Alyson Lex 0:00
In this episode, we're going to answer the question once and for all, does the size of my email list matter? Plus a bunch of other lies you've been told about your email list, we're going to bust those two. The big question is this as entrepreneurs, coaches and business owners, how do we consistently sell our products, programs and services without making our customers feel like we're only in it for the almighty dollar? How do we serve the way we know we're meant to serve and still run a profitable business? How do we put good into the world while we put dollars into our pockets? How do we change the lives of our community while also bettering the life we lead?

Jennie Wright 0:41
It's not a zero sum game. It's not an either or scenario. It is possible to thrive while serving your clients to the best of your ability. This podcast will show you how. I'm Jennie Wright.

Alyson Lex 0:53
I'm Alyson Lex

Jennie Wright 0:55
and welcome to the System to THRIVE.

Alyson Lex 0:59
Tell me if You've heard these, the fortune is in the follow up. Or how about this one, the money is in the list.

Jennie Wright 1:08
And both of these statements are completely true. Also, unfortunately, a lot of what you hear about building your email list is also really not true. Allison has been doing this since what for 13 years now you've been working on clients. Oh, wait. Yep. And I've been doing this since 2012. By the time you've listened to this recording, I've personally completed over 260 online summits about 150 challenges, hundreds of webinars, and everything in between. If it's a list build, I've done it. And what I've learned is that the things you hear that are supposedly important to building your list are oftentimes a bunch of hype. a load of hooey. Let's be honest, hooey. That's a good word. It is a good word. And what really matters are the things you may not expect. So today, Allison We're going to break it down for you to really really seasoned pros at list building, and share what we know is absolutely true. I

Alyson Lex 2:08
want to start with this list building is fun. It's interesting, it's necessary. And it takes a whole bunch of your time and your effort, right? It's simple. Sometimes it's not always easy. But what we want to do is cut through all the BS and all the hype, and all the lies and misconceptions and myths and whatever you want to call it that we here, we're going to get right to the real things that you need to know to make sure that you are treating your email list right.

Jennie Wright 2:42
I love that. So here's where we're going to start this off.

I'm going to say that one of the big lies that we hear is you don't actually need an email list. Have you heard that? Oh, you don't need me. No, this No. Oh, that hurts. It does. It hurts my whole self. does a lot of people rely on social media? So and you've maybe heard this before? So hands up? Have you heard this before? You know, like, chime in with us. If Facebook and Instagram close the doors tomorrow, today, what would your business look like? If you had no email list? What would happen now I've, I've lived through a couple Facebook outages we all have. And I know that I can send an email to my list tomorrow and still make money. All I have to do is email them, present them with an offer that I think they would like. And I know they would like same with Allison, and we can still generate income for our families.

Alyson Lex 3:35
Absolutely. So I want to break in real quick.

I remember, probably like a year or two years ago, I saw a video and it was a girl who had built her business on YouTube. And her YouTube account got shut down and I guess maybe she got flagged or reported or I don't know the details, but she recorded this video and she was completely I mean just distraught fawn tears, whole meltdown. Because she had no way to support herself. And in this video, she's like, Guys, this is my business. This is my income. This is my life, and now it's gone. Had she been building an email list? She wouldn't mean yes, she probably would have been freaking out because here's my source of traffic. And I think that it's really important to look at YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, I don't care what platform you're on. If you don't own it. It is not a list. It is a source of traffic.

Jennie Wright 4:34
I completely agree. And I have a really good example. So what you guys might not know about me is I actually love sewing, and all types. I know it's really funny, but I love sewing and I love costume design and I love period costumes and there's somebody there's an influencer that I follow on YouTube. Her name is Bernadette Bernadette banner. Go check her out if you'd like anything to do with turn of the century costume. You like costuming, she doesn't Their own dressmaking. It's super cool. She makes amazing videos. And guess what, she literally took Jeff Walker's course, a couple weeks ago to learn how to monetize her business because she realized during the pandemic that she needs to, you know, a PR game. And now she's got an email list. And now she's actually building our programs, products and services. So like, the influencers know it, it makes sense. It's really, really smart to build out that email list. So if anybody tells you, you don't need an email list, run the other direction. Also, if you're relying on social media, rules, change algorithms change what you might be getting traffic on one week, the next week, you're not I've seen it happen on Instagram, I've seen it what they call Facebook slaps, there's like, I think there's at least eight or 12 Facebook slaps that have happened since the beginning of Facebook where the people that were relying on the algorithms to help them get traffic have had these little slaps that have removed that traffic. And when you have Have an email list. You're not always chasing the vanity number, or the next high number, right? You have a list, your list is your audience. It doesn't matter their size. And we're going to talk about that soon. But it doesn't matter. As long as you have them and they're highly engaged, you are going to be able to create income, generate traffic to your programs, products and services. It works in your favor.

Alyson Lex 6:23
Do you remember when Facebook started? Like if you had a business Facebook page? Everybody saw your posts? Oh, yeah. Like I remember liking a page was a big commitment at the beginning of Facebook, because you were committing to having those people in your feed all the time. Now. I'll just like a page, whatever.

Jennie Wright 6:45
Yeah, exactly. Doesn't matter. I'll see it anyway. No, you barely see it at all.

Alyson Lex 6:50
Right? They want you to pay to play and that's okay for them. They're, you know, that's their business model. But what it means is that if you're relying on your Facebook business page As your list, your Facebook now just slashed your list by 98%. They just deleted it. But if you had been capturing those emails, you own it, you own it. And I think that's really important. Oh, no, I love it.

Jennie Wright 7:17
Yeah, I want to own it. I want to own it. I want to be able to email it when I want to all those things.

Alyson Lex 7:22
And that actually brings us to the next big lie that I've heard.

You shouldn't email them that often. Or the amount of times I've heard this one, Ellison, I don't know them too much. What do you mean, you don't want to email them too much. That's the point.

Jennie Wright 7:41
There's two there's a couple camps on this one for sure.

Alyson Lex 7:44
There are definitely a couple of camps. So first, let me start with a caveat. emailing your list with quality, content and promotions that they have shown that they're interested in. Is the forerunner of this whole spiel that I'm about to go on. Okay? So if you're doing high quality stuff, people listening, if you're doing low quality stuff, stop listening, go to high quality stuff, and then come back. Okay?

So emailing your list as often as they will allow is imperative. Now, some lists will allow you to email once a week. How do you know, if you start emailing more than once a week you start getting more unsubscribes or spam complaints or responses, like get the heck out of my inbox. But this keeps you front of mind. This keeps you relevant to them. It gives you more of an opportunity to connect with them. It reduces the number or the time between sales touches so it can help reduce that buying cycle or that length of sales cycle for you. If you don't email them, they forget about you. I have gotten emails from people that I was on their list forever ago, and they sent me an email, and I'm like, how did I get on their list again? Sometimes they email me all the time, and I still don't remember how I get on their list. So and that's how it is if I haven't heard from them in a while. So you want to email them as regularly as you can. They're on your list for a reason. they've raised their hand. They've said that they have the problem that you're solving. They, they're there for a reason. My dad can I used to work at Glaser Kennedy. So Dan Kennedy is co owner of that. And he used to be, he used to say, I'm going to mail them because he's a direct mail guy. I'm going to mail them until they buy or die. And I have updated that for the 21st century and I'm going to email them until they by dire unsubscribe. I I am very firmly in the They're on my list for a reason I'm going to use it camp. Now, Jenny, slightly different philosophy than I have, which is why this is so good, because I know she's going to chime in. She's going to share what she thinks. And you're going to get two different opinions from two people who are experts in their field.

Jennie Wright 10:17
Yes, and I've been waiting patiently to be able to see has,

and she knows I wanted to say something because she's like

Alyson Lex 10:27
gasping and pausing and preparing to pounce,

Jennie Wright 10:30
preparing to pounce. So, here's what I have to say about this. Okay, your email list is almost like a living, breathing organism. And every single list is different. You can look at somebody like Seth Godin, he emails his list every single day. Okay, you can look at somebody like Amy Porterfield, she emails her list twice a week, once for her podcast, once for content is informational. And if she's in a sales period, it's more than Right, she ramps it up, you could look at any of the people that you're on their email list to receive whatever I mean, I get an email from Lulu lemon, at least two or three times a week. So, and I'm cool with it. Like, I don't even subscribe. I don't even read them all the same time, but I don't unsubscribe because I expect it and I'm okay with it. Because I like the product. And your email list. Like I said, it's a living breathing organism. And every single list responds differently to stimulus stimulus being the frequency of your emails and the content within them. Right. So my belief is, you have to figure out how your list is going to respond. And it's going to be trial and error. And then you adjust accordingly. Right. How does your list respond to stimulus stimulus being the email? Oh, too much. Okay, back off. Oh, not enough. Okay. Put a little bit more on. And, you know, it's trial and error. There's no anybody who tells you that you have to email your list on Tuesday morning at 7am Eastern Standard Time, once per week, and again on Saturday morning, you know, at 11am. Eastern Standard Time is that's a load of hooey. It's a load of crap. Your list is your list. I learned this the hard way. Tuesday mornings at 7am don't work from my list. I was actually Allison taught me this, because we went into my metrics and milestones like, dude, nobody's opening your emails till 1130 in the morning. I'm like, really, I'm emailing them at seven o'clock. She's like, nobody's opening until 1130. here Look, because Active Campaign shows you that. And I'm like, Oh, wow. Then you should send your email at 1030 or 11 or 1045. I'm like, Okay. And my day wasn't. Yeah, am I day wasn't Tuesday, it was Thursday. And the open rate went up,

Alyson Lex 12:40
click through rate went up. Well, I think we're gonna talk about that more later. Yeah. But I wanted to come back and not rebuttal. But I think we actually agree. We're just saying the same thing. Different ways. Yes, we I say message them as often as they'll allow. And Jenny says, learn your list in order to know what they're going to allow you how on your list, so I'm sorry, you didn't get two different expert opinions. You got one just set differently. One Yeah,

Jennie Wright 13:07
it's one with two different visions of it. I guess I'm not yes

Alyson Lex 13:11
at all. It's just Yeah. But the thing is, don't be afraid to use the email list you're building. Don't be hesitant about emailing them. Mm hmm.

Jennie Wright 13:23
Absolutely. And this plays well into the thing I want to talk about, which is about promotion.

So if you're if you have an email list, and you're only emailing them when you're promoting something, and other than that, you're quiet. Yeah, your list. And I mean, I love this line. Your list is full of people. They don't want to be sold 24 seven, they want content. They want information. They need to know more about you to be able to trust you. And this is another mistake too when you're promoting non stop is you're not providing content in terms of being able to express who you are as a person. Enter your likes, your dislikes, all those different things that round you out as a person so that they can trust you. Allison will say this break in what is it that people do? They buy from?

Alyson Lex 14:09
They buy with emotion and justify with logic.

Jennie Wright 14:13
Yeah. And they buy from people.

Alyson Lex 14:15
Oh yeah. I have that other one people buy from people

Jennie Wright 14:18
fuel buy from people. these are these are Alan Allison quotables. Okay, I have too many quotables I can't get them straight. So let people buy from people. And

the mistake that I made early early on way back when I was using Constant Contact back in the day, is that the only time I sent out to my email list was when I was promoting something. And I never talked about who I was and what I did. There was no Jennie you know Jennie likes to sew or Jennie likes to, you know, collect wooden spoons or you know, Jennie has a zucchini plant in our living room right now. Like none of that stuff existed, right? Nobody knew who I was. It was professional, professional professional, because I was, honestly I was still transitioning from the corporate world. And that was a challenge as well. Well, so if your promo if you're only connecting with your list when you need to promo, they're not going to get to know you. And Allison and I talked about this and what we call a cap storm or like a content and promo storm. And one of the things is how are they going to get to know you unless you share things like content, or stories, or share things about your life or also share things that you like, like, you know, Allison, I'll do a post, and I'll actually share it, or Allison will do something and I'll send it to my list and I'll be like, Hey, take a look at what else is doing. It's super cool. You're gonna wanna check it out.

Alyson Lex 15:32
Yeah. So there is a flip side to this. And I don't want you to be afraid to promote. No. Okay. I don't want you to never promote.

There is a balance.

Yeah. So people buy from people, but people also buy when you have something to offer. And if all you're doing is giving away giving away giving away content And information, you're going to train your people to expect it for free from you. And you're also not going to monetize your list. Oh, yeah, that is so true. So don't be afraid to promote. But definitely don't promote 24 seven. The way that I like to do it is I will deliver content in an email, and then they will have a soft call to action. I'd love for you to join this Facebook group. Or come check out this training I'm doing or reply and let me know what you think just a soft call to action isn't like a hard promotion. But I am driving them to take an action to engage further with me. This allows me to see who is more engaged. But it also gets them used to the idea that I'm not just gonna not just going to be a doormat. I'm not just going to lay down and not ask them to do anything.

Jennie Wright 16:56
Oh yeah, we have a list to make money. Let's be honest. That's okay. And it's totally okay. It's completely acceptable.

Alyson Lex 17:04
Anyway, I could talk about that forever, but we are not allies to get through.

Jennie Wright 17:08
Yeah, we do. And this has been really fun so far because we're you know, if you know us we have an outline. We've gone off script a few times now but there's that's just because there's a lot of really good information that we have to share. This is we're we're really speaking into our, you know, our strengths today. And I feel like

Alyson Lex 17:26
maybe we're both just feeling a little sassy. Oh, I real sassy today. We're both feeling a little sassy. So we're like, get over these lies. Okay, yeah. Okay.

So have you seen those templates out there? And actually, I really, I love templates. I like them as much as the next person. I have some that I've sold. Okay. But the thing that kills me is when it's like, oh, you can just literally feel In the blanks and send this out as is, oh God, but that just really, that drives me crazy because it removes you. Alright, as a copywriter, my job is to get into the head of the client, and to write in the voice of my client. I never want their people to be like, oh, someone so didn't write this email. If all I'm doing is dropping business names and product names and dates into a template, it completely removes the personality of my client from that message.

They are an excellent starting point. They help you set your copy of the right way, in the right order, with the right elements, maybe using some really smart power words, but you can't blindly use them because they're not in your voice. They're not tailored for your audience. Yes, use the templates to get going. Avoid the blank page. Because that sucks. Sure. But don't let someone who's never researched your audience or learned about you tell you what's going to work for your list, just like we were talking about in the last one with the frequency of promotion, and when you can send and this is your list, you know them not me. I have to come down from that rant. Okay. So, Jenny and I have told the story before. And you know which one I'm going to tell Jenny. It's time that I decided I knew Jenny's list. Yes, this one. I thought I knew what would work. In all of my wisdom. I was like, Jenny, just send this email. Just trust me. And Jenny being the trusting, wonderful, Jenny that she is did. She sent this email. The copy didn't suck. Let's be honest, the coffee was good. And it wasn't for Jenny's list. No, it was too harsh for Jenny's list. And you got some unsubscribes you know, you got some email.

Jennie Wright 20:10
Got a few like,

Alyson Lex 20:12
what? Yeah, WTF? Yeah. And yeah, that's the danger of using something that's not written here.

Jennie Wright 20:20
It was a mistake, but also actually I'm not even gonna look at it as a mistake. I'm gonna look at it as something that helped me really learn my list because really did. I was able to I looked at it, I was like, Whoa, okay, this is a really strong response. But I'm happy for it because it told me what I needed to know. Now I felt bad that there were people that unsubscribe, but it told me that it was you know, that the voice was different. The style that my list preferred was a little bit different. And it helped me put my foot down and say okay, only going forward. This is what my people want and need. And this is how I'm going to speak to them and Alison being the amazing copywriter that she is Has then everything that else that she's you know, because Allison's written for my list a few times since then, like numerous times, her tonality has changed. Because I learned it too, because yeah, so you know, we learned it together. And as a result, we've had a better go with the copy. And we've had better results as of return on that. Course.

Alyson Lex 21:19
Yeah, that being said, You got some unsubscribes Sorry about that. Sorry. Yeah.

Jennie Wright 21:25
And, you know, that leads to me talking about unsubscribes. Because, no,

Alyson Lex 21:31
okay, I served you up. You

Jennie Wright 21:32
serve me up and I'm going to love it over. have too much fun on these.

Okay, so unsubscribes What is an unsubscribe if you guys don't know unsubscribes are when somebody's been on your email list and you've probably done it. We've gone to the bottom of the email or the top of the email wherever it is, you're like, I do not want to receive these anymore, and you hit the unsubscribe button. unsubscribes remove you either from the one list that you are on or the multiple list that you may have opted into for that provider. Now, there's a lot of sketchy things that a lot of people do. There's some, there's a woman that I've been, I bought a product from her probably about six months ago. And it was a scraper that helped pull people when someone wanted to join my facebook group. It helped me collect their email addresses in an ethical way, was allowed, and helped me put those into a Google Sheet which I could then add to Active Campaign. There was nothing illegal about it, trust me, everybody, you know, that was opting into our Facebook group, we would ask them for their email address, and if they wanted it, we would tell them that they would receive an email. But the point of it is, is I bought this product, and I started receiving daily emails from this person, and their canned emails. Now the product itself is good. But these emails drive me insane. And so I hit unsubscribe from these emails. And I've never actually been unsubscribed from her list. Can I just tell you she still emails me daily? Because she's like, oh, heck yeah. And I cannot get off this list. I cannot get off this list it. Yeah. So let's I'm going off a little bit, but let me talk about unsubscribes. When somebody unsubscribes from your list, they're doing another hand up, they're putting their hand up saying, hey, look, I joined your list. It was for whatever reason, I don't want this anymore. Thank you very much. But you know, I'm out. And you have to have the mindset of saying, Thank you for being around for the length of time that you were thanks for downloading my free thing or being on my webinar, just being in my, my area for as long as you have and lovingly let them go. obsessing about unsubscribes is not good. And I actually have a method to reduce the amount of unsubscribes that you do get, which is something like a completely different conversation, but it's kind of cool. I started

Alyson Lex 23:51
using it and my unsubscribes have gone way down. Yeah, it's good.

Jennie Wright 23:56
Oh, yeah. So if they don't want to be there, don't worry about about them being there. Don't get obsessed about your unsubscribe numbers. And here's when unsubscribes matter when it's completely disproportionate when you do something. And that's the action that I was just telling you about with, you know, Allison, emailing my list and things like that. You can tell something's happening with your list, it can tell you if you're going wrong, it can tell you if you're going off track. It can tell you if you're promoting too much. It can tell you if your content might be missing something or it might not be hitting the mark with them. And it'll also tell you if your list is built with the wrong people.

Alyson Lex 24:36
Here's that part.

Jennie Wright 24:37
Yeah. And here's a fix.

Even though we're not really talking about fixes, here's a fix when you're building your email list, be so dialed in on what it is that you're trying to do. That the only people who join are the people who want to stay and that solves the problem. I have done like I've done hundreds and hundreds of times. And in the beginning, when someone's first being done, literally, you could say, I'm doing a summit about painting clouds on canvas. Think about that for a second, which means nothing painting clouds. Right? I basically a summit about nothing. And you would get 5000 or 6000 people who would sign up. But then you would go to email that list after the summit was over. And you would get from one email 200 or 300, unsubscribes. And the client is freaking out. Because all of a sudden, they have unsubscribed. Well, duh, you basically, you know, you built the list off of fluff off have a very wide idea. And then you You came at them and you hit them hard with come join my $5,000 a month program, or whatever it was, of course, they're gonna unsubscribe. So the fix is to build the list the right way, and you won't have that problem. So I was just thinking

Alyson Lex 25:55
that your little unsubscribe were dumped trick that we've teased. And this is totally off the cuff. And you can tell me now, I would love to teach that in a quick download for this episode.

Jennie Wright 26:10
Absolutely.

Alyson Lex 26:12
So that is what our download is going to be on the show notes. I'm literally making this up as I go. I told you we're off script today. This is not, we're not even playing around today. So if you go to System to thrive.com, slash 11, we are so often System to thrive.com forward slash 11. That's the numeral one one. There will be a download that's going to show Jenny's super ninja unsubscribe reduction trick. And I have used it in my emails and saw my unsubscribes just plummet. And what's more, I saw my spam complaints reduced as well.

Jennie Wright 26:50
Yeah, absolutely. So this is a really good one and it's super, super easy. It's really simple, really simple ninja trick blip net will give you a template for it. It It's a blurb of copy that you're going to pop into your emails either at the top or the bottom I prefer at the top. And that one trick is going to save you so much grief.

Alyson Lex 27:11
Don't give away too much. Let's go download. Yep, go

Jennie Wright 27:13
down. Okay, you'll see.

Alyson Lex 27:15
So, the next thing that I've heard a lot about, and I've actually seen this a lot lately, so that's why we wanted to bring it up is that you should promote other people a lot too. And I think this is really coming into popularity because people are affiliate marketing right now. I follow someone who I remember a few months ago, she started teaching people how to be affiliate marketers. And that was what she was posting about. But now, all she's talking about is one of the programs that she's an affiliate marketing for. And it's like I literally didn't remember that she taught people how to become affiliate marketers until four minutes ago. Because she's diluted her message so much by promoting other stuff that I don't like, what do you even do? She's diluted it so much and it's driving me crazy as well because that's not why I follower. Correct.

Jennie Wright 28:16
And I know you're you've got more you want to say in this I want to jump in with one thing. And this is a little controversial. Oh dear. Oh yeah. So buckle up, Buttercup, here we go, Okay, I help a lot of clients build their lists. My clients are in various niches from people who believe that they were born on this earth to be unicorns. It's not gonna lie to people who help people in relationships, that people who help with divorce I've got, you know, every single niche you can think of I've worked in, and there has been a couple of times over the years where people thought that working with me meant that I would promote them to my following which doesn't make any sense doesn't make any sense. I do not promote my clients programs, products and services. Because it's not in my niche. My niche is people who want to build their lists, get more clients, sell programs, products and services. I build funnels, things like that. I'm not going to promote love summit

Alyson Lex 29:19
to my people, right?

Jennie Wright 29:20
I'm not going to promote a summit or a list build about finding your truth through you know, spiritual methods to islands.

Alyson Lex 29:31
Right.

Well, and also, okay, if you think of the relationship that you have as currency. Mm hmm. Okay. You have been paying into the relationship piggy bank, with content and showing up and authenticity and transparency. And when you promote someone else, you are giving them access to that piggy bank to do With what they want, because if you promote someone, and that and somebody from your list goes in registers, and then that person screws them over, that is absolutely going to come back on you. Yeah, I agree completely. there when I was in, like, I don't want to say corporate. So I was never in corporate, I was always in small business. But when I was in like a nine to five, people would say, Oh, can you like recommend me for this job now? Because if you screw up, I was totally going to get us that even that explicitly. If you screw then it's on me. Correct. I've put in the work. I've put in the relationship currency. I've built up the name. And I'm not going to let you come in and just smash my piggy bank dude.

Exactly.

When you promote other people, you not only dilute the power that you have with your list, but to dilute the relationship and remember Remember, when I did my first and only summit A long time ago and ill advised, one of my speakers said, I would like for you to promote as part of this and she said no. And I said, Why? And she said, because I've burned my list out. I've been promoting other people too much. And that's for me, but it also really sucked for her. She had to start over.

Jennie Wright 31:28
Okay,

Alyson Lex 31:28
now, you can promote if there's a JV in place, Jenny and I promote our shared ventures to our lists all the time. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 31:39
Boring alignment. Our businesses are in alignment,

Alyson Lex 31:42
either. Exactly. But just to promote your friends for fun, is detrimental to your business. I saw somebody do it last week. And she promoted something and it has literally nothing to do with her target audience. And I know it came from a good place. No, it was good in the heart. It just was ill advised. So if you do promote someone else, make sure that it matches what your people want. Make sure they're going to take care of your people they're not going to come in with a hammer and smash your relationship piggy bank, do not promote other people a lot. deliver content above all I can just keep talking about this because it hurts my heart to see it happen so often.

Jennie Wright 32:24
Yeah. And and that's okay. When you're first starting out. You make these mistakes sometimes and you learn from them. I made a boatload of mistakes guys, my first summit was culus thing.

Alyson Lex 32:34
Oh my I'm so bad.

Jennie Wright 32:36
Mine was terrible. Very as it says very ill advised. very ill advised

Alyson Lex 32:41
very

Jennie Wright 32:43
much pearls. And very funny. Okay. But the gist of it is you're going to make some mistakes. If you listen to this and you're able to use any of this information so that you don't make any future mistakes or big mistakes. rate, we're glad Yeah, you know, and

one of those big mistakes is buying a list, or sharing list or renting a list. Now, a lot of people have never even heard of this before. They're like, Oh my god, you can buy a list. Yeah, you can. And hundreds of people have done it. Thousands of people have done it. Back in the early summit days, there was when I was first starting out in summit, there was a woman that had a very thriving and growing practice. She Funny enough, she had three different niches, okay. And she worked very well in all three of them. And she would appear in summits and all of these three different niches. But her caveat was, if I'm on your summit, and I appear as an expert, then I demand that after the summit is over, you send me your list. Yeah, that's a hard pass. But she was such a big name at the time that people said yes. And so after the summit was over, it didn't matter how big the list bill Was she got the list and then she would email the list going Hi, you just saw me on so and so summit. It's me that expert you really, really like and here I am, I'm going to talk to you and send you an email you about this. Now, she regularly used to get thrown into a couple of like email marketing jails, but she always got out of them. She would move from email marketing, email marketing, or whatever, you know, however, it worked for her. And it's illegal to do that, first of all, yeah, it probably wasn't when she was it wasn't it wasn't it was totally legal when she did it. It's called list sharing. And GDPR and a couple other laws that came into play and spam laws have removed the legality of that and you can't do it if you're in Canada that's a big no no big fines. Yeah. Anyway. I know in the states is not as there's not as many big fines but I know in Canada there is and same with Europe, right? But it's also just really bad to do. It's really bad to buy it's like buying followers. They're not real It's not your people. And that's the thing. So there

Alyson Lex 35:03
is something that you can do instead.

Can I talk about that for a second? Okay, I've gotten the go ahead visually from Jenny. You can't buy a list, but you can purchase access to a list. Here's how it's called sponsored emails or solo emails. And this is where you find someone who may have a list, and you approach them with a JV style situation. Right, like we just talked about with promoting other people. So you can either say, hey, I'd love to pay you to send this email blast out, and you agree on a fee up front, and they send emails out on your behalf and then whatever happens happens, or you can approach them with, I'd love for you to promote this with me and a lot of big names use this. Have you guys heard of B school? Because B schools a thing? Okay. And basically, Marie Forleo has, quote unquote, purchased access To the lists of her affiliates, through the affiliate commissions they get when they're people take action. So affiliate programs really are nice for, quote unquote purchasing access to someone's list. But we're not, I don't get those email addresses loaded up into my Active Campaign. Sally Sue is going to send the email on my behalf, I might give her copy, I might say, here's what I'd love for you to win. I want you to send it here's what I want you to say all that, but she keeps her the actual name at URL com email addresses in her Active Campaign account. And then they hit a landing page where they come into my Active Campaign account having opted in, fully informed about what they're getting into, and you buy or receive a shared list. People don't necessarily know that they're going to be sent to you. It increases your spam complaints. It's ineffective It's not targeted. It's a big No, no. Also a big No, no.

I don't have a lot to say about this one, but it's not okay to add people without them knowing or giving consent to being added to your list. Illegal bar like happens to me all the time. In fact, I had a prospective client add me to his list. And then he didn't hire me, which was just salt in the wound.

Jennie Wright 37:29
It's not it's not game on you guys. It's not Wow, somebody gave me their business card at this marketing event. I'm going to add them to my email list. And you know, and we, we actually talked about that. And it's not okay to do that. It's not okay to ninja ad. It's just absolutely not okay to be able to pull those people in without their without their permission. Yeah, consent. Yeah.

Alyson Lex 37:55
And the other thing that we actually talked about in 10 in episode 10 that is kind of relevant now is how different people come onto your list in different ways. And because of that, you treat them a little differently. And so another kind of myth or big lie that people believe is just you have this one big email list, just send them everything. And I actually saw Facebook post must have been like two or three days ago that was like, if you have less than 10,000 on your list, it's not worth segmenting.

Jennie Wright 38:26
Could you even believe that? I couldn't believe that. That was ridiculous.

Alyson Lex 38:30
And it like a lot of these hurt my whole self like that was like, What? Okay, first of all, ignoring the whole size matters thing, which we are going to address once and for all in just a minute. I promise. ignoring all that. I don't care if it's two people on your list. The only time you shouldn't be segmenting your list is when there was only one person on it.

Jennie Wright 38:54
Yeah. And it's because

Alyson Lex 38:55
and it's you or your mom, or your best friend or whatever. Right?

But I don't care if there's two people on your email list, you segment them, you get to like them yelling at you now, you get to know them, so that you can tailor your copy to them. Okay, I have clients that I talked to in completely different ways. I have one client that she likes to send me a sales copy, and I fixed it up. And before she sends it to me, she wants to have a three minute phone call. That's it. That's the level of interaction she wants. She wants to tell me what it is. Send it to me, I send it back. And it's fine. I have other clients who every time we start a project, they need to have a 30 to 45 minute talk, because that's what makes them feel supported. So if those were the two people on my list, and I spoke to them the same exact way, do you feel like either of them would feel like they're getting what they need? Of course not. No. So why does it matter? how big or small my list is? If I can give a clear answer How to people need to be treated differently? Correct. segmentation is the best thing that you can do for your list. We did. We felt it was so important. We did a whole episode on it. Episode Two was literally our second episode. That's how important it is. Yeah, go back and listen to it. It's not important.

Jennie Wright 40:20
An episode one was an intro. So

Alyson Lex 40:24
that's Yes, Episode One was intro. Episode Two was about segmentation. That's how important it is. That's how big of a deal it means for your business. rant over.

Jennie Wright 40:38
And I'm about to pick up the mantle here because the rant is about to restart all over again. Alright, are you ready? Because we've been hinting about this.

Size matters. Oh, my bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep. Oh my God. Oh, my bleep any bleep. Oh, I want to keep I don't want to have the the rating so we're going to size matters can we chose Okay, for once, once and for all, we need to drop this. And I want to explain it in real terms. Okay. I had a client years ago, and she was a client that drove me insane. bless her heart really nice person. She had 14,000 people on her list 14,000 and she could not make anything more than $40,000 a year from them. That's it. And her open rate was really, really low. And her click through rate was super low, like her open rate was maybe 9%. Maybe her click through rate was maybe 2%. Which means when she sends something barely anybody thought she could not get these people to invest money with her. Okay. And I had another client at the exact same time, who was in year three, who had spent the first two years playing around on LinkedIn and a bunch of other places and decided to grow her list and year three. She did when she got to me she had 358 people on her list. She did a summit. She got 800 very targeted people and immediately sold $45,000 in coaching packages. Okay, that's a list barely over 1000 It doesn't matter size does not matter. When you see in this drives me crazy because I lived through the whole summit era have to be on a summit you need a minimum of 5000 people, blah, blah, blah. And what I'll tell you is is that we hear that you know you you'll make money when you get to 10 K, you'll make money when you get to 10 k before that. It's peanuts, and we actually heard this from a client last week and also denied the nod like Mm hmm. And it's just not true. You can make money off of 358 people you can make money off of 1000 people on your list. You can make money off of 2000 people off of your list. I've seen it I've seen people make six figures from under 2000 people on their email list.

Alyson Lex 43:04
I'm one of them. my list is was kind of, I mean, it was way more pitiful before Jenny got ahold of me, but it's still not super robust. I'm a service provider. for 13 years, I've been focusing on service. And my, quote unquote, email list is in my Gmail, where my clients messaged me. Yeah, right. And I know all of their email addresses or at least how to get them to auto populate, right? They're not in my Active Campaign. I'm doing just fine, guys. Really. I think I looked, I think I made might. Hashtag transparency. I think I have like under 400 people on my list right now. And I'm doing just fine.

Jennie Wright 43:46
Because they're targeted there. So you're at our ideal client. When you send an email, you actually get emails back saying thank you for this awesome content.

Alyson Lex 43:54
I do. It's like super exciting to get those emails but I also So I haven't focused on that. I'm focused on that now.

Jennie Wright 44:05
Yeah, and you're

Alyson Lex 44:06
wrong. Oh, yeah, it wasn't 406 months.

Jennie Wright 44:09
No, you know, and I've been busting your

Alyson Lex 44:12
Jenny has, she's been yelling at me for years. So look, it takes me a long time to come around to realizing that Jenny is right. And I said it very clearly and on a recorded call, so that she can use it against me as leverage later. Got it, this client that we had, that she she really wants to get to this big list forgets that she made money with a smaller list. Right? she feels like she needs a bigger list to make more money. And while there probably is some truth in that, if you continue to grow your list to be highly engaged and niche then it will give you more opportunity to sell. It's not the only way.

Jennie Wright 44:54
No, and that's okay, you know,

bigger lists don't always mean bigger engagement and sure you should be focusing on growing your Absolutely, but don't grow it just for the vanity numbers, don't grow it and say that 10,000 is the number you've got to reach before you're going to make any money. You know, it doesn't work that way. Big lists tend to drive fewer clicks. So when a client wants to do a summit with me, and I see that they're like, Oh, you know, this person has 25,000 people on their list, I'm like, great, you're actually going to get more clicks from somebody with, you know, 1800 2000 3000 5000 than you would with somebody with 25,000. Let's just be honest, that's that's just how it is. Right? Absolutely. So the thing that you should be striving for instead, is engagement. Having a highly engaged list that when you send an email, you get a 25 or 30, or even a 40% open rate. I'll take that every day. responsiveness so that when you send something out, they actually engage with it being that you know, they respond and respond to the email. Will they register for the webinar, they click through to the offer, whatever it is, so they respond. The other thing is being niched in being a nation is so important. If you're a vegan raw food coach, and you're sending emails out about how to butcher up a pig, and make sausages, probably not going to fly, no. Probably gonna have a problem. And then the other thing is you want to list that's incredibly excited to be there. You only want the raving fans with you. So it's absolutely okay to purge your list and we didn't even talk about this. No, we would if people are on your list, and they haven't unsubscribed but they haven't opened your emails and they're literally just hanging in. You're paying in for hanging in. We want people who were excited to be there. And so we'll talk about probably in another episode all about cleansing and cleaning out your list cleanup Abbott's cleanup. And how to do it properly. Right. And that's a really big thing as well. So that sort of encompasses it. Those are the big lies about your email list that we wanted to cover today. Go and head on over to System to thrive.com, forward slash 10. It is

Alyson Lex 47:21
System to thrive.com slash 11. That's the numeral 11. One and one system, not nine, not 10. Totally number 1111.

Jennie Wright 47:34
Head on over there. Check it out, grab the download, get my ninja trick for reducing your unsubscribes and increasing your open rates and click throughs. You can get that there completely for free. It's a good little ad. And thanks for listening for everything that we did today and everything that we shared about the big lies with your email list. We'll be back with another question the next time. Thanks again for watching or listening to this podcast. We hope we've answered some of your big questions today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast anywhere you're listening and leave us a review.

Alyson Lex 48:08
Also, make sure you've checked out the thrive collaborative podcast community, our Facebook group for listeners and entrepreneurs. Find us on Facebook or online at System to thrive.com