The Psychology of Building an Excellent Email Marketing Campaign with Rob and Kennedy

Jeremy Deighan
Hey, everyone, thank you for checking out the podcast today. We have some very special guests with us, Rob and Kennedy founders of the Email Marketing Heroes and the Email Marketing Show who are obviously experts in email marketing.

And not only that, but one thing that was interesting when talking with them is that they look at the psychology of email marketing, and how we can use that in our business.

So, I'm really excited to have you two hear today. How's it going?

Rob
Yeah, really good.

Kennedy
Hello, Jeremy. Good to see ya.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, awesome. This is a pleasure. I was checking out your stuff we've been in contact back and forth. And I was looking at your site as I usually do before I hop on the shows and get to know you know, the guests.

Beautiful website, you have a wealth of knowledge on there, great looking podcasts, a lot of free training and paid for training that people can get. And I think this is going to be a really great episode to help one of the common problems that a lot of people who have an online business, which is helping them with their email, as we know, it's so important to have.

So before we get started into the aspects of email marketing, why don't you just go ahead and give me a quick little story about how you got into this role, how you got into this business and started helping others with this.

Rob
Yeah, so it's an unusual backstory. I'm Rob. I'll be speaking with this voice for the rest of the podcast. You'll be able to differentiate us, because Kennedy is-

Kennedy
The funny one, the funny one.

Rob
The other one, let's say the other one.

I'm actually a hypnotist, the stage comedy hypnotist. I've been doing that for like 18, just over 18 years now, traveling almost all over the world performing my show.

And Kennedy is a mind reader. The folks in the states would know that as a mentalist. Basically, using skills like body language and psychology and understanding people and influence to make it look a lot like he can read people's minds.

And basically, that means that we get inside people's heads on stage and do funny stuff for a living. And we started doing that, again, like 18 years ago. For me straight out of school for Kennedy straight out of university. And we realized that we had accidentally started a business.

And I'm sure people listening to this can relate to just having a thing that you're really good at and you like doing, and all you want to do is do it or help people to do it. And then along with that, you then have to study how to do marketing and branding and pricing and positioning and all of that jam.

And so we very quickly found email marketing is just an amazing tool to get booked for gigs. And then those gigs were turned into more gigs and referred gigs and all of that. And we became very, very busy at a very early age.

And other entertainers started asking us how we were doing it. And so that actually led to creating courses to teach other entertainers how to market themselves the way that we were still doing.

In fact, Kennedy still has a business doing that now for magicians, particularly another entertainers. And I created courses for hypnotists and hypnotherapists, teaching them how they could grow their hypnotherapy practice or do more stage shows, just by selling courses realistically to fill in the time where we weren't on stage where we were sat in a departure lounge or sat on a train or just traveling sometimes halfway around the world to do 60 minutes on stage and then travel back again.

So we wanted something to fill that time. And that's where our courses came about. And again, we realized, "Hang on a minute, if we can get gigs using email marketing, then we can sell a whole boatload of our courses with email marketing."

And eventually, that kind of spread to other businesses wanting to learn how to do this other course creators wanting to learn, "How do I sell my courses to my audience in the same volume and the same way that you have using email?"

And we were really keen to apply the same psychology that we use on stage to email marketing. So that actually we can get deeper impact and have better results and send emails that people love receiving, and we can make more money from even a smaller email list.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Very cool. Yeah, this is going to be a really cool topic because I think a lot of people out there when they hear about email marketing, or when they first start learning it, you had that very cut and dry email sequence that everyone uses.

You know, the five day email sequence that is, you know, introduce yourself and then talk about your product. And not many people talk about the psychology and the way the emails should be formulated to make sure that you're getting the best response from people.

And so whenever you begin teaching someone who's, say, brand new let's let's imagine that the person listening to this podcast right now is a new course creator, or maybe they have an online course but they haven't done email marketing before.

And they come to you and they say, you know, "I need help with setting up my email sequence." First of all, why do you think email is important would be I guess my first question. What's the purpose of using email for those out there listening?

Kennedy
What's really interesting about email is that the way it's used has completely changed over the last few years. And it's gone from being this replacement for letters from your gran, which, you know, it used to be electronic mail, it was like the replacement for sending post and mail to people.

It's now actually just another app that snuggled between Tik Tok and Clubhouse on your phone that people check and expect to get content from. So to be honest, we didn't decide that email was super important.

Much, much, much, much cleverer people than us decided that the people at HubSpot people, a lot of these big companies did research and found out that email is the number one, the single highest by far return on investment activity that businesses of all markets and of all stages can be doing in terms of how much time energy and money you put into it.

For every ounce of that you put in, you get many multiple times more back when compared to cold calling, trying to do things on the phone, social media, anything and everything else. And nothing's replaced it.

Things have tried things have been touted around, usually by marketers trying to sell you of course, about why that thing is wonderful, and that are gonna come and replace email.

The truth is, look, how does Facebook get you to go and check out the posts you just got tagged in? It sends you an email. How do you sign up for that new social media channel? You have to have an email address.

How do you hear about confirmations of anything, any tickets that you book to go and see something at the theater? Or you go and see Elton John, go and play his final concert? How do you do that? Well, you do it with an email address.

We've all got email addresses, and we receive those emails on our phones. And what's really nice is, well 99% of email marketing is terrible. But same as 99% of everything. 99% of everything is awful. But the good news is, that's your hugest and biggest opportunity.

If we can get you to do slightly better email marketing, your stuff, your content will stand up head and shoulders above all the other "blah" that's in everybody else's inbox. And you will get people opening your emails, you get people looking at your offers at your courses at your memberships and things like this, and actually deciding to become a customer of yours. Because they like you.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, very good. That's awesome. I totally agree with that. I mean, email to me is strong, because like you said everyone has that. Everyone uses it, probably uses it more than social media and some of the other things that you mentioned.

And then one thing that I found out early on in my career is that when you are on Facebook, or say you're putting courses on a platform, you're always subject to that platform shutting down, kicking you off or banning your account.

But email doesn't ever go away. As long as you, you know, have those emails, you can always contact those customers. And I found out early on that that was probably the most important reason for me to learn email marketing was so that no matter what happens with my business on any of these platforms, I always have that email to contact those people. Is that something that you would agree with?

Kennedy
Yeah, you own the data, right? You own the data. Like if you fall out with Instagram, and they shut down your account, you probably know people, we've all heard of people who've had their account shut down for no good reason that they know of or they will admit to anyway.

And so what they can't do is take that data, download those contacts and upload it to a different social platform. You can't do that on social media. Whereas hey, if you're with Active Campaign, and you try something, and it was a bit naughty, and you didn't realize it was a bit naughty, but they send you off to go pack your bags and shut down your account.

Well before that, before they do that, they will usually let you go in or they will that you go in, download your information, you can go and get a Infusionsoft or Keap account and upload the information there.

So you can transport that data to other places, because you own the data. You're not really at the mercy of those social media algorithms anymore.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, very good. I totally agree with that. So someone comes to you. They're new to email marketing, and they want to start sending out emails and creating campaigns and automations and what have you.

What would be the starting foundation that that person should focus on?

Rob
So the first thing we really want people to pay attention to is the fact that the emails that they send are not going to be about the products that they sell, the course that they sell, or the membership or whatever it is that they sell. It's going to be about serving them emotional needs and benefiting the subscribers.

This requires a bit of a flick of a switch of mindset. But we always think about email as being this thing that we send out when we want to tell our people about our course or about our program.

And instead, what we really want to do is we want to be there and be valuable and turn up every day so that people want to open your emails. And this sounds crazy, but why don't open your emails, even if they're not considering buying from you.

Because we've all been on lists of people who sell courses, and they email you every day and say, "Here's another cool thing about my course. Would you like to buy it yet? No. Okay, great. Here's another cool thing about my course. Would you like to buy it yet? No. Okay, great." Next day, "Here's another cool thing about my course, here's a testimonial from someone else."

And that has its place, that has some value to it. But what we really need to do is to make sure that people don't get to the point where they think, "Well, this person's always just selling me something. So I'm just going to stop opening their email until I'm ready to buy." And that's what typically tends to happen, right?

People get into that banner blindness from your emails and think, "Well, I'll just open that when I'm ready to buy something or when there's a new course, or when there's a new thing happening, or a new promotion, or a discount, or a Black Friday sale or something."

And instead, we want people to open your emails, because the emails themselves are valuable. And you casually mention your product as part of that. Now, that doesn't mean that you now have to spend weeks of your time creating these amazing long emails that have full blog posts in them and a full training articles in their own right. That's not what value means.

Value just means that it provides some sort of insight ideas, stories, hints, tips, inspiration, humor, in people's daily life, it connects with them emotionally, it moves them on an emotional level, it serves their emotional needs as we describe it.

And then it casually mentioned your product so that if and when it's the right time for them to buy, they will. Because email fixes the one thing that marketing generally has always struggled with. And that's it being the right time for someone to buy something.

It doesn't matter if your product launch closes on midnight on Thursday, because you've decided arbitrarily that's when it's going to close. If your cost is $2,000. And that person doesn't have $2,000 in the bank or credit to the value of $2,000, they can't buy it no matter what you're doing.

So there's always going to be something in the way of somebody buying that you can't overcome and that's typically going to be just the wrong time. That's not my my priority right now, I don't have the time to invest in it right now, I don't have the money to invest in it right now.

And so rather than just like throwing out an email promotion, and hoping that some of our people open, some of our people click and some of our people buy, instead, we want the email to be there every day in their life.

So that when it's an providing value to them, so that when it's the right time for them to buy it, they can just jump on it and immediately grab it. And then that's what we're really looking to do here.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, very good. Yeah. So staying in front of mind, for the customer, you know, as we know, it takes many touchpoints for someone to buy, as you mentioned. And so we want to create these emails hit on an emotional stance for that customer, so that we're talking to them, and we're getting them inspired and motivated to buy our products in the future.

So how do you decide on what to write about? I know you listed a couple of different things that you could put in an email, but someone who's brand new and starting out and is looking at that blank screen and you know the bleeping cursor.

How do you figure out what you should be writing about? I guess my fear when writing emails is I don't want to go off on a tangent and start talking about stories that doesn't relate or isn't going to help someone, you know, get to know me better or want to buy my products in the future.

So how do you come up with the information in those emails that you want to write about?

Kennedy
The emails we send are interesting, because we have this problem, obviously, which is people in most of our emails, talk about our membership, which is called the League of Email Marketing Heroes. And when people buy that we naturally take them out.

And and they don't get those emails anymore, right? As you'd imagine, like, "Hey, they bought the thing. Don't keep selling the thing." Basic email segmentation, you know, just say no to that.

But then we had a bunch of members complain and come to us and say, "Can I keep receiving your daily emails?" Because we email every single day. And we were like, "But you've bought the thing." And they're like, "Yeah, well, they've become a part of my routine."

And the only reason that's possible, is if you send a particular type of email, and that type of email is an email that has value in it every single day. And so what do we mean by value? Don't you ever try to sit down and like write value, Can you imagine that right? Just everybody says that, "What should I put in my social content, or whatever in my email content?"

And people go up on the forums and in Facebook groups and stuff, say, "h, you should just give them value." And then you sit down and try to write some value, it's very difficult to come up with value. So we came up with some shortcuts.

What you want to do rather than emailing about your products and services, you want to serve the emotional needs of your audience. And the really simple way of doing that is to tell stories. Stories are really useful for a whole bunch of reasons that we won't go into today but a couple of which are really easy for you to write, you know what a story is.

Secondly, stuff always happens to you that you can tell stories about. And we'll get on to how it relates to what you sell in a second. But also, stories bring things to life. They allow people to emotionally connect with you, as a human being.

If I just give you a list of four different ways to increase your open rates of your emails, that's great and everything, but you're probably not going to be talking about that in a month's time. Whereas I am sure there are stories you tell even today about events that happen years and years and years ago.

And the reason is, we emotionally connect with them, they become a talking point. And they easier to remember they actually physically if you look at the actual neuroscience of storytelling, they physically take up more space inside of people's brains.

So how do we take stories about everyday occurrences. Rob ordered a mattress, you bought a new doorbell, I've got two Bengal kittens, I've all these different things. How do we turn those stories into things that are relevant to your audience?

Because you might be thinking, "Well, Kennedy, I've got this course it's about it," maybe it's a weight loss course that you've got or something like that, as an example, "How does the fact that I got a new doorbell relate to weight loss?"

And what we're going to do is we're going to use the stories as like fables as like, what can be the moral of that story as it pertains and relate to the audience and what they need. So you should absolutely know what the pain points what the needs, what the wants, what the insecurities what the desires of your audience are.

And if you're in the fitness industry, that's going to be to do with self image, self confidence, competitiveness, there's a whole bunch of things in that particular industry, right? So what you can do is you can talk about the story, and then relate it to one of those emotional needs.

Let's take the example of Rob sent an email fairly recently about the fact that he ordered a new mattress for his bed, and he had not ordered a new mattress for a long time. And he expected it to come into like two big people, strong people to show up at his door and carry in this big unworldly mattress.

But of course, when it showed up, and it was one little delivery guy from UPS, and he put on his doorstep, but it was like tube, Rob was very confused. How does that transition into a story and too into a lesson from that story about email marketing?

In fact, Rob do you want to just explain what you did how you got from, "Well, it wasn't the right shade box" into, "Hey, you should come and join our free Facebook group, that Email Marketing Show Community" or whatever it was.

Rob
Yeah, so the story was a really short version of what Kennedy just said, a guy turn up at my door with this box, that was a small tube, and I looked confused. And he said, "Oh, it's your mattress." And I looked even more confused, because I'm not that small. And he said, "Oh, we vacuum pack them these days."

And sometimes when you look at something from the outside, it's easy to make assumptions about what it's like on the inside. It's easy to assume, "That's not what I thought it was gonna be. That looks like it's gonna be more difficult than I thought was going to be. This thing's now got to unroll on my bed somehow."

It's easy to make assumptions from stuff from the outside. And a lot of the time people look at email marketing, and they make these assumptions about it from the outside. They assume it's difficult and time consuming, and it annoys people and doesn't work anymore. And email marketing is dead now.

But actually, once you get into the weeds of it, you actually find out it's quite easy, it's really effective, you've just got to do it right, you have to look at it from a different perspective.

So when you look at something from the outside, you see this illusion of what you think when you see it from the inside, it can be very different indeed. In fact, if you want to see a sort of a modern, cool, good approach to email marketing, without bashing the microphone the way I just did, then come and check stuff out inside the league. So that's kind of how we relate one thing to the next.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome, really cool, I love this. This is amazing.

And I thought about this myself, I don't think I've implemented it as good as I would like to. But we all have things that happened to us every single day, that could be relatable into a story.

And then if you could find the value in that story, like you said, I love that you said use it as like a fable or moral of a story that you can use that to drive people back into your business. I think that's amazing.

I mean, I had a similar story that I posted one time, about an experience I had at Dunkin Donuts. It could have been resolved so easily, and it wasn't and it turned into a catastrophe. And I was able to wield that into a story or a fable about online business and how you should be thinking about the customer. So I totally get this. And I think this is an amazing way to go about it.

One question that I had. When you are going to write these emails or when you think about these stories, something I've struggled with in the past is trying to find a way to make sure that I keep notes of these stories or as they happen I write them down. Do you have any apps or tips or tricks to organizing these as they come to you?

Kennedy
There's a couple of things. One of them is keep it out of them. I mean, I have a notes document on my phone. In the past I've used a simple Google Sheets document to keep note of them. And I just put like, had two columns.

Literally, this was what happened. And an idea for what the moral of that story was, as it happened. I will often find that when I started writing the story, the moral change, though, because one of the big tips to doing this and doing it quickly, because literally, I write these emails, we write an email like this every single day. And we do it for four businesses.

So four emails every single day, between Rob and I. And the reason we're able to do it quickly, is yes, we started and so we kept going, and we got better at it. So you've got to start at some point. But the other reason is, because we don't allow ourselves to get consumed in what's the moral gonna be, what's the lesson out of this.

So just to clarify something as well, before we go into kind of how we do that. The reason the story, then the lesson, then we go into the offer. So it's like, "Here's the story about the thing, here's the lesson, the moral and here's the offer about you know, if you want to do this faster, or you want our templates to do it," or whatever it is, you offer, that's the offer at the end.

But the offer could be go check out our podcast, that Email Marketing Show, it could be I'm doing a Facebook Live at two o'clock click here, it could be whatever it's going to be. So that can be any offer does not have to be a paid offer.

But the reason that SLO, story, lesson, offer formula we invented works is because you no longer have to sit and scratch your head and wonder, "Is today a value day, or is today a day I can make an offer?" Because that slows you down.

We don't want to slow down, we want to be fast, we want to be efficient. We want to we don't want to make email marketing our entire world. We do all of our email marketing in two hours a week, maximum probably an hour honestly. I'm probably exaggerating when I say two hours, right?

And the only reason we can do that is because in a story, lesson, offer framework email, there is value in a story because there's value and attainment. There's value in the rapport, it builds with your audience, because they identify with things that happen in your life. So there's value in that.

Then there's value in the moral in that lesson of the story. So that's two pieces of value in that one email. And then there's an offer, sometimes it's a paid offer. Sometimes it's a free offer. But the great news is by just following story, lesson, offer, you 100% of the time outway offers 2-to-1 with value every single time without having to wander without having to plan without having to slow yourself down.

So that's the reason it exists. Because we need to move fast because we don't want this stuff to take over our lives. So does that make sense?

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, just to clarify. So story, lesson, offer, that is in every email that you're writing, correct?

Kennedy
Almost every email. Like we do break that we have actually four different formulas we use, but there's what we call the traditional, which is the SLO. That's how we do most of our emails.

Sometimes if we're doing like a more direct sales campaign, and we're like in full sales mode, because we're launching a new course or we're promoting a friend's course or like that, then we might just do some more like, "Hey, we just made a new video for you go check it out." We'll do like a much shorter email or something like that.

But this kind of email a day to day email. Yeah, it's always story, lesson, offer.

Jeremy Deighan
You brought up a great point that I was thinking about because I know you said you do emails every day. And you don't have to spend a whole lot of time writing these emails.

So my question for you is what is your stance on how often to write these emails? Are you batch writing emails? Lke say at the beginning of the week for the rest of the week?

I know some people will go into their autoresponder and they will just keep adding emails so that when someone opts into their email list, they have the next 180 days of emails written out.

So what is your stance on that? Do you like having pre-written emails in the autoresponder? Or are you writing new emails per week or per day? What does that look like?

Rob
So we do a combination of those two things. So that's assess the batch writing versus day to day writing.

Generally speaking, Kennedy and I both have really short attention spans. And the idea of sitting down and like pre writing a week's worth of emails feels like a nightmare to us, generally.

We do have an approach to it, if we ever had to, like if one of us was going to be out of the business for an extended period of time, and we just had to get through them, we have a process for doing that. You can batch right 90 days worth of emails in like an hour and a half in terms of figuring out what you're going to say. And then you just need to quickly go through and fill in the blanks.

With that said, however, you have to do what suits your personality and what will get the emails written and sent. So if you're a batching person, and you're better to spend half a day writing your entire weeks, or two weeks worth of emails, then you should do that.

For us, it's very much a daily habit thing, Kennedy gets up at half, five in the morning, puts the kettle on to make a cup of tea, opens up his MacBook, writes an email, hits send, before the teas boil, shuts his MacBook, and it's done for the day.

And that's like an easy habit like brushing your teeth, you brush your teeth at the same time of day, wash your face at the time, and it's the same time of day. Send an email at the same time of day, it's a habit thing.

Whereas there's other people who would do like I said, spend a couple of hours in one blast and get them all done. The downside for us of doing it that way, is that all of your emails are gonna be in the same kind of mood.

So if you're having a grumpy day, or a tired day, your emails are all gonna feel kind of grumpy, and tired. And it also means you have to like think back or go and check your vault of stories as to what what else has happened to me lately?

Whereas when you do it in the moment, every day, you can just say it right. One of our questions is, "What's the least boring thing that happened to me in the last 24 hours, I bought a mattress. Great, I'll write about that."

And there's very little thought you can always just cast your mind back within the last 24 hours and think, "Well, what's happened to me that I can talk about? And then you go ahead and write the story there. And so I think that's the first part. So we like to do that.

However, in terms of like automations versus broadcast one offs and our emails, we use a combination of the two. See, day to day, we want to be able to email our list and show up every single day with value. And most of the time, that means that, I don't know, probably 60% of the time, we're doing those day to day daily emails.

I would guess like once every four to six weeks, we'll do some kind of campaign-ified promotion, which is more than one email, it's a bunch of emails pointing towards a specific thing. So maybe we do like a five day free challenge and launch a course at the end of it.

Maybe we do an affiliate promotion for somebody else's course. Maybe we are doing a webinar. And that's obviously got emails to get people on the webinar show up to the webinar, and then follow up after the webinar. So that might be in our case, like a 15 day promotion now.

So every four to six weeks, we'll do something where there's a real beginning, a middle and an end, and all the emails stacked together to take the subscribers on a journey and push them through a particular thing.

What we tend to do is we do that once every four to six weeks, because it freshens it up a little bit. It makes it something different and an event that we can talk about. And it usually has like a close or something that there's some reason to act now.

And then we take the best performing ones of those campaigns, the best performing campaigns that make us the most money and get the best response, and we automate those and put them into what we call our Email Engine. Now the Email Engine is there for every new subscriber to go through begins with our welcome sequence, which we call our "getting to know you sequence" where we get to know them, and they get to know us.

They go through this amazing welcome sequence. And then through a series of these highest performing email sales campaigns, which we all give stupid names to, because we teach them and we have to be able to like refer to them as different things.

So they go through a bunch of campaigns that are there to set context and make sure people know what our courses are, why they're good, who should buy them, why they should buy them now what that'll do for them, all of those things, and give people different offers and different perspectives. If you join now you get this cool thing as a bonus, okay, great.

When that comes to an end, "Register, go and watch this free video." And at the end of the free video, we talk about the product, "Gatch this free video," maybe we don't sell anything in that one. But once they've clicked to watch it, we put them into another sequence where we sell them something else.

And so basically what this means is that by the time somebody comes to the end of our train carriages, our train cars, that email engine, they end up like sort of six weeks into our business, they've got a really good overview of what we sell, we've got a really good overview of why it helps them.

It's mostly story that's an offer. So they've had a ton of value along the way. And we make 80% of our sales at that point by that point. And if somebody comes out the other end of our email engine having not bought, the only reason they could not have bought is either they're on the wrong list.

And they're not actually, they actually thought they were subscribing to a gardening email list or something and we don't help them with that. Or it's just the wrong time. Like they just need to wait now until the time is right and when the time is right, they'll join.

So that's why we show up every single day in their inbox with a cool short email, hint, story, tip, idea, or inspiration. So that when the time is right, and they're ready to take their email marketing seriously, there's only two names at the top of their head, and that's Rob and Kennedy.

So that's kind of how we're pushing it to happen. So we use a combination of broadcasted stuff and automations like that.

Jeremy Deighan
This is brilliant and I love the idea of taking your best emails and putting them into a sequence because you know that those convert well, you know that those are going to be powerful because you've seen the metrics. And now we're implementing that into our sequences later on.

So that anyone who goes through that, you know, they're going to get great value. I think that's wonderful. This is going to be kind of a double loaded question. You answered it a little bit.

But how often are you sending emails out? It sounds like you're sending them once a day during promotional periods. Are you sending multiple emails a day? Some people don't think you should send more than one email a week, some people say every day is fine.

I signed up for this guy teaching guitar on YouTube. And I really enjoyed his content, but he was sending like six emails a day, and it really overwhelmed me. He's one of the few people I unsubscribed from because it was a little too much.

So double question here. How often are you sending the emails? And then is there a certain time of day that you find works better than other times? Earlier you said, you know, you write the email in the in the morning and send it off.

Does it matter if you send it first thing in the morning? Or do you schedule it to go out later in the afternoon? What are your thoughts on that?

Kennedy
We email every day. And the reason we email every day is because we want our subscribers to look forward to and create a habit out of reading our emails. And it's easy to get into a habit of something that happens every day than it is to have to have something and get into a habit or something that happens every week.

Because, I mean, going back to that fitness niche example, again, if somebody gets into a habit of their daily routine of, they're going to get fitter and get better results faster, and have their mindset change psychologically speaking, much, much faster.

Because our brains need training. It takes between 28 and 45 days to form a new habit. If you're going to spread that out over once a week, that's 28 to 45 weeks. But it won't be as fast as that because the habit doesn't actually form as fast if it's not a daily habit.

So we want to create a habit. And people don't get upset if you email them every day, if the reason they're joining your list is to hear from you every single day. So our highest performing lead magnet is the one that says, "Do you want to get our daily tips about email marketing to your inbox every single day to make more sales of your courses, coaching and membership sites?"

If people opt in for that they know what they're getting. The problem is a lot of the time, the old way of doing email marketing, and list building was tell people they're going to get this lovely lead magnet, and then hide the fact you're ever going to be in touch again.

And what that causes is the thing that everybody hates. And that is a surprise. None of us like surprises. None of us. I don't know about you, but when I know it's gonna be my birthday. So there I am on the second of July each year, the day before my birthday.

I'm over at the mirror practicing my surprise face. So I don't look like I'm being sarcastic. "Oh, no, that was too much. Oh, no, you look grumpy still." Like, nobody likes a surprise nobody.

So when your subscribers opt in, and they join your email list, because they're getting your fantastic eBook about such and such a thing. They never expect to hear from you again, because they you as far as they're concerned, the transaction is complete, they've given you their email address, you've got their PDF, job done.

So when you show up with an email ever again, they'll gonna be like, "Why are you emailing me? We have to put the I'm going to be in touch with you front and center. Right? The more often you email people, the more you can move that relationship on.

Because if you go on a date, and they don't text you for a week, or two weeks or a month, you don't think that relationships going to go very fast. The people you're in the deepest relationships with are usually the people you hear from most often.

So emailing more often definitely helps. There are some times if an offer is closing, like the last day of an offer, we might email three times that day. I don't think we have an email more than three times a day. Right?

Because will usually email that morning saying, "Oh, today's the last day," maybe a little bit later on going, "It closes tonight." And then probably an hour beforehand go, "This is your last chance." And we feel like that's okay, because we want to make sure nobody can say to us, "Well, I really wanted that thing, but I didn't know about it."

So I want to make sure we're not doing people a disservice time of day, though. Rob, what do you think,?

Rob
It doesn't really matter. The best time of day to send is the time that you're going to get it sent. We've tested loads and we've never found any we've never found a time of day that gets a higher open rate or a higher click through rate than other times a day.

It seems in our business, at least in our testing in other niches to make little difference.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. I just wanted to hear an opinion if it mattered or not, or anything that you had seen.

I mean, I guess the good thing about email is, you know, unlike Facebook where, you know, it's gonna disappear, or you know, something like one of those platforms Instagram or something where it's going to go away at some point, email is going to live in that email box.

And even myself, I might see an email in the morning. I might not open it till later on in the day, so it doesn't matter when they send it to me. I'm going to open it up when I want to open it up. So that makes a lot of sense.

I guess my next question for you would be the question of writing good subject lines, because, you know, no one's going to open an email if the subject line doesn't stand out to the other hundreds of emails that you have in your email box.

So how do you go about writing a good subject line for your email or something that's captivating, so that you can get more click throughs?

Kennedy
I'm going to say something really shocking now, I hope that's okay. So your subject line, contrary to what we've all been sold on, is not the thing that gets your emails opened. What?! I know.

Your subject line is the second thing, maybe, that gets you emails opened but it's not the thing that gets them open. And it's not the biggest thing. The thing I'm going to share with you get to emails opened, far outweighs even the best subject line ever.

The thing that gets you email opened is your subscribers mental reputation with you. It's your name. Your name in the left hand side where it says who it's from, that's what actually gets your email open.

And here's the proof of that. I don't care what Jeremy puts in his subject line to his email when he emails me because if my friend Jeremy drops me an email, I'm opening the email. I don't care if he puts the word, "Hi, hello, some T's," I don't care.

I'm opening the email. Because I know every time I open that email, I'm going to get something valuable, I'm gonna get something important. It's every time I get an email from Rob, it's not going to be like rubbish, I'm always going to get something valuable.

So the thing that gets your emails open is your reputation with them. That's the reason you think of email as a long term game. Don't use tricky subject lines, to trick people into opening your emails. Because guess what you just did?

You just damaged your email reputation with that person, your psychology reputation with our personal so next time you see any subject line from you, they're gonna be like, "I don't care what's in the thing. I'm gonna get tricked again."

And we see big name marketers messing this up all the time. Tricky, clever, "Oh, this thing happened." And you open it up. And it didn't really but I got the email opened. And guess what you just did? You look like an idiot and you, you broke my trust.

When my selling our courses. The last thing you want to do is break trust, we do all this work to build trust. So a really good way of making sure you are getting the results of your reputation. And you're not being negatively impacted by other people's reputation is change your from name that you send from so your email address, do the same, the little from name, change it to your first name, and then like a hyphen or a semicolon or a slash, and then your brand's name.

Because when you get an email from Rob, and it says Rob - Email Marketing Heroes, you know, which Rob that is. And you know, when I get his emails, they're always fun. They're always funny, I learned something, I really liked them.

Or there might be another Rob and he's not very good. He's a bit of a snake. Right? We don't want this rob his reputation and his open rate to be negatively impacted by other Rob nasty Rob, evil Rob's terrible reputation. So your name is really important in that email inbox. That's the first thing.

Now, we still do need to have good subject lines. Because once they do that, once they look at the name, they go, "Oh, cool it's somebody I care about." They want to know that the email content here is different. This is something new I want to take care of.

And Rob actually, I've done enough blathering on. Do you want to talk about some of the techniques we use for coming up with subject lines.

Rob
Yes, a really simple thing really is we take the email we've just written the first thing is write the email first and come back to the subject line later. So many people sit down and open that email that blank email editor and they think, "What's the subject line for today's email?" And you haven't written it yet, that's really hard to do.

So write the email first, and then come back to the subject line. And basically, we break the email down into the sum of its parts. So if it's a storythat's an offer email, there's first part of the story and second parts of the lesson. Third part is the offer. Great.

So now I just dig through the story and say, "Well, what's an interesting thing that we can pull out of this story?" So it could be with the mattress story, it could be what's inside this box, it could be the stranger at my door with a box. Something around that.

Then you look at the lesson and say, "Well, what's interesting about the lesson?" So it could be is it what's inside that counts, it's you're looking for plays on words, you're looking for interesting things you're looking for stuff that sounds contradictory.

In our case, we've got a very childish sense of humor, so we're looking for stuff that might have an innuendo in it. Like we're looking for stuff like that. And then the third part is the offer. I would say 60, no more than 80-90% of the time, our subject lines will come from either the story or the lesson.

And we usually write one of each and then split test them against each other. And then sometimes if it's like a closing thing, or the first time we mentioning a product, the subject line might be about the offer and it might be benefit lead so how to get more people opening your emails today.

You know, but very, very rarely would it be that most of the time it would be what's inside this box, or you know something about the story or the lesson.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome, awesome, very great guys. This has been like a masterclass in email marketing, and I really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing your knowledge.

I'm sure that you have a lot more knowledge that people are going to want to find out about and learn about from you.

And so if anyone out there is listening, and would like to come check out what you're doing, check out your Facebook group or your league, where can they do that?

Kennedy
Sure. I mean, the best thing to do is if you thinking about how to apply this or do email marketing for my particular cause, because we get it, your course is different. Your subscribers are different, your audience needs certain nuances.

Don't be left wondering, "Dow do I apply any of this other stuff." So we've got a free Facebook group, it's called the Email Marketing Show Community. And we named after our podcasting, the Marketing Show just stuck the name community on the end.

Because we're good email marketing, terrible at naming things. So the Email Marketing Show Community, if you come and join that, just search for it on Facebook, and on the way in there, actually, you'll be given the option and it is completely optional, you'll get the option to give us your email address, and you'll get to go on our email list.

And then you'll get to see us doing our daily emails and see how we actually do this in practice. If you would like to do that. It's absolutely optional. It's not required, though.

Jeremy Deighan
Thank you so much. Any of those links that you have for your Facebook group, your business, your website, or your course, I'll make sure that I put those in the show notes for today's episode, so that anyone who wants to go check those out can click on those and go straight to you.

Again, Rob and Kennedy, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been a blessing and just an amazing time with you guys. I think that you are just experts in this field. And I hope everyone got a lot of great information from this episode.

Kennedy
Awesome. Thanks.

Rob
Thanks for having us.