Running a Successful Email-Only Promotion
This session with Sarah Cook is all about email marketing and specifically about launching with an email-only promotion. Sarah shares some fantastic insights and practical tips for using email to successfully promote services like memberships, group programs, and online courses. She explains the key elements for a successful email-only launch, the importance of a healthy and engaged email list, and how to navigate expectations for email marketing metrics. Join us for a deep dive into using email marketing to grow your health and wellness practice!
Takeaways
Email-only promotions are effective for offers that are less than $500 and do not require extensive interaction with the seller.
A healthy and engaged email list is crucial for successful email-only promotions.
Curiosity is key in email marketing, and each email should focus on a specific micro angle to pique the interest of subscribers.
Segmentation and targeting can be beneficial, but it is not necessary for every email-only promotion.
The focus should be on the final sales and the number of people who purchase the product or service.
Transcript
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Elevate Your Practice Summit
[00:00:51] Introducing Sarah Cook: The Email Marketing Expert
[00:02:20] The Power of Email-Only Promotions
[00:03:02] Choosing the Right Offer for Email-Only Launches
[00:04:00] Building a Healthy Email List for Successful Promotions
[00:08:05] Crafting Your Email-Only Launch Strategy
[00:19:33] Segmentation and Frequency of Email Promotions
[00:22:45] Understanding Email Marketing Metrics and Expectations
[00:29:05] Closing Thoughts and Resources
Full Transcript
Welcome to the Elevate Your Practice Summit
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: Thanks so much for joining this session of the Elevate Your Practice Summit. I am going to be talking with Sarah Cook all about email marketing. And while email marketing is a really big topic, we are going to be focusing on using email only to run a successful launch or promotion.
Sarah is An amazing copywriter that I have worked with alongside, worked alongside of for many of my clients.
And I'm excited for her to dive into the topic of email and email marketing because it is such an impactful way for us to not only reach new clients, but to actually continue to nurture our previous clients and bring them back to our practice.
Introducing Sarah Cook: The Email Marketing Expert
[00:00:51] Samantha Mabe: Sarah Cook is a copywriter, StoryBrand certified guide, and former naturopathic doctor. She helps wellness practitioners get more clients from their content without spending all of their creative energy on marketing. I'm really excited for you to listen to this session.
Thanks for joining me, Sarah.
[00:01:09] Sarah Cook: Of course. Thanks for having me, Samantha.
[00:01:11] Samantha Mabe: Can you give us a little bit more detail about what you do and who it is that you work with In the health and wellness space?
[00:01:19] Sarah Cook: Yeah, of course. So I am a copywriter. I'm StoryBrand guide and I'm a former naturopathic Doctor, so I primarily work with naturopathic doctors functional, medicine practitioners, holistic nutritionists, pretty much any practitioner kind of in the health and wellness space who's Really building a name for themselves online. And so using online marketing in some capacity through website, social media, emails all of that fun stuff. It's really my sphere.
[00:01:48] Samantha Mabe: I love that you have a background in this so that when you write copy, but also the membership that you have, like you can draw on all of that knowledge and help them. Then translate that into words their clients are actually going to understand.
[00:02:03] Sarah Cook: Yeah, it really is. It's bringing together just that actual fundamental knowledge about natural medicine, but it's been communicating it in a way that connects with people and Ultimately brings more clients, patients in the door.
The Power of Email-Only Promotions
[00:02:20] Samantha Mabe: Today we're going to talk about email marketing, but specifically launching and promoting only with email. So I want to talk about if that's even possible because I think most people think we've got to have this whole process and all of these moving pieces when we want to launch something.
[00:02:41] Sarah Cook: Yeah! Doing an email only promotion is one of my favorite things to do. For myself personally, like being an introvert, not wanting to be showing up on a lot of calls or a lot of webinars. And it's very easy and hands off, but it's not the right fit for every offer or every situation for sure.
Choosing the Right Offer for Email-Only Launches
[00:03:02] Sarah Cook: I think one of the things just from the very start to know is what type of offer is really gonna be appropriate for selling just through email. And I think, the first thing to think about is just that I would recommend only doing this for an offer that is less than $500. Now, that's just a very, specific number that I'm throwing out there. But the concept with that is that you don't want it to be something where people need more interaction with you before buying.
And so the higher priced types of offers are not going to probably work very well with email alone because people will need a touch point. They'll either need to be on a webinar with you where they can ask questions or they'll need to have a call with you. They'll need some sort of touch point. So for one that's why I recommend like for the lower price type of offers This is a really great option.
Building a Healthy Email List for Successful Promotions
[00:04:00] Sarah Cook: And then the other thing to think about too is it's really only going to work if Your email list is healthy. Meaning actually Healthy and it has the right people on it. That's a huge thing I have seen actually if a practitioner has built an email list around promoting one certain lead magnet on a topic, then they try to offer something that is Different. Maybe they've slightly shifted their focus. So it doesn't work if the people on your email list are interested in something different than what you're trying to offer.
You have to have like the right match or the right people on the list. And then the list needs to be healthy, meaning that people generally Open your emails. They generally are used to hearing from you, the list is nurtured. People engage, people click through people sometimes reply. That's what a healthy email list is.
And so if you have kind of those things in place, this is an amazing option to run a promotion or a launch.
[00:05:07] Samantha Mabe: Okay, so do you recommend because this is going to be a lower price service is this generally something that's not like a one on one service?
[00:05:17] Sarah Cook: Correct. The types of offers that I have seen this be successful with, for example one naturopathic doctor wrote a promo like this for her and she was opening up a membership. And so it was more of a low priced monthly membership where people were getting weekly coaching calls and a few extra resources. And I don't remember the exact price point, but she had a monthly price and then she had a yearly price. And when she first opened it, we ran an email promotion like this, and she promoted the one year subscription at kind of a discounted rate. And she filled it up and she met her goal of how many signups she wanted. So a membership like that.
I've also had success with group programs. A lot of practitioners are running a wide variety of group programs and some of them are more in depth and more expensive and maybe even have a one on one component to them. But I helped with writing a promotion like this for a doctor who was opening up an eight week group program for women impaired menopause. She wanted six to ten people and she got eleven people. The price point was right. Her goals for the numbers that she could get were right. So that worked really well.
And an online course you can certainly do this with as well.
[00:06:35] Samantha Mabe: That's really helpful. I think it makes sense if you're launching a membership or a group program and you're saying, okay, door's open on this time, we want to get so many people in the door. I'm going to promote it to my email list that we know is healthy and engaged. And that's an easy way to do it without having to like, feel like you're on every platform trying to just get as many eyeballs as possible.
[00:06:59] Sarah Cook: Yeah. The other thing I have seen this work better for is if the offer isn't new. I have had a doctor that I worked with, she tried to just promote something again that essentially she'd been promoting all along, like pretty much everyone on her list already knew this thing existed. They'd already chosen not to sign up for it. And then like just running a promo of that, it wasn't anything new or fresh and it didn't really get a lot of results.
That is another thing to think about is something like a little novel or new, or if it is something that you've had for a while, either freshen it up or add a special bonus or do something that makes it more interesting to people who maybe have overlooked it before.
[00:07:46] Samantha Mabe: I think that's a good point two is that if you've been talking about this thing for a while and no one's buying, just focusing on it for a couple, like for a launch sequence is not going to help. You have to either give them a break from hearing about it or refresh it so that they have the motivation to be interested.
Crafting Your Email-Only Launch Strategy
[00:08:06] Samantha Mabe: Okay, so let's dive into what this actually looks like. How do you structure this? What do we need to do in order to build an email only launch or promotion?
[00:08:19] Sarah Cook: Sure. So first you're going to want to choose how long do you want this to go for and Generally, I most often will do one week actual doors open period of promotion. The emails will go a little bit longer than that, which I'll explain in a second, but it's actually just a Monday morning till the next Monday night is the actual time period of you're going to be wanting to get the sales.
I think one week makes a lot of sense because we are trying to get people's attention during a consolidated time. We're going to have some sort of urgency, like reason that now is the time we want them to buy. We're going to be emailing every day. And so we really don't want to drag this out more than probably a week or a week and a half.
You choose your one week promo time. But you don't just out of the blue that Monday morning send something. Okay? Actually you have to build kind of some interesting curiosity before the promotion period.
And so best case scenario, like I mentioned, would be your email list is nurtured, meaning like they're used to hearing from you maybe once a week, maybe once a month. Okay. But at least they're used to some consistency appearing from you.
And so what you first do is in one of those nurture emails is just start to tease that it's coming. And that can be as easy as a PS. I wouldn't do it too far in advance, but you could do that two weeks before the actual promo or you could do it one to two weeks.
So you just tease in your normal email and part of that is to give a heads up, it's to get people curious to get them thinking about it, but also because You When you do this promo, you're going to be sending an email every day. That's going to be a really shift in the pattern than what they're used to. And so you want to prepare them for that coming. So there's just like the PS teaser.
Then I will do a single email teaser. So it's not part of your normal weekly newsletter. It's not just the PS. It's a one single dedicated teaser email. I like to do this one Friday before if we're going to open the doors on Monday. And this one is very specifically giving them an idea of what the offer is going to be, but not Linking to the sales page, not telling them the price, not giving them any details. It's more just your problem and solution messaging: I've been noticing this problem. I've come up with this new, I offer that I'm going to be sharing with you Monday. Watch your email Monday. So that's the, before the promo.
And then Optional to also send another teaser on Sunday or not. The reason I would do an email on Sunday would be if you're going to do an early action bonus, where anybody who sends up signs up within the first 12 hours gets this even extra special thing. If you're going to do that, you want people to really know that. And so you want to send something on Sunday that says, okay, I'm opening something tomorrow. I'm opening the doors to this new program tomorrow. I want you to be ready because the first 10 people to sign up are also getting a 30 minute consult with me or whatever. So you'd want to let them know on Sunday. If you're not doing any sort of like bonus like that you don't necessarily have to do the Sunday teaser.
The door is open and it's literally every day is an email and purpose of every single one of those emails is just to, first of all, get them curious to click through and go to the sales page. And second of all, just to overcome every possible objection you can think they might have to signing up. And so every day you said something.
And then on the very last day, Say it's the next monday, those emails are all about urgency of why they need why it's the last day What's going to happen if they don't sign up then. You're closing the doors and won't be opening them again for another six months or this is the only time they're going to get in for 50 percent off or whatever the urgency. You send them like two or three emails on the last day. That's just for making sure they know what they're missing if they don't opt in at that point.
And that's it.
[00:12:55] Samantha Mabe: Walking through it feels a lot simpler than a lot of us think of when we think of launching something with a million emails and three emails a day and four weeks of a promo period. You have maybe two emails to start, you've got one week with an email a day, a couple of last minute reminders on the last day, and that's it. It's not like you're spending a ton of time on this and emailing people over and over again.
[00:13:25] Sarah Cook: It's about 11 emails.
[00:13:27] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, and that's much more doable, I think, than a lot of us expect when we think about, Launching something.
[00:13:34] Sarah Cook: Yeah. And I think for my business, also for the practitioners I work with, we're not huge companies with hundreds of thousands of people on our list. We're not typically emailing every day already. And typically we're emailing once a week on a good practitioner pattern.
The pattern interrupt of suddenly sending something every day actually is really noticeable to our subscribers and it is enough to get their attention. There's no reason that you have to be doing two or three times a day or anything like that.
[00:14:07] Samantha Mabe: You mentioned a lot of these emails during the week of that open cart, you're directing them to the sales page. So that's where they're going to get all the details about stuff. So really you're using those emails to get them interested enough to click over and then address some of the objections so that you don't have to do all of that on a sales page and make it forever long.
[00:14:28] Sarah Cook: I should have probably mentioned this in the first two minutes of our conversation, but when I say email only, I actually mean email plus sales page. I don't actually mean just email to a checkout link.
What I mean by email only is that you don't have to be doing Instagram lives. You don't have to be running webinars. You don't have to be taking sales calls. But you do have to have a good sales page to go with this.
[00:14:59] Samantha Mabe: We are not depending on these 11 emails to sell A group program or a membership. We are depending on these emails to get people interested enough to combat their biggest objections and then they're going to the sales page to get all of the nitty gritty details and that is then going to lead them straight to a checkout page. There's no sign up for a call. It's just email, sales page, check out.
[00:15:25] Sarah Cook: You absolutely nailed that. Every email, the entire purpose, actually, probably this applies to all of email marketing, it is all about curiosity. The subject line gets people curious enough to open it. The content of the email gets people curious enough to click through. And then the sales page really closes the deal.
[00:15:48] Samantha Mabe: Okay. So do you have tips on getting people to actually open these emails and then click on these emails.
[00:15:58] Sarah Cook: So how do we get the curiosity piece to work? So one thing is to remember that you do not need to put all of the information about the program in every email or any email. I use the word micro angle. And that means like you want to take one tiny part of your messaging, a micro part of your messaging per email.
One like micro angle per email. So whereas a sales page probably has a lot of messaging all the way from, who exactly is this program for? What types of problems does it solve? What kind of benefits can you expect to get? How does it actually work? What's actually included? What are the bonuses? And, why are you qualified to teach me this stuff. So there's all of these messaging points that will all be covered on the sales page.
And in a single email, you want to pull one tiny micro angle and then really flesh it out. Maybe there's part of your messaging is how is this different than everything else you've tried before? And one email is specifically just to talk about that.
And the fun thing about this is, You can even go then more in depth on it. So whereas like on your sales page, you might be trying to keep it to just like a short paragraph about why this is so special and unique, but then you can just take that idea and you get to write as long as you want, really in an email. You can give an example or you can give more analogies and you can just dig into that one little thing about why it's different.
And then the whole point is okay, they might not want to do this because they feel like they've already tried every diet to lose weight. Okay. This is different because we're actually helping them relieve stress, which corrects their hormones. So now they can lose weight. So you just dig into that on the email that's look, I know you might be feeling like super frustrated You've tried everything but have you ever thought of it this way? That actually like your stress hormones could be blocking you and that's exactly like what we're gonna fix in this program. And that's all you talk about and then click through to get the details.
So it's all about choosing a micro angle for each email. It really acts as a teaser to get them then to go And go to the actual sales page. The beauty of that is one of those micro angles is really going to speak to a certain client. Everyone needs to hear something a little bit different. And so throughout the course of the email sequence, you're going to touch on what the each different people need to hear. And then, Oh, that's the one that made it click for them.
[00:18:48] Samantha Mabe: I think that's really helpful. And some people are going to read every single one of those emails before they click to buy. Some of them are going to resonate with one email and they're going to be ready to go. We just have to address as many of those micro angles as possible in that timeframe. And really hit on why this program, why now, why you in a way that you can go a lot more in depth than on a sales page where we don't need five paragraphs in every section.
[00:19:17] Sarah Cook: You can tell more stories. I think that's a little bit more suited for emails. Tell examples can put in many kind of case studies like, Hey, I had this client who this happened with. And adding a little bit more of story into emails is also really helpful.
Segmentation and Frequency of Email Promotions
[00:19:33] Samantha Mabe: Do you have any suggestions or best practices that you've seen work for segmenting things out? Do you send these to everybody on your email list? How do you recommend doing that?
[00:19:45] Sarah Cook: So that really depends on your own situation with your email list. If you have pretty homogenous list, meaning like most everyone has gotten on there because they downloaded your gut health guide, then everyone on there is interested in gut health. If it's pretty homogenous like that, you don't have to worry so much about segmenting and only sending to certain people.
Some practitioners might actually segment that they have their patients on A certain list and then like people who have not become patients on another list.
For the most part I don't get too worried about segmenting, but there is I think a really important thing to think about. You don't want to send an offer to somebody who has either already bought that or Has already bought something really similar, especially If they bought it at a higher price. That's easy enough to do. Maybe you just promoted this group program six months ago and you had 20 people go through it. Now you're going to promote it again. Don't invite them again.
[00:20:50] Samantha Mabe: That's a relief, I think, for people is we don't have to get super complicated. We write 11 emails, we send it to almost everybody unless they've actually purchased this thing before.
Do you have any guidelines on how often to do a promotion like this, whether it's for a new thing or like the same thing over and over again?
[00:21:08] Sarah Cook: Yeah, I think that you just want to be cognizant of not constantly promoting. And it's totally fine to do something like this two to three times a year.
Some of the other things to make sure that people aren't like unsubscribe or this is spammy, I like to include a line on these emails where they can click to opt out of this promotion. It's just a very easy to set up the automation in your system. Because it is different for them. They're used to getting there once a week or there once a month, and all of a sudden they're getting something every day, even if it's only a week, you want to give them the opportunity to skip it.
And I like to just put a little line. You can either put it right at the top of the email, or you can put it at the very bottom as like a PS that says if you're not interested in, and you named the program, right? If you're not interested in this click here to skip the promotion. And you won't be totally removed from the email list. But they won't be bothered by those emails.
I think that's just a nice touch to do. And that it gives people that choice. I typically don't see people clicking that to unsubscribe, but I still feel like it's polite. It's just polite to give them that option. It's almost like when they don't click to say, I'm not interested, it's almost this little feedback in their mind telling them, Oh, actually I am a little bit interested. I feel like it can work in our favor to reaffirm to them that they're almost like taking this small action of saying, yes, I am interested by not clicking it.
Understanding Email Marketing Metrics and Expectations
[00:22:45] Samantha Mabe: So do you have any expectations as far as how many people we should expect based on our list size and metrics that we metrics that we should expect, things that we can take a look at to make sure it's working.
[00:23:01] Sarah Cook: 100%. Okay, so a couple things about this. I always find it odd to look at statistics that are published about email marketing because they usually do not reflect my experience. And so I want to share a little bit about what that is those statistics say and what my experience has been and what I typically tell my clients to expect.
So you'll see, for example hubspot posts a lot of statistics on marketing and things. Open rates, I'm not even going to care about anymore because it used to be, yes, we're very interested in open rates, but now several email providers, they'll mark it as if it was opened just because they've moved it onto your phone or something when that person has not actually opened it. It's just because it's moved from one server to another server or something like that. So basically open rates, I'm not even going to worry too much about.
So we look at click through rates. And HubSpot says average click through rate is 2. 6 to 3 percent. And okay, that's fine. Other statistics I see is that a good conversion off a sales page is 1 percent to 2%. Let's say you got a thousand people on the email list and you get 3 percent of them to click through and then they're on the sales page and 1 percent of them buys, you're left with negative, like zero below zero people, right?
When you look at those types of statistics, it's very disheartening and it's not my experience. Part of that is that those numbers are coming from massive companies working in our favor, most of the practitioners I'm working with have relatively small lists still, but the key is, They are specific. So they might have a small list, but if they have the right people on those lists, these types of statistics are completely irrelevant.
And so I can share what I see from running these promotions. I usually tell my clients that we can definitely expect to get 1 percent of their list to buy, 1 to 2%. However, the smaller the list, the higher you can get higher percentages. So on the example of there's 1000 people on the list, that's 10 people. So you can get 10 to 20 people will buy the thing from an email list of 1000.
However that's what I say expected. For myself, I ran a Black Friday promo for one week, followed this strategy, and I had three and a half percent. So three and a half percent of my subscribers bought something during that week. And so that's why I say, if you're doing it right, if you're following this protocol I've just described, if you have a healthy list, you can pretty much count on the 1 to 2%, but it could be up to 4 percent if all the stars align.
The reality is like, Yeah, marketing is a numbers game that we cannot ignore. And for some people getting 10 to 20 people to sign up is perfect. It's exactly what they want. Some people might say, No, I want a lot more than that. In that case you need more traffic. You need to be running ads. You need to grow your email list bigger before doing this launch. Because it's a numbers game. And even if we can break the odds of 3 percent clicking, 1 percent buying. It still does depend on numbers.
[00:26:56] Samantha Mabe: That's really helpful though. Yes, we need the numbers on our email list, but it's not as dire as some of the statistics that we see out there.
Since you have set expectations for people, are there things they should be looking at?
We don't want to look at open rates because Those are clearly not accurate, but is there like a click through rate, is that what we should be looking at? Are we just looking at the final sales?
[00:27:20] Sarah Cook: All I care about, no, seriously, especially a promo like this Who actually cares how many people opened it? How many people clicked it? How many people read the sales page? Who cares? What matters is how many people bought it and are in your program now? So I literally only care about the final number.
I'm not breaking it down to how many clicked and opened and replied. I get replies to my emails all the time, and I think it's a sign of a healthy email list, and you can put that in your promos like give any questions hit reply. You don't have to jump on a call with them. You just answer their question really quickly on email.
[00:27:53] Samantha Mabe: Thank you for breaking all this down. Like having it broken down, It's a lot simpler than we expect it to be. We're not looking at all of this crazy numbers. We're not looking at weeks of launching like it's a whole lot easier to do To get our program or our membership launched and in front of people as long as we already have The traffic and the email list size.
[00:28:16] Sarah Cook: Yes. And I do keep coming back to this. You have to have the healthy email list and the right people on your email list. And that's the part that we haven't talked about, but that is the part that begins with your lead magnet growing your list, right? That's another conversation for another day, but essentially like this whole process begins with growing your list of the right people. That happens with the lead magnet and that happens in all the places of showing up on social media showing, up for podcasts and then sharing a lead magnet that connects with people and they care about and gets them in. And then from there, you're able to do these things.
Closing Thoughts and Resources
[00:29:05] Samantha Mabe: Awesome. Can you let everybody know where they can find you? And you have a freebie to share that's going to grow our list .
[00:29:14] Sarah Cook: Yeah, for sure. I'm at wellnesswriter. com. I'm on Instagram. I am sarahcook. wellnesswriter.
My freebie right now is a rinse and repeat caption template So this is for using on social media, a way to directly just get people curious enough to go to the next step And so this caption template gets people curious to be asking literally asking To download your lead magnet. That's the rinse and repeat caption template, which I can share the link with you as well.
[00:29:45] Samantha Mabe: Thank you so much for tuning into this session of elevate your practice. I was so Excited to talk with all of the guests in this round of the summit, and I hope that you'll share it with a colleague or a friend who could use this magnetic marketing magic as well. You can send them to elevateyourpractice. co to register now, and they will get access to the summit right away.
