Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 291 | How Genuine Email Marketing Transforms Audience Engagement and Drives Results
Unlock the secrets of authentic email marketing with Tanya Brody, who transformed her career from a touring musician with The Muses to a master of email marketing and direct response copywriting. Learn how Tanya's journey from collecting handwritten email addresses at live gigs to building robust email strategies can inspire your own marketing efforts. Gain insights into her philosophy of email as a community-building tool rather than just a revenue generator, and discover the pivotal role consistency plays in nurturing your audience relationships.
Join us as we explore practical tips and actionable advice to elevate your email marketing game. Tanya shares her experiences, emphasizing the importance of genuine connections and serving your audience. Whether you're an entrepreneur or small business owner, you’ll find valuable lessons on how to provide meaningful content that keeps your community engaged and invested. Tune in to understand how a well-structured email strategy can not only enhance your marketing efforts but also foster a supportive and loyal community around your brand.
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Hey guys, ryan DeMint from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today On the podcast, we have Tanya Brody. Tanya is an email marketing expert and direct response copywriter. I think we're gonna have some great conversations. We had some technical difficulties at the beginning, but I think we'll work through it and we got some noise in the background, so we'll try to tune that out for you guys. So, tanya, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:You're more than welcome. Thank you for being patient through the technical difficulties snafus as we got that all taken care of. Before we get into email marketing and copyright copywriting, tell a little man, I need more coffee already. Could you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:Sure, pardon me. As I mentioned, I am a professional direct response copywriter and email marketer or marketing consultant, and I actually got my start with this weird thing sitting in back of me. I used to be a professional musician. I was touring all over the country playing the harp and guitar and lots of crazy Celtic instruments as part of a Celtic band called the Muses.
Speaker 2:We had the old-fashioned paper mailing list where people actually wrote down their email addresses by hand and I was lucky if I could understand them two days later when I went to input them all into my computer. And this was just as email service providers was getting started. So I've actually been doing email for a very long time and what I found was the reason to have the email list was to keep people aware of what we were doing, even if we weren't touring in their area. I could send out an email once a month saying hey, here's the new merchandise, here's the new song we're working on, here's where we'll be in the next month, and if you want us to go, here's where we're planning to go this year. If you want us to meet a venue near you, please suggest one.
Speaker 2:And it made our touring lives easier because A. We had people showing up to our shows, which was lovely. We could say we would have some sort of a draw, which for some venues is a requirement. Now, a lot of the venues we were playing it wasn't so much, but still, it's always a bonus when you can do that, and it meant that we had the support we needed when we were out on the road, people saying things like hey, you're going to be in our area, do you need a place to stay? It's more than just a way to make money. It's a community building tool, and that's really how I have always approached email marketing is you are creating a community. You are in service to the people you are emailing. You're not just there to take their money. You're there to build a relationship.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of small business owners, entrepreneurs, don't see that. It took me a while to understand that and the biggest thing that I get out of it is being consistent. I email my list twice a month, every single month, every other week, the same day, in the same time. I try to keep in the same pattern because they will. Well, it's almost an expectation. I actually do every so often if I have missed because I've been on vacation or I didn't set it up or something happened, and I'll get three or four emails and say hey, where's your newsletter? At what's going on? Are you okay? Yeah, are you okay?
Speaker 1:And as soon as I started looking at it from your perspective of building community and keeping people informed, it became a lot easier to write and share. It wasn't. I was always looking at it as a revenue stream and it truly wasn't. It's letting people know what you're doing and then having those conversations, because it generates conversations. People respond to the email or they'll see that I put it out on social, but I think that's a great place to just you said, build community, but I also think it's a base. It's a good leveling point where you actually can start with everybody. It's a good leveling point where you actually can start with everybody. Everybody gets bombarded with email, but if you provide value in your email, that email is going to be opened to where you're now creating community and moving forward and getting them further down the funnel.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and the truth of the matter is it is an income stream. Let's just be blunt. You have an email list to make money, but people are more likely to buy from people they know and trust, and people are more likely to open the emails from people they know and trust and know that they're actually going to get something interesting, they're going to get something of value to them. I email my list twice a week. I email on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I send a blog post of some sort on Tuesdays and on Thursdays I send some sort of either promotional or response email. So I sent one a while ago talking about the fact that I had just been to my. I participate in a science fiction convention in Minnesota where I go and I help run the convention, but I love it and I have a really good time, and it refilled my tank. So I sent out what I refer to as a reply to email and just said hey, tell me what refilled your tank. And I got responses. I got people saying, oh, it was this, or oh, my God, I need that so much. So you are actually creating conversation. So you are actually creating conversation, and not only is that helping build your community, you're getting information from your people about what they want. You're getting information about what? Have you that email right? There would have been the perfect opportunity for you to go all right.
Speaker 2:I hear from a bunch of you that you're having issues refilling your tank. Here's a really cool meditation for you to use. For me, it was okay. I understand that my people are stressed out and how can I help them, making their lives easier with their email? I'm looking at stuff that I can do with that and, to the point of you said earlier, being consistent is really important.
Speaker 2:When people know, okay, it's Tuesday, it's two o'clock, there should be an email from Tanya in my inbox and they open it. And that's what you want. And, regardless of what is at the end of that email, what call to action you have and there should always be some sort of call to action in your email, I don't care what other people say. You want something to get people to do something in response, partially because that's a good community building exercise and partially because you're training them to click on the link in your email, whether they're going to a blog post or a podcast or they're replying. You want them to be taking that action because when you do actually sell something, then they're going to click on the link in that email to find out where it goes. It's really important. Really do want the whole package.
Speaker 2:When you're sending an email and I know people say, oh, but it's so hard to write. That is the number one complaint I get is I don't know what to write. And that's fair, because unless you literally spend your day, all day, writing, which is what I do I spend my day writing email for myself and for my clients. Why would you understand how to do this every single day? But it's nowhere near as hard as you think and we can talk about that shortly, as soon as you say what you wanted to say here.
Speaker 1:It's nowhere near as hard as you think, and we can talk about that shortly, as soon as you say what you wanted to say here. No, I agree with all of that. It's the biggest thing that I took. I'm taken away from it is being consistent, otherwise you're not going to build that. I call it email muscle because really, if you're only sending out every so often and I I know we're going to, I'm going to get into some stats but you get an open rate of three or 5% with a click-through rate of less than half a percent, okay, it's not great. But if you start consistently sending out, whether it be weekly or twice a week, like you do, or myself twice a month I've learned in about 18 to 24 months that I've been doing that consistently because before it was very inconsistent. I get an open rate of anywhere between 35 and 40%, but I get a click through rate of between four and 5%, which is excellent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's because I've started that muscle, that email muscle memory, to where they know it's coming every other week but it's taken me two years. It's close to two years. I would say it's probably close to two years, but I want to dig into that. But I know where we started late, so I want to be able to ask some other questions. So I got to ask the elephant in the room, question AI. How is that?
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, how does that impact you as a copywriter? But then also, can we talk about how AI can potentially help people come up with ideas to write?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Ai is a fantastic tool. It is not a replacement for human beings, at least not yet. And if we get to that point, we have Skynet and it's a problem. But to be really honest, I use AI regularly. It's a great tool. Can't just say to it write me an email, because it won't know what to write, so you still have to give it a lot of information.
Speaker 2:You need to tell it who you're writing to, why you still have to give it a lot of information. You need to tell who you're writing to, why you're writing, what you're writing about, and you need to say these are people, this is the problem, the people I'm writing to have. You need to say this is the, what I am selling, how that solves the problem. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And the truth. No one will ever do as good a job as telling your stories as you will, because they're your stories. That's just the nature. We all are inherently storytellers and we're hardwired to listen to stories because it's how we've communicated for centuries. There's a whole monomyth from Joseph Campbell which is the arc of Star Wars, and pretty much just about every action, just about every motion picture out there. But every story has that arc of hero leaves home, hero encounters a difficulty, hero has a mentor and goes into the underworld and fights whatever demon, monster or what have you had, achieves a treasure, comes back out and comes back to their community. That is a standard story pattern and we all have those in our own lives and globally we. This is a really common thing and the reason it's an every man pattern is because it literally happens to all of us at some point and some way, shape or form, whether it's oh my gosh I had to go argue with my mechanic about how much they were charging me to you know literally the hero descending into the underworld. It's a very common story, so it's something we're all trained to listen to. You're going to do a better job of telling that story than a computer will, but the computer can help you get that idea and it can help you refine it so that it sounds good. For people who feel like they can't write and the truth is most of us can write and most of us can write conversationally, which is what people want anyway If you approach your writing to sound what I refer to as professorial sorry you're going to bore people. If you're conversational, like you and I are having a conversation right now that's going to be more engaging and people are going to be more interested.
Speaker 2:But AI is a fantastic tool. In fact, right now I am actually working on a workshop to help people come up with subject lines and writing prompt for their business using AI, because I can come up with great general prompts. I can do that until the cows don't roll, but that's not necessarily applicable to your business. So what I'm working on is writing prompts that you can use to come up with specific subject lines, and actual writing prompts that you can feed into any AI and it will spit out a list of, say, 10 or 20 or however many you ask for and you can then go oh okay, I have a starting point. I can actually like work on this right now now.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, I magnet, which is and that would be the dog I actually have a lead magnet, which is 30 of those random writing prompts that anyone can use, because that is the most common frustration that people like I don't know what to write. I have no idea what to write about. I am stuck, and that is one of my students called it white screen of death. One of my students called it white screen of death. It's terrifying when you're staring at a blank document, going I have to write something. I have to write something, having a writing prompt to somewhere, to start is so helpful If you can prompt it, like you said.
Speaker 1:I guess my question to you is when it comes to prompting, is there some tips and tricks that you could help people with? I know I struggled with it. I still do, but I've learned to give myself time to write and I'll come up with my ideas. It's something I've gotten used to. I use that with my AI prompt, but I also add in tone of voice I like to use educational I'm witty because I've got a dry sense of humor and conversational and then I can refine it. I can refine it from there. I don't think a lot of people understand that you can really. Ai is unlimited as long as you can be creative up in here in your mind, right?
Speaker 2:I think that's the struggle and I think that's what people have to remember it. Ai is not the end, all and be all. It's not going to do the job for you. It is a tool that you can harness to your will and actually make something of it. Now, the truth about AI is garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, if you're going to put in as little as possible, you're going to get something that sounds really boring and generic and probably doesn't make any sense and may tell you to glue bees on pizza. But if you actually give it enough information which is the creativity part on your part anyway, right, yes, then you're going to get something out that you can actually use and you can look at and go okay, that's not quite me, but I can do some careful editing here and make it make sense. So I'm not starting from zero. I like to use it personally as what I call a messy first draft. It gets some thoughts out there for me and I can go yeah, this is totally irrelevant, it makes no sense, but this makes sense and this I can adapt. And then sometimes I'll even take it and put it through again and say is there anything I missed? Now that you see what I want. Is there anything that I missed? Anything that you think is relevant to the people who I am serving?
Speaker 2:And the really important part is and this is something every business needs to focus on your business is not about your product or service. Your business is about the people you serve. As my mentor, ryan Lebeck, always says, don't fall in love with your product. Fall in love with your product. Fall in love with the problem your product solves, because that's really what it's about. You are serving people. You are here to help the people who in my email, right, so I help them solve that problem, either by writing those emails, if they want me as a one-on-one client, or by teaching them how to write their own email so that they aren't stuck. They aren't sitting there staring at that white creative desk. I have writing prompts. I have ways to automate your email to make things easier. My whole point is I'm here to help you make your business better so that you can do a better job of serving your own people, right? So that's the problem. I'm not all about just selling courses. I'm about serving people.
Speaker 1:So how? And I'm just going to dive in further down. So how can you help, or how do you help? I should back up. Your avatar is typically small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Small business owners and entrepreneurs who either currently have an email list and wants to write better emails, or want to start writing emails in some cases, or people who are just starting and want to create their own email list.
Speaker 1:So how do you currently help them with, since the integration of AI and I know we've talked a little bit about it but how does that play into your business in being able to help them? I know it's about people, I get that You're solving a problem, but how does that play into I want to call it edu man, I'm so sorry about the dog barking how does it play into educating that in your client, the entrepreneur, the small business owner?
Speaker 2:So in terms of AI or in terms of what I do, your services, and then how does AI play into that?
Speaker 2:Got it. So right now, what I do is I have a course called the 30-Minute Email Workshop, which basically teaches you in two and a half hours, to be fair, how to write an email in 30 minutes. Every time, boom, boom, it's done. And that way you know that however often you are putting out that email whether it's daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly you can just sit down and do it, as opposed to going, oh my God, I have to put an entire day away to write something. Because, again, this is a conversation. It doesn't need to be that perfectly crafted jewel that many people feel like they have to put out. It's no, this you're being you. You are showing yourself to your audience. So don't feel like, yeah, you're allowed to show some of the math because people want to get to know you. But the other thing is in terms of I also have courses on how to write in a welcome sequence so that people can properly welcome people to their business. I have a course on how to start an email list. I have a bunch of different courses that I help people and I teach them how to both write and automate emails. But in terms of AI, the way I'm incorporating that is, I am coming up with ways for people to use AI as a tool to improve their email, because the truth is, humans should never be omitted from the process. You can't just this part of the writing part is not a set it and forget it thing, and the reason is computers don't know how to human, they just don't. And you want your business to be about humans, so you have to be the human in the business. So, as great as AI is and as how much as it can help you speed things up, you still need to be involved, and that is going to be in the prompt, that is going to be in the editing and, in some cases, that's going to be in going. All right, this is an idea and I like where it started, but I've got to rewrite this entire thing. Well, once you have somewhere to start, that makes it much, much easier.
Speaker 2:So I think that really that I'm a writer, I'm biased, I realize that, but I can always tell when a business has sent out an email. That's entirely AI. In fact, actually, one of my advanced group, if you will, is a group of people, business owners, and we come together every week and we write our emails together and then we spend half an hour writing the email. That's the whole point. Get it done in half an hour. We then spent half an hour editing those emails, where I actually look at my students' emails and go, okay, so this is what I think you should change.
Speaker 2:I can always tell when they've used AI, like that doesn't sound like you, that sounds more like AI. And they're like, yeah, I know, I put it through AI. I'm like, okay, that's fine, how are you going to fix it? So it sounds like you, and they always do, and it always sounds great. So AI can get you partway there, but I don't think it can get you all the way there.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, when it can, then we have larger problems in the world, usually ending up in an apocalyptic movie scenario. The point is, this is something that you should be able to do quickly and easily and it shouldn't be a stress every week, because when it becomes a stress every week, then you don't want to do it Right, whereas when you get to the point where you just like, as you say, that email muscle when you're okay, I've got it down, I've got my half hour, it's on my calendar whether you're coming to my group or you're just putting it on your calendar. You've got that time set aside, you just do it. You're kind of like going to the gym Okay, you've got to go to the gym now, whether you like it or not. For me it's always doing the dishes. I hate the idea of doing the dishes until I'm actually doing the dishes. Not a big deal.
Speaker 1:So very true. I always like to ask my guests what would be three nuggets? There are three nuggets that you could share with the listeners. So, for entrepreneurs, small businesses or how about anybody struggling to write, what would be three nuggets you could share with them that could help them potentially get over the hump and be able to start writing consistently?
Speaker 2:Nugget. Number one answer the questions you get most commonly. That is the easiest thing to write about. That is the easiest thing to write about, Whether it's within your business, because you have a product or service that people ask about, or it's a question about yourself, if you're writing just personally, or a question about something in the world that you deal with. Answer the questions that you get most commonly, because if you're getting those questions, that's something people want to know about. That's a really easy place to start and it's something you can answer really easily, which is ideal because that gets you writing and frequently that will help stimulate more ideas for other people, which is like.
Speaker 2:Number two be yourself. Don't try to put on some weird persona unless you have that weird persona established in the world. I think about people like Mr Beast. It was a social media influencer. He's got a persona. Be you, because that's what people really want. They want to get to know you. They don't want whatever artificial thing. They want, Ryan, they want to know who you are. They want to know that you have a dog barking in the background. It's all good.
Speaker 2:And I think the third one is be genuine. Be authentic. Don't hide the dog barking in the background. It happens to all of us who have dogs For me it's cats. They walk across the street and they show up and it's all good. Everyone gets that. And I think that the other thing is to talk about your own struggle, whatever those may be, because again, that's something people can relate to. That's part of being authentic. Me for a loop, People can go thank God it's not just me and again it makes you more relatable. It makes people go. Yes, this is someone I want to hear from regularly. It's someone I want to do business with because they get me, they understand they're going through the same things I am. So those are my three nuggets. I hope those help.
Speaker 1:Love. Each of those are great nuggets. So we're getting close here to wrapping up, but I wanted to ask two more questions. One if someone is struggling with writing, are you looking to work with new clients?
Speaker 2:I am always interested in working with new clients. It, of course, depends on what they're doing and what they need. I'm always happy to talk to people. Does that answer that question?
Speaker 1:It answers that question, because that said yes. So I guess my next question is if you are, where's the best place for them to reach out to you?
Speaker 2:The best place for you to reach out to me is actually at tanyabrodycopywriter. All one word com, and hopefully Ryan will put that in his show notes.
Speaker 1:So you have it it will go on the show notes and we will, yeah, you will find.
Speaker 2:There. You will find interesting about me and my services. You will find blog posts about all of these emails. You will find that list of 30 subject lines to keep your and your subscribers opening and reading every email, and you will find more information about this upcoming workshop on how to create your own list of subject lines for your business using AMP. When is that happening? I am looking at probably the beginning to middle of September for that. So stay tuned. Get on the email list. You'll be the first to find out.
Speaker 1:I thank you for coming on with all the hiccups we had and a dog barking in the background. Thank you for sharing everything you're doing, but better yet, you're helping entrepreneurs and small business owners truly get over that hurdle, because I wish I knew you were around when I was struggling with it, and it's one of those big things and I'm not trying to digress, but it's almost like making cold calls and you hate doing it. That's how email marketing was for me, until I actually sat down and found a way to really love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and once you start getting into it, it's easy to fall in love with. You can actually look forward to writing that email every day, because you've got ideas, you've got things to talk about, and that makes it so much easier.
Speaker 1:That is so true. So thank you for coming on, thank you for sharing, and have a great day.
Speaker 2:You too. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you.
