Most small business owners are sleeping on their email list. They gathered emails once upon a time as their clients trickled in because they knew they should, but never did anything more with them. Now, that email list sits dormant, slowing having new people added to it, but the leads aren’t hearing anything from your business past that.
By ignoring or avoiding your email list, you are leaving thousands of dollars on the table. Whether it’s because you don’t know what you should be sending out to your leads, or you don’t want to annoy the people on your list — your email list as a small business owner is a primary tool for client acquisition.
Let’s make it easier for you to get started mining your email list for new clients. Here’s 3 ways you can get more sales from your email list, including a script you can implement as soon as you’re finished reading this.
Consistency
Email is hard because it requires a lot more consistency than social media does. When we make a social media post, it exists forever in some way, shape, or form. It’s searchable, and it will continue to hit the algorithm as time passes by. Email however, won’t. It gets buried in your lead’s inboxes, never to be seen again.
Developing consistency behind your email cadence is the first decision you need to make. The more regularly you can appear in the inboxes of your leads, the better. This will enable them to begin to get to know you more, like you more, and eventually trust you more, and turn themselves into buyers. Making sure you’re committing to a cadence that is realistic for you is imperative.
It’s important to note that sending out a monthly email is simply not enough. Even weekly, I’d argue, is not enough. Some of the greatest email marketers out there are sending daily emails, some even multiple per day.
You, however, are a one-man show, and that won’t be realistic for you. At minimum, committing 2x or 3x per week is enough to get started and to build the habit. But ultimately, do what you know you can continue on with for 90 days, so that habit gets built.
Structure
Once you have the cadence set, you need to think about what type of content you are sending out. Monthly newsletters of what’s happening in your business are useless – please stop doing this if you are. Your leads don’t care about the happenings within your business. It’s your job to provide them with useful content that will educate them on why you’re the no-brainer solution to their problems. Monthly newsletters will absolutely not accomplish this.
My suggestion pertains to a 3x/week cadence, on a 2-week cycle. Once you have completed the 6 total emails, you start the 2-week cycle all over again. Rotate through 6 emails in this format:
- free help, informational give, something that pertains to the exact problems they have
- a client success story that would resonate with the problems these leads have
- something about your own story, overcoming similar problems, or educating why you do what you do
- and an invitation to work with you
The first three topics on that list provide authority building content. They help the readers understand who you are and what you do, and most importantly, how you provide results to the problems that they are facing. Social proof is incredibly powerful when it comes to turning leads into buyers.
The last email – the invitation to work with you – is exactly that. Within our CEO Clubhouse mentorship program, we provide dozens of different scripts and DFY material to copy and paste to make it easier to complete this step.
Remember: You don’t want to friend-zone yourself. Your job is to provide enough content, and balance it out with an ask. If you only provide content and reading material, but never ask, all you’ll do is build an audience of friends, not buyers.
Jolt Them Awake
Every once in awhile, it’s good to test the email list and see if they’re still awake. While we have 12 different scripts we rotate through in our CEO Clubhouse program, it all boils down to a simple strategy.
Pull up your email list and include all of your alumni clients (people who used to work with you at one point in time) and your current leads list. Send them an email in plain black and white font, no borders, headers or footers, nothing fancy. In this email, ask a simple question that will elicit a response. We want the question to be simple enough that it will encourage them to press reply, and give a response.
These types of emails are entirely about the engagement of the lead. If they will respond to you, you have an opportunity of an open conversation, and you can now direct that conversation in whatever direction you need it to go. It’s an engagement that you didn’t have before – congrats!
Your email list is incredibly important to your small business. It’s not just for gathering emails of the people you’ve worked with, or the people who have stumbled across your stuff. These people have shown interest in you at one point in time, and it’s your duty to help educate them more about who you are, what you do, and how you can solve their problems.
Use the format above and pick a cadence that feels realistic to you. Watch your email list come alive, and after following through on the first cycle, you should have responses from your dormant email list.
If you want extra help, or you want access to the scripts we use in the CEO Clubhouse, just send us a message with “Clubhouse” on our Instagram, and we’ll send you the details all about our program.