Easy evergreen funnels for small businesses with Lindsay Hope
In this episode, we talk about the significance of an effective email strategy without getting icky. It's all about building personal connections with subscribers and finding the right balance between personal and professional content.
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We also get into testing and optimizing a live launch before transitioning to an evergreen funnel and tailoring email sequences based on audience awareness stages. Can't wait for you to listen!
Listen to episode below:
Episode Shownotes:
Cinthia introduces herself and discusses the importance of having a good email strategy. - (25 secs)
Lindsay Hope, a copywriter specializing in email strategy, discusses the importance of email marketing and building personal connections with subscribers. She emphasizes the need for a balance between personal and professional content in emails, and advises against immediately launching a new product as an Evergreen funnel. - (0:43)
Cinthia and Lindsay discussed the importance of testing and optimizing a live launch before turning it into an Evergreen funnel. They also emphasized the need to understand the different stages of audience awareness and tailor email sequences accordingly to build relationships and provide value. - (6:37)
They also discuss best practices for testing funnels and recommended segmenting the email list based on engagement levels. They also emphasized the importance of removing cold subscribers to improve deliverability and mentioned that a 20% open rate is a benchmark for B2B service providers. - (12:15)
Various strategies are discussed to improve email deliverability and engagement rates. They explored techniques such as blending segmented emails, focusing on open and click rates, encouraging replies, monitoring unsubscribes, and considering the use of double opt-ins. - (18:37)
Cinthia and Lindsay discussed the importance of focusing on one offer and tailoring communication to meet the stage of awareness of potential customers. They also emphasized the need to approach email marketing with a human touch and consider getting a second set of eyes to review content. (24:07)
Lindsay’s Bio:
Lindsay Hope is an email strategist and conversion copywriter who loves working with impact-driven businesses. Her goal is to help them sustainably (and authentically) build relationships and grow with email strategy and copy. She's all about having fun with email and finding projects and partners that share her passion for personality-driven conversion copy.
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Thank you so much, Cinthia. Yeah, I'm really excited. It's been a while since we've talked about email. It's important.
It's a part of art. And especially for those of you who do SEO, having an email strategy is going to really complement your SEO strategy.
So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your business?
Great. Yes. If you are looking for someone who loves to talk about email, that is me. My name is Lindsay Hope and I have a copywriting business for email strategy and copy. Lindsay Hope Creative and I've been focusing on primarily just email. For about three years, I started my business about four years ago, but I decided to niche down to something that I was really passionate about where I felt like I could really help people that was a little bit more than just copywriting and I fell in with email. So I'm really excited to talk to you today and share what I know about Evergreen Funnels and how to use email as part of it. Yeah, I feel like email is one of those areas of business that I personally forget how magical and important it is. We're also just many times distracted with just other shiny things that email can sometimes feel so simple of like you're just landing in someone's inbox, right? But when you start to look at, well, I try and look at my analytics, right? I see, wow, people are opening, people are converting with emails, and then using it as an Evergreen setup, which we're going to talk about in this episode, can be just so, so powerful. You're literally able to talk to people, you know, and that it feels like you're really talking to someone like one to one, right, in many cases. Exactly. Yeah, it's so much more personal. When you're, you know, posting on social media, it's like you're one person talking to many, right? But with email, it is that one to one. You have a chance to build a relationship and a personal connection in a way that you can't look at some of the other platforms. So if you are able to get somebody's email and they allow you to come into their inbox, it's like them opening the door to a friend. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that so much. But it does sometimes feel like email because it's different than a CEO, it's different than social media. It's just you can recreate some of that writing, but because it is more personal, maybe some people feel little more daunted, right? Because it's like, okay, what do I say to this person, right? like, how can I come off personal, but then sell, right? So how do you like? We're going to get into the Evergreen thing in a second, but how do you coach your clients or with your own work? How do you think of that about that personal element but also keeping it professional? Oh gosh, I mean, first I was going to say, I feel like there should be a three to one ratio of personal emails that are a little bit more educational, informational, relationship building, three of those to everyone's sales email. So, you're really going to be a lot heavier on providing valuable information. Don't be afraid to give away some of those nuggets of your wisdom for free to people who are on your email list. I think that's one of the number one mistakes I see is that people are scared that they're getting away too much. And it's one of those things where there is a balance of you still want people to buy things from you later, but you have to build that trust and know like, knowing that I can trust my trip with them through the inbox first. And I feel like... You it's a little bit more personal than professional. Of course, you know, you want to keep it professional, but you know, it's a chance for a big and tough personal stories and you connect with people on a deeper level and adding a little bit of personality into your emails just makes them so much more fun to read. Nobody likes to get the stale, boring emails of them or inbox, anything that's all caps and shouting at them. You want to be able to find a way to engage with people and write emails that are fun to read. I really love about email and finding people that value personality driven copy. Yeah, oh, I love that so much. it's a good, I love this ratio idea because it can almost feel like extremes, like either selling a lot or you know, diary writing. Or like, yeah, for me as an SEO expert, there's so many tips and steps and like tactical things I could share. But the email is like the space where I also get to open up and do some personal stuff. And I just love getting the email back, right, when someone's like, oh, this was helpful, or, you know, this is happening to me too, or even your first hate mail. I mean, that's kind of a milestone in my opinion. It's special. Someone took the time to actually reply to me. I mean, wow, thank you. Hey, thanks for boosting my deliverability. You're going reply to my email. Let's take it with a grain of salt. It's not the same on social media where it's like maybe you feel sometimes, yeah, could feel. I mean, I guess you could get hate comments too. But yeah, yeah, it's like that ratio idea. Okay, so let's talk about evergreen funnel. So, I personally have been working on my own evergreen funnel for my S.U. course. So, selfishly talking about this will help me. But here are some of the things like I'm struggling with is I feel like with an evergreen funnel. There's like this secret. Formula or part of me thinks that, right? And then I'm realizing Evergreen Funnels are just a sequence of emails I get sent to a specific time. Like that's all it is. So tell me about like from your perspective and like working with your clients some kind of elements that you think are really important when you're building an Evergreen funnel to sell a course or an offer whatever. Yeah, so I think one of the most important things is that. Starting off, if you have never sold funnels before and you're launching a brand new product, it might be a good idea not to sell it as an Evergreen funnel. You might want to try a live launch first. Just because you want to make sure that you have the right messaging, you're targeting the right audience. Give it a little test run with a live launch before you decide to turn it Evergreen. And Eno, you want to make sure that you are finding the right people and you're meeting them at the right stage of awareness. So I know that you've talked about this on the podcast before. But if you're meeting someone in a brand new relationship and they're landing on one of your landing pages and they don't know anything about you, are they going to be the most likely people to buy from you? And what stages do you need to take them through in your sequence of emails, which is probably going to be five or seven different emails so that they get to know you well enough to want to give you their credit card number. So moving on from an unaware audience or a pain-aware audience to a solution-aware audience and then they become product-aware so they know that your product is going to solve their problem. And then when they finally buy, they're at the most aware stage where they've decided that your product is going to be the one your product or service that's going to be the best solution to their problem. So the way that you do that is through a series of emails. in the first couple of emails, you're probably not going to do so much selling. You're going to do more education. You're going to do some of that relationship building, provide value. So, giving them a key behind the curtain of what it's like, what your product's going to be like. So, I know a lot of times people will rip out maybe one little tidbit of a module if they're doing a video module for one of their courses. show people what your videos look like. don't afraid to give away that first module for free, kind of what I was saying before. You don't have to hold your card so close to your test. Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah. And so, not first one, you're that first stage, you're giving information. And then we, again, I feel like with a lot of evergreen funnels, the timing aspect is interesting. if you could speak to that, like, what do you feel and I'll tell you what I've been playing with. But I feel like a lot of people do education and then they'll do some limited time offer and then they'll keep selling for at least another week or so. Do you feel like that timing aspect Part can come right after just giving them some sort of quick discount or something like that. Yeah, you know, everybody's different and every business is different. So there's really no blueprint of what's exactly going to work and what's not going to work. So you kind of have to test and optimize. So even if you set up your tunnel, you know, to be, let's say, seven day cycle and you send an email every single day for seven days. The first three or four are going to be more educational value building and then maybe in the last three, you say there's a 72 hour window to buy with a certain discount. Just as an example. And if it doesn't work, then maybe you have to go back to the drawing board and think about maybe your sales cycle is a little bit longer. Maybe you want to trip out emails over the course of two weeks or three weeks where you can provide more value in the beginning. And that's where you have to study your metrics. I know as an SEO person, you're used to looking at which emails are getting open, which emails are getting clicked. it's kind of a constant. Test and optimize for the first couple weeks, months, rounds of when you're launching your funnel to find out what's working best with your particular audience and what kind of content is most engaging for them and what they are most interested in either downloading or reading from their emails. Yeah, no, that's a really good reminder. feel like a lot of people assume like, okay, I'll set it up and it's going to start working. And then, you know, maybe it'll make some iterations, but it's really like you said, like months of going back and looking and like testing and looking at those just different pieces of that puzzle. And even when you do click and find like a good rhythm, there's still like an awareness of like, okay, you know, how many people are re-bringing into this? has it improved over time? it always requires some sort of maintenance, right? I was looking at the back end of ESP, an email service program for one of my clients, and there was a series of four emails, and people were really opening the first one the most, obviously. And they were dropping off after the third, but they were coming back for the fourth. So I realized that that third email really wasn't providing the right value. People, maybe we needed to tweet the subject line and just see if maybe that was what wasn't working for them. Maybe we just needed to remove the email altogether. So it's kind of like looking back and analyzing everything from the subject line to the offer to the body, copy of the email, and realizing that you don't have to set it in stone. You can change those things to see what works better next time. Yeah, totally. love that. And then how... So I think I made a mistake. I was testing on an evergreen funnel, and I sent it to my whole list. And at the time, it like, this is great value. People like, why wouldn't everybody want this? But I realized that sending a more mature subscribers through Nevergreen might actually rub them the wrong way because you're sending quite a bit in a small beer at a time anyway. It's not a big deal. But how do you recommend testing? I guess that's my lead up to that question of, I've heard people take a quarter of their lists. What happens if you have a smaller list? Do you have any best practices around testing the funnels? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is making sure that you have an option to opt out of a particular funnel near the very top of the email. So if people aren't interested in hearing about you about this particular offer that you have, give them the option to opt out, not just in that first email in the funnel, but continue that throughout all the emails. Because if you give them the option to opt out, they're much more likely to still stay on your way. I guess when it comes to best practices of how much of your list do you send an evergreen funnel to? I don't know if there is a best practice on those. I'm not. No, it's okay. guess it must be enough. I would. I guess the part of that question that's tricky is like it depends on your list. If you have less than 100 people or something, then you probably find it like, because if you don't have enough of a data set, then it's hard to trust the numbers. Yeah, I think that maybe I would segment your list more by who's the most engaged. So if you have a larger list, you might look at who's opened an email, open, or clicked, or read an email. Now up in the last 90 days, right? And so those are probably your warmest leads. That might be who you test sending in the funnel to rather than some of those older subscribers or perhaps you make a little bit of a different offer for people who aren't as engaged on your list. That might be the time when you're trying to reengage them, which might mean a little bit more of a discount. That's what your special is or you add a special bonus for people who seem to be not opening as many of your emails. Maybe they've become a little bit colder. That's a good way to reengage them. No, I love that. I love that. That's like, yeah, it's a really good customization. mean, I tend to over complicate things, but I also feel like having that sensitivity and like just taking that time, like you said, to look at, like, who's kind of a colder subscriber. I actually did run like a cold subscribe campaign earlier this year where, and I'm planning on doing this every It's six months of like, if someone has any. Open an email in like over three months. I send them an email saying, hey, like I noticed, or even longer, I think over six months. I'm kind of like, hey, you know, if you don't reply or click on this, I'm just going to send you on your way. And that helps a lot with the open rate because you have just a lot of kind of spam emails or people who just aren't opening your emails anymore and that's okay. Well, and as you know, the back end of the Google algorithm knows what the real truth is, but you're sending out emails and you're only having a 20% open rate. Then somehow in the back end, that's going to hurt your deliverability. So if you remove some of those cold subscribers, it's going to help your deliverability. I do think that a lot of times since there is this, it's out there in the world, remove your cold subscribers. I think you have to be really careful and you want to make sure your list is big enough to do that. And it is going to do more health and harm because like you mentioned, if you only have a hundred or two hundred. Yeah, a funnel, if they can come back to life, warm them up a little. Yeah, speaking of open rates, I guess what, so we've got the open rate, we have the click rate, I'd love to hear like what you feel is like the best ideal. I know, again, as a Google Analytics person, it's hard sometimes because it just depends on how big your list is. know, usually if you have a bigger list, all the numbers tend to go down just because it's more people. But if you have, yeah, just like some ideals or how you read that for your clients, and then any other metrics that you look at within, you know, even Do you analyze, I guess, how an email is performing overall? Yeah, for, you know, B2B service providers, I think, you know, an open rate of 20% is about the benchmark. Yeah. But I find that for a lot of people that I work with, their open rates are quite a bit higher, which is great. You know, and some of them are also, you know, small lists. Maybe it's only 500, maybe it's 5,000 subscribers. But if you have a really engaged audience with those open rates, it helps. So one way to make sure that you can raise your open rate is by not sending every single email to all the subscribers on your list and by sending in the out targeted emails to smaller segments. Like I was talking about before, sometimes that's people who are more engaged on your list. So people who've opened or clicked an email within 30, 60, 90, 120 days. You might send send them some more emails than some of the colder subscribers. For other ways to segment your list as well, maybe you could ask them to self-segment in one of your welcome emails. So that's a really great way to, on the back end, create some tags so that let's say you gave them three options. I'm most interested in mindfulness. I'm most interested in nutrition. I'm most interested in meditation, just as an example. And then if they clicked any of those links, then they would receive a tag. So then when you're sending out an email about nutrition, you just send it to the people who clicked that they were interested in nutrition, which that's going to give you a gigantic open rate because hopefully those are the people who are the most interested. So when you blend some of those smaller segmented emails in to the emails that you're sending out to your entire list, it boosts your overall deliverability. boosts your overall open rates, and it tells the back end that you're creating content that people want to read. So that's definitely a trick to making sure that your open rates are healthy and high. I would shoot for 30% 40% at, you know, as a benchmark for open rates. Click rates are also really important because that shows that people are reading your emails and they're interested in what you have to say. So rather than recreating all the content from one of your blogs and repurposing it into an email, give them a link so that they click back to your blog and they land back on your website within the email or, you know, people reply to your emails, if you ask them a question and you really start engaging with them through the impact. So, that even boosts your metrics and your deliverability even more on the back end. So, it's a really great way to, you know, have conversations with people that feel personal in the inbox if you're able to reply to them one on one. And that help, you know, that's something that I would definitely track as replies. On subscribes, you know, it is healthy to have people subscribing from your list. It's not, you know, it's much better than having people mark you as spam because people start For barking your email is spam. Then the back end is like, what is this person? What is this business doing? Why are they emailing me? So I usually keep an eye on unsubscribes. But one of the things that is challenging sometimes is if you have a decent size list and you start getting a lot of unsubscribes and you're not bringing in new people to your email list, and then it feels a little out of balance. So, you know, one of the things that I always recommend to all my clients is how are you going to keep getting new subscribers? You want to keep your list fresh? You want to be able to bring new people into the mix because people are going to leave? Yeah. I love that. I was looking at my convert kit numbers and I noticed that in convert kit, they're very gentle and nice. think the word isn't unsubscribed. They say like cancelled or something like that. We're like unconfirmed or something. then there's another one that's like, complained. And I was like, what does that So I think it's a spam thing. I was like, this is interesting. And so it is a little painful sometimes when you're the one writing the email. But if you have a team, I guess, for anybody listening, like if you could have someone or Lindsay go through and like look at the emails like where where did they feel like I was bamming them. Was it the timing like maybe someone who just got off the welcome sequence and you're just sent selling them something or. Maybe there is a particular email that's kind of triggering that it can be helpful to analyze that and just yeah it's not too personally it's just like good data information. Well, one way to combat some of that perhaps could be to add the double optic so in ConvertKit, a lot of people have, you know, a single email that goes out if you sign up for somebody's list they get another email to confirm that they want to be a subscriber. And most of the This kind of debate. In most cases, the double opt-in is highly recommended because you want to make sure that your subscribers really want to hear from you. There's another side of the coin though. If you're in growth mode and you're really trying to grow your list, that double opt-in is a trigger that you can pull if you're trying to get more subscribers because I found in a lot of the back ends of Kirkett, sometimes people sign up for the list and they don't confirm. Yeah, so that is where the Unconfirmed Subscribers land and I know in my own, I'm like, I know a lot of these people. I know they met to subscribe to my list, but somehow that double confirmation in their inbox didn't get clicked so they didn't end up on my list. It's kind of a 50-50. Some people believe in the double opt-in and some people believe in the single. It's something that you can test though. If you do have the single opt-in and you're getting a lot of spam complaints, that could be why. Yeah, and it may be it's good to just try. Maybe there's a season where you take it off. I think I have double for mostly everything. But because I also appreciate, yeah, I kind of try to reflect what I appreciate others do with me, right? So if I'm signing up for something, I'm really enthusiastic. I'll sign up, you know, I'll look out for that confirmation email. Now the only caveat is like, I know I'm a bit more techy and there could be someone who's not expecting that email or like they're just not thinking about it. They don't know. And so you have to also think about is your audience, how techy are they, how easy are you making it for them. But I also remind myself that if someone does spammy or on confirm whatever, leave my world, they can always come back. It's like a relationship. Maybe I piss them off and maybe they find me some other place and they come back and that's okay. Like I'm not. And also, you know, yeah, I've had the email and at first it was. It was devastating, but then I was like, wow, thank you for taking the time to let me know about that feedback. mean, you didn't find that useful. Great. But who knows that person can even come back. you just never know. And that's the beauty of the internet is like, you just get to keep selling and marketing and growing things and allow people to come and go as they please. Yeah. And, you know, as entrepreneurs and we have to have big skin. So sometimes that feedback. It's helpful, but you also kind of have to have a bubble around you and not let it ruin your entire life. I don't know why you Yeah, something back isn't helpful at all. was just like, why did you, but it's still, it's like, wow, they really. I don't know the fact that someone replies again helps with all the metrics and the open rate and stuff, but it's just like, okay, like, you really had to tell me something right. But anyway, some people. Just more communicative than others. Yeah. Well, thank you, Lindsay. This is so helpful. Do you have any like either final thoughts or anybody who's OK, so if there's someone out there listening who's like they've got their evergreen funnel. They're feeling kind of like. Kind of flat with it. Like what would you recommend they look at first to kind of get it going again and get enthusiastic around it. Yeah, so when it comes to things that I would look at like what might be going wrong, you know, definitely making sure that you're focusing on one offer. And that all of your communication is, you know, one to one like one reader, one main idea, one offer, one call to action. You don't want to confuse people. Simple is better. So that's like the first thing I would look at. And then also thinking about that stage of awareness like I was talking about before. mean, if people just found you on Instagram, click over into your funnel and they get the first email from you and you're trying to sell to them. They don't trust you yet. They want to get some value first before they have a pitch for whatever your offer is. So thinking about the stage of awareness where they are and trying to meet them where they're at, realizing that it may take a little bit longer. sales cycle is going to be a little longer for some people. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm really not one for Pachey's sales pitches. think that thinking remembering that it's a human on the other side of the email. And, you know, there's a lot of AI and robots out there, but you don't want to sound like a robot. You don't want to think like a robot. You want to remember that you're selling to a person. And so sometimes it's hard to take that lens off for ourselves in our own business. getting a second set of eyes on it never hurts. Might be off putting or what I'm missing from my subject lines or my body. I mean, Just thinking about, you know, are you actually thinking like a human? Yeah, it seems like simple, but yeah, I do feel like sometimes we're either and I've done this like you're just really, who's the athlete without selling something or you know you want to reach your revenue goal but I always remind myself like what would I say to someone if they were just sitting with me in a coffee shop and we were talking about whatever and I was teaching them like about SEO was telling them about SEO. How would I want to come off? But then there, I mean, some emails that are pure sale, emails are very helpful right because there's people who are ready to buy and they just want you to give them the link right but it's like you said before there's like a time and place for each of those and just yeah thinking about that other person on the other hand because then there's like the opposite right where you're wanting to sign up for the offer but they're not sending the link or they're like teasing it and I'm like okay I'm just ready to buy like you know Also really annoying too, right? It's like, that's almost worse because it's like, I don't think I have to cut it apart. I'm to get a copy of by email, like five days. It's like, actually a pay. Well, so in that case, you know, if you have something that's a hot offer that you might want to try selling it to, if you have, if you tagged the previous buyers for your last product, in the back of end of your ENSP, those might be the people that you picture next product to because they're already interested in what you have to sell. They may not need to get to know, love, and trust you, they already do. So that might be where you would test out selling second product to people who have already been, you know, buyers before. Oh, I love that. So good. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much. Why don't you go ahead and share, like, where people can hang out with you and get more information about your email service.
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