely valuable content and see your email marketing as a content channel. Not as a sales channel. So your email marketing is a content on like, it's another app, most people are reading the emails on their phone these days, which means it's just another app snuggled in between Tik Tok and Tinder that people are checking on their phone. Which means if you show up with valuable stuff that they actually like, well guess what happens, they start opening your emails, it's a really good way of increasing your open rate by actually sending content people like so instead of email or when when we want to make a sale, we want to sell our latest, hey, we've you know, when we put together a new, I don't know, you post in our free Facebook group, that email marketing show community, when we put a new post in that we don't be like, hey, go check this thing out. We need to be showing up. So in that the moment people are ready to buy, we are there at the top of their inbox. Case in point I was trying to hire an electrician to come and sort out from the lightning for my studio, right. And I met an electrician about two years ago. And he's a really cool guy. I really like I really like what he was talking about. And the way he worked right. I was like, Okay, this is cool. I've got no idea what his name was no idea. I've searched my email inbox for electrician. I just couldn't find him. If he had been in my inbox regularly a few times a week, even like if I heard from him the last year would have been great, because I could have found his email. So he does all the hard work of turning up to a networking event and and meeting me on that thing and but he didn't do the easy bit of just staying within arm's reach so I can hire him and pay him for that work. He did all that yet, though, those years ago. It's for that long term relationship. And I

Unknown Speaker 9:56

think part of the problem with that is that we think people don't want to hear from us that often so that electrician will think, Well, of course, I didn't email you every week, you know, or every month or three times a week between us meeting and networking people, because people only want to hear from electrician when they want an electrician. Well, that's only if you It's only if you tell them if the content you're sending them is the content you think they don't want to receive. So I think one of the things that we should really do is, get into the mindset of saying, Well, I'm going to email people, and I'm going to make those emails good and interesting and stuff, I'm going to send it to them, regardless, irrespective of whether I've ever got anything to sell them. And I'm not going to send the emails to make sales, I'm going to send the emails to make connections, and the selling will sort of happen as a byproduct of that. Because when they're ready to buy, they'll buy or when I'm going to launch mode for that new thing, the the connection, and the relationship is already there.

Britney Gardner 10:46

You know, I think it's such a good point. And something that kind of brought it home to me, I have if I do regularly email my people, it's not always about things to sell. So you know, I feel like I'm halfway there, right. But one of my recent podcast guests ended up buying one of my entry level products. And I saw the name pop up in a name sounded familiar, I double checked. Oh, yeah, I was correct. It was someone who was going to be on my show one a few weeks ago. And when we did pop on for the interview, I was like, Hey, I noticed that you, you bought this. And he's like, Yeah, you know, I, I hopped onto your, you know, your lead magnet and ended up in your engagement sequence. And it was actually something that I had been thinking about working on in my business. So I was like, Hey, I'm going to talk with her anyway, I may as well try out the product. And it was as simple as that. And you know, because we were talking later, he had all the opportunity to offer, you know, questions and give me information about that, which was fantastic for him, you know, the close personal touch there. But it was 100%. Oh, top of mind. There it is. Let's just go. And it wasn't that I was sending an email about the product itself. It was casually mentioned within an email that made sense.

Unknown Speaker 11:55

Right, right. Yeah. And that's about like, just creating that context, making sure that when people are getting your emails, there's context to them, that you're serving their needs. You're serving them, like, Don't think of your emails as you've gone around to their house and sat on their couch. That's not what this is like, you're not the person showing up every day going, Hi, do you want to buy my thing? Here's my annoying content like that. But those people who put those flyers through your door, that's not what your email list is. And I think a lot of us with a small business, have gotten to that mindset of were the one doing the intruding, not true. In fact, it's the other way around, they've joined your email list, they've come round to your house, which means if you say you're welcome sequence, hey, I'm gonna turn up every single day with a really good tip to help you improve your email marketing. And they go, Oh, no, I know, that sounds horrible. That's the equivalent of them turning up your house and going, Oh, this decoration that that color of green on the wall and this couch are horrible. Guess what they can do, they can leave, they can go out because it's not, they're not gonna sit and tell you change that. And don't do that. And I hate that. And I don't like cats to lock them away. No, instead, they get to leave, it's your house, you can, you can email people five times a day if you want, if that's what you promise people in the beginning. And that's the that's the thing, like one of the one of the best things we do in our business to grow our email list. I know everyone wants to know how to grow email list, like here's a cool tip. Tell people they can get your emails. So for example, our highest converting lead magnet is is absolutely get our free daily tips about your email marketing, we will send you a tip every single day to tell you how to improve your email marketing. And if you want that you can get them we're not even gonna charge you for them. And that means when we show up every single day, we're not like a surprise. And fact, if we don't show up every day, people are gonna get upset. In fact, they did. I was flying back from Las Vegas a couple of years ago, because of times time differences and delays on flights because that's the thing, right? I couldn't send my email that day. And we got people saying, hey, what's happening? I thought I was gonna get an email from you today. You okay? Are you dead? You know, that kind of thing. Um, so if we make the right promise, and we remember that it's our house, they come into our house, you make rules on some people won't like it. That's okay.

Britney Gardner 14:27

I have heard from many people that you know, you have, you know, a certain percentage of people who are going to subscribe, and then unsubscribe fairly quickly. And that's normal. And you should actually celebrate it. Because what that means, and I talked about using content as a filter, right? What that means is they hit the wall of your filter, and they're like, nope, not for me. And they did do a service. And it's a good thing.

Unknown Speaker 14:47

Yeah, and there's no point in having a list of a million people that you're too frightened to email because that's just costing you money and making you numb. So if you just get over the fact that every time I send an email, some people are going to unsubscribe, that's probably okay. We know that some somebody will unsubscribe From every single email that we send, but if I don't send the email, I also can't make the sale to the people who didn't unsubscribe. So like I'm willing to take the hit of somebody unsubscribing or a few people unsubscribing in order to make the sale to the person who couldn't have bought if that email hadn't landed that day, because a lot of this is about, about slowly sowing seeds until the penny drops for that person, that the thing you teach, or the thing that you sell is important, it's urgent, it's important and urgent to them now, and that now is the time the right time for them to do it. Because they've got the headspace, the finances, that everything to do it right now at this moment. And it's one of those things where if you send 12 emails a year, then you've only got 12, chances are you're like, once a month, you've only got 12 chances a year to throw down, you know, a seed and see if that's the one that they buy onto. Whereas if you send 365, which is what we do, then you've got 365 chances to go, Is this the thing that's going to make you bite? No, is this the thing that's going to make your bike okay is this and none of those things are offensive are going to push people away are going to annoy people. They're not selling, selling, selling, selling, selling. It's all done with value lead stuff and interesting things and stories and quirky bits. That mean that actually they're perfectly acceptable for people to read. Even if it takes all 365 We've got people who've been on our list for three or three years and haven't joined our membership lead yet. That's okay. They just haven't heard the thing that they need to hear to make them realize it's for them, they will one day.

Britney Gardner 16:23

I love that. And I mean, obviously your team daily emails, I've you know, I've listened to a fair number of people who say the same but they tend to be copywriters. You know, like the the Justin Goffs and the Ben settles of the world, right? And that's not so much your background and where you're from, but you're still sending daily emails. And I mean, what is the I mean, for lack of a better way of asking what is the content of your emails looking like? Are they short and snappy? Are you going with more of us story based approach? Like how are you actually creating 365 days of great email tip content?

Unknown Speaker 16:59

Well, first of all, we initially we sat down and thought like, what if our emails could actually be valuable in them of themselves, while people could look forward to them? And also, how do we do if we're gonna do every single day, we need some shortcuts, we need some hacks to be able to do this. Because otherwise, we will decide not to do it, we'll put it off, they'll be terrible, they won't get results like all these terrible things. So how do we overcome all of those things? We've asked ourselves, but what if we did? And what if we could? And what how would that look, and so we have a whole bunch of frameworks that we use one of them. So we have four different actual frameworks for an email, one of them is, is this I give you this one. So for example,

Unknown Speaker 17:37

one of things you definitely want to do in our emails is be training our subscribers to be clicking the links. Because if we don't, human behavior, if you look at our psychological background, right, if we're training, if we're not training to do something, we're training people to not do something. So we may as well be training people to do a positive behavior. So that behavior that we all want an emails is definitely going to be clicking links. Two reasons. One, if they're not clicking links, they can never see your sales page or your your application form, and they can never buy from you. So we want to make sure they are doing that. Secondly, because we cannot rely on open rates anymore since iOS 15. They're now you know, Apple, and now blocking open rate and will actually doing the opposite. I'm telling you, all these people have opened your emails when they absolutely haven't, and Android are doing the opposite. They're blocking open rate. So your open rates, they mean nothing. So now what we can rely on, though, is clicks, we know that person clicks, it goes through a bunch of technology that makes that reliable. So how do we make sure we can have clickable links without being obnoxious without always feeling like we're withdrawing from the Bank of goodwill from our email subscribers? And how do we make sure we're turning up the value in a way that they actually want to hear from us? So we've got four different formulas we teach in a program of ours called the bottom is email strategy. But here's one of them. You can literally just go and use this. We call the story lesson offer framework. It's a new definition of slo which most people know is their self liquidating offer. But story lesson offer. And basically, the whole email is maybe 175 words, maybe 200 words sometimes. So yes, it is short and snappy, but it's also the storyline approach. The first thing is to come up with a story. And that story needs to have nothing really absolutely nothing to do with what it is you sell. Because if you do show up and talk about what you sell people stop listening to it. And you will run out of things to say there's only so many ways you can talk about your product, how many benefits are there, how many outcomes are there, how many features are there, like you'll run out of stuff to say, we don't want that. We don't want that you don't want that your audience your subscribers, they don't want that either. So you can tell the story. And so for us to it might be the fact that Rob during during the COVID 19 pandemic bought a new mattress for his bed. That was what happened. Now bear in mind he's thinking about I'm going to send this email to my list about email marketing that's got nothing to do with email marketing great. But it has got something to do with something our audience can relate to that as a relatable experience, buying mattresses buying things online, we can kind of get that he wasn't talking about, I was just doing this thing on a rocket that you've never heard of like, that's a bit of a weird thing, it was extremely relatable. Then what we do is we take that story, and we transition that into what's the moral of the story? What's the sort of lesson that we can give to our audience based on that story? So in this case, I bought a mattress on the internet. But the problem was when you can't sit and squeeze your mattress and find out how comfortable it is, how do you pick a mattress? And story? What's that two lines short. But it's interesting. Then you transition to this lesson, which is buy in our case for selling stuff about email marketing, it's buying anything on the internet difficult when you can't feel it, hold a sniff and lick it, how can you sell anything on the internet, there's a high level of resistance from all of our audiences to doing that. So what we need to do is come up with really compelling ways of communicating, that allow us allow people to understand why they should buy. Okay, that's a nice soft lesson from that story. It's the moral of the story. And then we transition into the offer, story lesson offer. And the offer can be a free thing. Or it could be a paid thing. It could be Hey, come and check out our membership, the League of email marketing heroes where we teach you how to do that. Or it could be, hey, I've got this new lead magnet, it's called click tricks that tells you how to get more clicks, or every email you send, and that we show you how to do it in that, whatever it's gonna be, it could be to your podcast episode. So for us, it might be a paid thing. It might be to the Email Marketing Show podcast, it could be anything. But it follows that formula of story lesson offer, and why this works so well. One is you can not run out of those stories. Here's a little psychological mind hack for you to figure out some stories. We teach that nine of them in our full program. But here's one, and this is really effective. It's the one we use a lot. And it is to ask yourself this psychologically start question. And it's what's the least boring thing that happened in the last 24 hours? And when you ask yourself that question, not, you're not setting yourself up to fail, you're not setting yourself up with the question of what's the most interesting thing? Because what is your worst silly minds? Do they go? Well, nothing interesting ever happens to me. Of course, your brain does that. But if we use the psychologically start question of what's the least boring thing, you'll pick the least boring thing you'll always have something to say. But also, I having story lesson Offer. Offer is the bit where you withdraw with the bit you where you have a little take from your list and ask them to give you something, story and lesson or two pieces of value. Which means you never have the additional cognitive load you never have the additional mental calories to burn of is today a day where I can write an email where I'm giving? Or can I actually ask for something today? Can I make an offer a day? Or do I have to show it with value, you don't have to worry about that. Because every day you do story lesson offer, you are automatically giving two pieces of value and outweighing the offer to to one automatically without having to think about it. So when you sit down to write your email, all you got to worry about is not even worry about on your way, they'll open up the laptop thing. What's the least boring thing that happened the last 24 hours start writing the story before you even know what the offer is going to be before you even know what the lesson is going to be write the story, then you'll figure out what the moral is what's the what are the what are the sorts of things you need to serve your audience with? What are the emotional needs of your audience, as we call them, that you can serve through that. And then how and that's the that's the moral of the story. That's the lesson. And then you transition into that offer, which is, here's how my paid service or my freebie or this week's episode of the podcast helps you do that faster, easier, cheaper, whatever.

Britney Gardner 23:51

I love that. And I mean, it's definitely the the basic form framework I follow for the majority of the emails that I send. So it makes it super applicable for me and hopefully, for the audience as well. But I really, really want to just kind of circle back to what you said that you never have to worry about whether you're going to give or ask. And I think that's such an important piece of what you said, I want to highlight it because I know especially if people are still struggling with the idea of am I showing up at their house? Or are they showing up at mine, it's a really good reminder that you are offering value every time that you send so even if you do have an offer or an ask and even if you start out feeling awkward about that, you're always offering value so that the balance is always always, you know, two out of three, and it's just a really good way to go into the strategy feeling good about that. Yeah, that's why we love it. Well, wonderful. Um, well, you guys, I think this has been really great. I know that you have mentioned casually amongst our conversation several of the ways that people can work with you. I heard about like your unclick tricks your your league membership, what what is the number one thing you'd like? Tell people about and maybe how they could contact you in the future.

Unknown Speaker 25:04

Yeah, definitely. So we'd love to give you a copy of our click tricks report. It's, as Kennedy hinted, 12 really great ways that you can dress up the links and the calls to action in your emails to make them interesting, exciting and different. So it's not just click here, click here, click here over and over and over again. So if you want to grab that just go to email marketing heroes.com forward slash K Lt. Email marketing irs.com forward slash k l. T. Have I got that right. Yeah. K LTS K. If I send the words, it'd be fine. But the letters are screwed myself over. Lt. Go there. And if you'd like podcasts, which I'm assuming you do, because you're listening to this, you can find our podcast that email marketing show wherever you get your podcasts and you'll hear us Wittering on every week about email marketing in a funny off the wall manner.

Britney Gardner 25:45

I've listened to several of your episodes already and it is 100% What you guys just said I love how you start off with little fun stories. And now that I'm actually connecting the dots, it's exactly what you were talking about with your SLO framework. So that's awesome. Thank you guys. Rob Kennedy. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank

Unknown Speaker 26:03

you

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