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Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale.  On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.

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Welcome. to Make more money without selling your soul. I am Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert, and I help online entrepreneurs to scale their businesses with simplicity. And today I’m talking about how to wake up your mailing list and why does that even matter? It really varies. Okay, but here’s, here’s an issue that people present to me very often.

Once they’ve got to the stage where they understand that having a big email subscriber list is important, and they’re in the habit of sending out regular newsletters and regular emails, sometimes they’ll come to me with a, I’m doing all of this, but I hate it because nobody is responding. and this whole thing that you hear that people are six times more likely to buy when they’re on your mailing list?

Well, I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Sometimes they’ll say to me, I’ve got a really good open rate and nobody’s responding. Other times they’ll say, I’ve got a really rubbish open rate. So obviously there’s a couple of different issues going on there. In the case where your emails aren’t even being opened, then obviously you wanna be looking at your subject lines, but where they are being opened and even where they’re only being opened by a few people.

If you’re still not seeing any bites, if you’re not seeing any responses, then there are definitely some things that you can be looking at and I’m gonna be covering them. On today’s podcast. So firstly, why does it even matter? I mean, I know I’ve just covered it briefly, but there’s more to it than the whole, um, you know the statistic you’ll have heard that si people are six times more likely to buy who are on your mailing list versus your social media following.

I mean, hard hazard. Guess that it could potentially be even higher than that when you consider, I mean, I don’t know. Ever since the invention of reels, I’m certainly noticing a, a lot of non-ideal followings, um, happening to me on social media. Which I do not see with my email subscriber list. Um, so that in itself really speaks volumes, right?

I’m sure you can recognize the same in your social media following. Um, you know, same for LinkedIn. You know, the amount of people who are following me, looking for work from me versus the other way around, hoping that they will be hired by myself rather than considering hiring me. It’s the same across the board.

It’s only really where it comes to your email list that most people who are choosing to hear from. There may be the odd competitor scattered in there who wants to see your messaging and how you are, you know, communicating with your following. Uh, there might be, um, the odd kind of person who’s just a bit nosy, a bit bored, but on the whole, most people are on your mailing list, are only choosing to see you pop up in their inbox several times a week.

because they have an interest in you and what it is you have to share. So that is really significant and we want to be nurturing that. Another obvious advantage while having a mailing list is so important is the familiarity piece. Because let’s face it, people aren’t going to buy from a personal brand that they don’t feel familiar with.

I mean, actually that’s a slight exaggeration. There are some people, there’s all sorts of different buying behaviors out there, but the majority of people who are making a high ticket investment in your services most of the time want to have a few touchpoints from you. Before they’re going to buy from you.

And those touchpoints, when I refer to touchpoints, can be emails. They can be looking at your social media posts. They can be perhaps seeing one of your adverts. It can be a variety of things, but obviously one of the beautiful things about having your mailing list is that it’s entirely free. The only time it takes up is your time to create the content.

And of course, one of the big things I’m a huge advocate for is repurposing your content across various different platforms. So you are not necessarily even creating something entirely. For your mailing list, it could be the very same post that went down well on Instagram today. That’s how simple your mailing list gets to be.

So we’ve got the advantage of the familiarity piece. There’s a familiarity bias that we know in terms of psychology. People are more likely to buy from somebody they feel familiar with. So even where somebody is not opening most of your emails and seeing your name popping up regularly in the inbox, that in itself is really powerful.

I can say that myself. There are people whose emails I rarely open because they send so. But I have to say, whenever I think of about the kind of, you know, who are the first entrepreneurs that come to mind? Of course they are the people I think of first, because I see their names daily in my inbox. And of course there’s the impression that I’ve kind of gained from that, that they’ve been doing that now for the whole time I’ve been in online business, which to me, tells me that they are strong and that what they have, you know, it must be powerful, otherwise they wouldn’t still be around.

So there, there, there’s certain things. Affect us around our behavior with our inbox and that go beyond the behavior of just, you know, the obvious things of opening up an email and responding to it. And the other thing that, as I kind of referenced gently earlier is, is recognizing that people have different buying behaviors.

There are people who are solution driven, who are simply looking for the vehicle to their solution, in which case they may come across you. You may have a very strong, you know, niche. With a very strong solution, you know, transformation and what it is that you sell, and people may be like banging down your door to come work with you because it’s so easy and obvious how they can work with you, that they are the ideal client and that you are the person to help them.

And there’s some people who will just give you their money because they, they’re, they’re secure in themselves and they’re secure in their investments. However, a lot of the time I find probably about 60% of the people who purchase from me, if not perhaps even slightly higher. I tend to be in my world from anywhere between three to six.

So knowing that your mailing list is incredibly powerful and you know, I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes people make early on in online business is their focus is so driven towards who is buying from them immediately. Who is that immediate 1% that they ignore, that there is a huge percentage of people among those who are already following them, who will be buying from them at some point.

And things like sending out a regular newsletter to their following will have a huge impact on the. As to which somebody then makes the decision to buy from you. So this is why it really, really matters. I’m a huge advocate for sending out regular newsletters and ideally more than weekly. Now, what is the solution I’m gonna be sharing with you three things that I think are immensely important when it comes to how we engage people who are on our mailing list.

So firstly, I’m gonna bring out the mantra that I use so regularly with my own clients, which is create like you like to consume. Now, why is this important? It’s important because, I’ll give an example. I was on a coaching call for Scale with a power one recently with a client who supports the niche of, you know, ADHD women.

That is her niche. She supports ADHD women. She herself, um, has ADHD, so she really understands it inside out. And one of the things she shared with me was that one of the sales templates that I have inside the program was quite lengthy and that the idea of filling it in felt like a lot for. and what I highlighted as a response to that, because I’m all about empowering my clients to kind of really lean into those thoughts and feelings and, and not dismiss them or feel like they have to fit themselves into a certain way of doing things, but instead be like, well, what is this question prompting from you and what does this mean?

What it could mean is that if that’s how you feel about writing a long sales email, that’s similarly, those who are consuming your content will look at it as too long and not bother to engage with it, you know, there’s a lot of people, regardless of whether people have ADHD or not, focus is is very limited on social media.

Focus is very limited on the internet in general. Focus is is limited full stop, right? People, um, you know, don’t wanna be spending time doing stuff that they’re not overly interested in. And I could, I could do a whole podcast on just how to write engaging content, perhaps. I’ll do that at some point. Let me know.

Hit me up on Instagram if you’d like to know more about how to create engaging content. But for now, let’s focus on this. You know, if somebody doesn’t, if you don’t enjoy creating it, chances are the people you’re writing it for won’t enjoy consuming it. And this also goes to things like those beautifully, carefully created newsletters.

We did one, um, very recently. I think we, we announced it a month or two ago. And it was going to be a kind of collection of client case studies, a little kind of tidbit from me, kind of reflection on the week previous, um, a link to my podcast and various other things. But the time it took, even though we were using a similar template each week, the time it took to kind of create this newsletter.

We looked at it and reflected on it and looked at the open rate on it and various other things, and also reflected on whi, which were the emails where we saw the most action, where we saw the most responses, where we saw the most engagement, and actually recognized that while on the surface this may look like a very professional thing to do, because it’s what a lot of what a lot of the big coaches do.

It simply didn’t make sense for us as a business because it’s simply they weren’t, the emails getting the most engagement. They weren’t the emails getting the most clickthroughs and they weren’t the emails that really we enjoyed the most putting together. And I much prefer, prefer storytelling. I much prefer.

Kind of almost writing my emails to my subscriber list, like a kind of almost diary entry or or a, or a kinda letter to a best friend. Um, because that’s, I, I guess that’s also what I enjoy consuming. I enjoy kind of feeling like a c e o of a big business is my best friend, and they’re sharing the kind of behind the scenes of what is and what isn’t working for them or what is, or what isn’t working for their clients and, you know, trends that they’re seeing and things like that.

And so that is what. Have decided to create myself and since I’ve leaned more and more and more, into what I really enjoy sharing. Um, without overly thinking about it too much, I’m suddenly seeing way more email responses, a better open rate and all the things. And so that’s re and and it’s really enjoyable.

You know, those newsletters are the kind of newsletters I wanna share about in my stories because I wanna make sure everyone’s reading them because there’s really valuable stuff in there. But this, you know, it boils down to, you know, you’re building a business that you’d like to buy from people. We’ll see your values in how you communicate.

So even if you don’t say, my values are, yeah, I don’t know. Let’s say, um, connection, community and wealth, whatever your values are. You don’t have to say what they are because they will come, they will come through in your branding. They will come through in how you choose to show up. They will come through in the words that you speak.

They’ll come through in, in so many different ways, okay? And, and the longer that somebody’s in your space, the more they will connect to that. They will see something of themselves in you. So this is where values and, and how we kind of communicate and how we shop and our business is so important is that ultimately, Even if you’re not trying to attract people who are kind of previous version of you, or a current version of you, or perhaps even a future version of you who knows , it gets to be so many different things.

But even if you are not conscious of it, it does tend to be, you know, people feel safer with things that they feel familiar with, that they recognize. So this is why the whole element of building a business you’d like to buy from really matters. It is. It is also like a very sensible compass to help you steer clear from doing anything that feels out of alignment.

If someone’s saying to you, you must send seven emails a week, or you must send a really beautifully created newsletter each week, or you must send antagonistic emails, or clickbait emails, or whatever it is, and it doesn’t feel aligned, then chances are it won’t feel. For your client either. Now, by the way, those few things I just shared, I’m not saying any of them are necessarily wrong or right.

I’m just giving examples of different things that perhaps people have come to me and said, oh, I was being asked to email all the time. I didn’t enjoy that. Like I shared on a previous podcast, this is where it can be a bit of a blur between does it conflict with my values or is it just something that feels unsafe because I’ve not done it before?

And a lot of the time we just learn through doing these things and seeing what does sit well and what doesn’t sit well, and what ge what generates the response and what doesn’t. So I do encourage you to be playful. I do encourage you to be experimental. I’m regularly saying to my clients that sometimes, well, not sometimes all the time, we should be approaching our business a bit like a crazy scientist.

Playing with what wax and holding things relatively loosely because that’s where the adventure lies. That’s where we keep our business kind of exciting and interesting to us. And of course that enables us to see what does work and double down. And what does so, like I say, it boils down to a very simple philosophy of create what you like to consume.

That’s where you’re gonna be in your zone of genius. That’s where the flow’s going to be. That’s where you’re gonna find the most pleasure. And so it goes without saying that most people then will receive it far. Now, of course there’s some kind of very strategical things I can bring to this too. I mean, that’s a slight mindset piece that you can be approaching to how you approach your mailing list, but there’s also some kind of strategical things that you can think about too.

Referring back to the piece that I said about focus, one of the things people quite often do with their mailing this. Is feel like the longer they email the better, particularly if they’re repurposing, perhaps their newsletters for their blog, they can bring the entire, the entire blog party to their newsletter.

And sometimes, you know, if you’re just scrolling on your phone, um, you know, I dunno, commuting somewhere or kind of doing it while your kids are watching some cartoons. You don’t necessarily wanna sit there for five minutes reading a really long email. And so I’m a huge advocate for ensuring that you smatter in at least two to three emails per month, which are literally one or two liners.

And I particularly love it when you can make it a question. So in the past I’ve done things like, would you like my support with scaling your business this month? Or would you like to see X, Y, Z? But to ask them a specific question because that’s where you’ll start seeing responses and that’s really exciting.

I love any kind of engagement. Any kind of conversation is great because it’s a door that’s become open to me where I get to create a connection with that human being. Whether that leads to a sale immediately or later or never, doesn’t really matter for me. It’s just more that it’s not nice to talk to what feels.

A totally quiet room. So those short emails are really great for creating engagement. The podcast I did on how to create three, how to get more sales calls this week, three sales calls this week, I think it was called. I also talked about hand raiser emails. So I encourage you to go back to that podcast if you want to learn more about how to create hand raiser content, and of course the final other kind of little strategical piece that you can implement if you are looking to get more engage.

From your following and really make the most of the fact that they are in your world, is to invite them onto different platforms. I find if someone’s not much for a reader, perhaps they prefer videos, perhaps they prefer audio. So by giving them the option to consume your content in a different way, whether it’s via podcast, whether it’s via being a guest on a different podcast, or whether it’s simply a live that you link to on Instagram, and again, it gets to be quite a short email where you can say, today I talked about.

why bloody blah matters, and the three takeaways that are pertinent to you. If you want to learn more about it, here’s a link. Happy viewing, , or comment below if you, you know, if you enjoyed this, or something along those lines. You know, give me a follow if this resonated. Anything like that. You know, give them a little call to action alongside the video so that when they’re on there, they let you know that they’ve been there and they’ve visited.

And of course you can look at the click through. I mean, it goes without saying that you should be looking at the data from your mailing list. So you know, a lot of people are saying, well, what’s your click through rate like? And they have no clue. So do be sure to at least weekly check in with who is clicking on the links in your email, because that in itself again, will be a kind of indicator as to who is engaging with your content and perhaps hasn’t reached out to you yet, and will give you the opportunity to perhaps find a way to connect with them at a de on a deeper.

And potentially lead to a sale later on. So there we have it. Those are my three tips. So essentially create like you like to consume, create content that you enjoy creating, and you know, double down on the stuff that works and don’t feel like because somebody else is doing it, you have to do it too. The reason why people will relate to your business.

is because it’s so you, so don’t bend and twist to be like somebody else. There are so many ways to make different things work. The key piece when it comes to any kind of marketing is consistency. So if you can find a way that you enjoy consistently showing up, it’s much better that you do that than it is to try and do something that some other said is gonna work for you that you find hard to do and then you don’t do consistently.

Consistency is. And creating in a way that you enjoy to consume will be the thing that ensures that you continue to show up and that people genuinely relate to what it is you are sharing. Secondly, writing shorter, inspiring content is another powerful thing you can do with your emails. You can’t do that to all your emails, but make sure there’s a smattering every single month of two to three.

Very action led emails, which encourages people to actually answer a question. And of course, if people aren’t opening your emails, do look at the titles of your emails. Again, shorter punchier headlines tend to do better than long waffly ones. So ensure that when you look at it, it creates intrigue in you.

If it doesn’t, then that’s not a good sign. And then finally, , you know? Yes, it’s great. They’re on your mailing list. Yes, they’re more likely to convert cause they’re on your mailing list. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be invi inviting them onto other platforms if perhaps they’re more of a video watcher or a podcast listener.

Inviting them onto other platforms is a great way to ensure that they’re finding pleasurable ways to consume your content. Like I mentioned earlier on in this podcast, people consume and buy in different ways. So when you can create different ways for people to buy from you or consume from. all the better, right?

For those who are looking for solutions right now, for those who are just contemplating the area that you are speaking about regularly and wanting to learn more about it, ensure that there’s something for all of them, and that’s where those short emails are really fantastic cuz for those who are like, I don’t need to watch a long webinar, read along sales patient and now I need to work with you.

Those one liner emails are amazing. While those longer emails are really great for helping to nurture those who are still perhaps sitting on. So there we have it. That is everything I had to share on how to wake up your mailing list. I hope you are feeling inspired. I hope you are feeling motivated to go out and take action.

If you haven’t sent a one liner email in the last month, please go and do that today. And then give me a follow at Poly lare on Instagram and let me know that you did it. Now if you are in the mood to make more sales and engage your list, well, I have something exciting that’s coming up very, very soon.

On January the 25th, I will be running a masterclass on the five steps you need to take in order to turn your group program evergreen. I’ll also be sharing. The behind the scenes of my business and how it’s structured to maximize lead generation of profitability. And I’ll be talking about the all important numbers you need to be tracking to ensure what you are creating is scalable and profitable.

So if you’d like to come along to that, there is going to be a link below this podcast. Please do go check it out. Please do go and sign up. I would love to see you there. It’s going to be amazing. I love all my live trainings. They always get the most incredible feedback. I always enormously overdeliver.

You can expect it to be like a masterclass that you’d pay for the level of valuable in information I’ll be giving away, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be epic. And that’s it for today. I will see you in the next episode. Where I’ll be talking about is now the time to go Evergreen. See you there. Bye.