Anna Crosby - Why I ditched the "weekly newsletter" (( and got better results ))

00:00  Hello everybody, welcome. This is my presentation on how and why I ditched the weekly email newsletter and got way better results. Before we dive in, here's a quick little thing about me my name is Anna Crosby i run Geni Collective, which is an email marketing consulting company specifically for online business owners. So email marketing is all that I do. I don't use social media at all in my business and I've been making a full time income using just emails. So that's what I love to talk about and that's why I created this business.    

00:39  Other than that, I'm a huge tech nerd i love all these online tools that we have to run our businesses and really create the lifestyles that we like. Specifically for me, that is the house goblin lifestyle i'm a very introverted homebody person, so running an online business is great for me. And I have a pH D in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and I have spent the last 14 plus years studying how we can show up online as business owners to truly connect and build trust and make sales. So that's a little bit about me. Let's go ahead and dive in as to why you might be here, right so you might be here because you are currently sending or trying to send a weekly email to your list and it feels like it is a ton of work right and sometimes, some weeks you just skip it because there's already so much on your plate and you can't fathom trying to think about what the heck to write this week on top of everything else that you have to do in your business, right? You probably start with the question, what do I write about in this week's newsletter? Usually you come up with some sort of tip or trick or value or a personal update or what you've been working on in your business, right? Then once you've written that, you try to decide if you're going to sell anything in this newsletter.    

02:01  But most of the time, if you're like most of my clients and students, and this was me too many years ago, you can't find an easy way to weave in the promotion that it sounds natural and not abrupt or pushy. So you just skip the selling part, right you just do a quick selling launch later, no big deal, right? You get the email, out you get it sent, and you were resting easy for only a few days before the task of sending your weekly newsletter pops up on your To Do List again.    

02:29  And the cycle repeats. So if this is you, first of all, don't worry, right? But if this is you, you are in the exact right place because if this cycle feels really feels really tedious and really heavy and you kind of feel like your email marketing can be more than you are in the right place. But I also want you to not worry because this is what everybody teaching email marketing says that you need to be doing. So if you are doing this, I don't want to tell you that you've been wasting your time. You've just been folk following best practice advice because nobody is teaching this right and I was doing the same exact thing as you, sending out the weekly newsletter, trying to stay consistent, sometimes failing right until I realized something about this system of doing email marketing.    

03:21  Unless your business model is sending out a monetized magazine style actual newsletter, weekly newsletters are actually keeping you stuck. They're keeping you inconsistent, they're preventing you from connecting to your audience and they're taking your sales as as a result. All right, in this workshop, I want to show you a better way to do it so if you're in, let's go ahead and get started. So just a little overview of the workshop we're going to talk about why exactly email, newsletters unless you are a newsletter business, right so if you are a newsletter business, if your whole business model revolves around the paid newsletter, this workshop is not for you, right? But everybody else, right if you don't have a paid newsletter, we're going to talk about why that doesn't work for the types of businesses that you have.    

04:14  We're going to talk about the new focus, what it actually looks like, how you can get started. I'm going to give you a super easy action tip and I'm going to recap and give you your next steps. So let's go ahead and dive right in, right? Why doesn't this weekly newsletter strategy not work? Weekly newsletter style emails are disjointed and random because you are sitting down every time at the beginning of the week and you're trying to think about what the heck am I going to write about this week.    

04:44  Every time is a different topic. They're causing you to start over from scratch every week because, again, every newsletter is its own topic. Everything feels like it's in a silo because you only have one email to write about the topic that week. You have intense pressure on you to come up with a creative idea every single week. That's not sustainable, right? Even the most creative of us usually cannot perform on a consistent schedule like that. Your weekly newsletters are also not reusable because let's be honest, are you really going to repurpose them, right? I don't, I don't even know where to begin with this, right? And last but not least, the weekly newsletter strategy separates nurture from sales because you're thinking it's a newsletter, not a sales letter, right? So that's why selling in your weekly newsletters feels so awkward, abrupt, maybe even pushy.    

05:45  And you don't really know how to make it sound natural.    

05:50  The weekly newsletters also cause you to focus on providing value without selling, but this is actually throwing a whole bunch of information at your people without any clear picture of what they need to implement to actually see the results. This strategy is actually tanking their belief and their ability to do anything to get closer closer to their goals this is the number one objective that people have. It's not that they don't believe your stuff is good, but they can't do it. And you throwing a bunch of stuff at them only seeks to overwhelm them and add to the pile of evidence of all the information and tips and value that they're getting that they still can't reach their goals.    

06:30  So your job as a business owner is not to overwhelm people with what they should be doing, right they don't need more information they don't need more tips. They don't need more value, right? Your job is to provide value in educating on your audience on what they don't know that they don't know, right? Where are there gaps? They are here they want to be there. What is stopping them what is the connection in the middle? This is what you should be focusing on and that is the true value that nurtures and sells together. And it positions your products and services as the solution that they need.    

07:06  Because let's face it, your best shot of actually helping your people get the result that they want is to work with them in a paid capacity through your products and your services where you're not thinking about what you're holding back, right? It's a very common thing. People always ask, what do I give for free in my newsletters what do I hold on to for my paid newsletters, right this does not exist when you are not focusing on the content as pure content without any sales content in it. So let's talk about the new focus, right if we're not going to be focusing on value and we're not going to be focusing on the tips and tricks and sending them out in a weekly newsletter, instead of thinking about your emails as as newsletter based or value based, I'd like for you to switch to thinking about your email marketing as topic based.    

08:00  All right, so we're not thinking about, I'm going to send out a weekly newsletter what am I going to send instead we're going to pick a topic that you normally talk about in your business, and we're going to structure your email marketing strategy around that specific topic, right? When you do this, every time you're talking about this topic, it seamlessly combines both nurture and sales because they should not be separate. You shouldn't have only nurture times and only selling times. Nurture and selling should work together because when they do, you naturally create opportunities to share that educational content, right? What don't they know that they don't know? You create sales opportunities a lot more than during, you know, very specific launch periods.    

08:53  And you are sharing your expertise naturally as part of this process process. And the best thing is, is that it never feels awkward or pushy to do all of these things. Another way I like to think about it is that your email list is a school and your emails are the curriculum, right that's another way that you can think about this specific strategy. It gives your people multiple chances to get involved with different things you provide, like workshops, courses, buying your products, interacting with you in some way, right, In the context of what they actually want to learn about because they joined your email list for a reason, They have a problem and they are looking actively for the solution and they think that you might have it.    

09:40  So you presenting them with lots of these different opportunities is actually fulfilling your implicit promise when you create your email list is that they're actually going to get some of these solutions. Most importantly, it takes your subscribers from passively consuming your content to really engaging because now there's things to engage with. All right, so if this all sounds good to you, you're on board you're like, all right, how do I actually switch my email strategy from a weekly newsletter to a topic based strategy? So let's take a look at what that looks like. I created this 2 little graphics to examine what these two strategies look like. So on the left here is the newsletter strategy this is most likely what you're doing this is what most people do in the email marketing space, which is to send out let's say you're sending out a weekly newsletter on Tuesdays.    

10:39  All these different colors the yellow, the blue and the green are different topics that you're talking about. And the purples is where you are doing sales, right so if you've ever heard the jab, jab, jab right hook, this is an illustration of that specific strategy. You're giving value, giving value, giving value, and now you're asking them for a sale. Let's contrast this with the topic based strategy strategy and you can already probably see the difference visually. Instead of talking about 3 different topics, we're picking just two topics to focus on and honestly, you can do this with even just one topic per month as well.    

11:23  Each topic is not just once a week. You are sending multiple emails throughout the week, throughout every like whatever days that you're currently so currently sending maybe it's a Tuesday, a Thursday email a friday email and throughout the whole time that you're talking about it, these purples are popping up these purples represent sales opportunities. And you'll notice some of them I put in a lighter purple shade and some of them I put it in a darker purple shade to signify how hard or soft you are selling.    

12:00  But I want you to really pay attention that the fact I'm not just selling one week out of the month, I am selling throughout the whole month this is the the biggest difference between these two strategies. Let's take a look at it point by point. We already talked about the sales opportunities. The newsletter strategy has very few sales opportunities and they are removed or separated from regular communication, right? They are corralled over here all by themselves in their launch week space. However, over here we have loads of sales opportunities in varying intensities and you're selling all month long without it even feeling like you are launching or even really selling With the newsletter strategy, sales seem to come out of nowhere, right the launch period comes out of nowhere with no warm up, no warning, no connection before it.    

12:57  But in here, because your sales are related to nurture and education, they're all seamlessly woven in, so sales never come as a surprise. With the newsletter strategy, you feel tons of pressure to tell them everything in every single email because that's the only email only email that you're sending that week. However, when you are switching to this more fluid, topic based strategy, you have so many opportunities to send an email and make that connection that your tone can be more conversational, your pace can be more leisurely.    

13:30  You can break down ideas into smaller chunks and actually get engagement from your audience instead of trying to overwhelm them with too many things, right well, not trying i know you're not trying to overwhelm people, but I think you understand what I mean, right?    

13:47  And finally, last but not least, when you look at this strategy, there's only maybe four to seven touch points throughout the month versus the topic based strategy gives you 1012 however many, right there's no upper limit really on how many touch points you could have. And it used to be that the research said we needed nine touch points for to make a sale now it's more like 20 or 30. So the more touch points you have with your audience, the more regularly you communicate with them, the more trust you build and the better your sales goes, right? So I'm going to pause right here and say if this feels and looks like too much, too overwhelming, right if you are used to just sending the weekly newsletter, I know that looking at this graphic might fill you with a bit of overwhelm.    

14:40  But don't worry, I'm going to break it down how you can get started with testing out the strategy in a very simple way that doesn't include doing more work than you are already doing. All right, so let's talk about how that is not doing any more extra work. What you're going to do is you're going to map out your content topics and you're going to focus specifically on the topics that you already have, products or services that you are currently selling around those topics. What are the broad categories of those products and services what do you already frequently talk about when it comes to your business topic? And then I just want you to pick one, pick one product or service that you want to sell more of this month or next month.    

15:27  I really want you guys to try this strategy as soon as possible, right and I'm going to give you a resource that's going to help you towards the end as well. I want you to pick, I want you to pick one product or service, and I want you to write 4 emails just about this topic, right? We're going to talk about, we're going to just write 4 emails. This is no more work than you were already doing in a month. You're already sending 4 newsletters at least in a month. Now we're just going to write them a little bit differently instead of being random, disjointed, different topics, they're all going to be about this one topic.    

16:06  And I want you to try this strategy out over the whole month. Not talking about overhauling your strategy and suddenly sending like 10 emails in a week, right? You'll still send 4 emails, the same 4 emails that you've already been sending, but you might find that each email is much easier to write. You can write more naturally about your products and services in every email, and you can set those emails up in an automated workflow or as part of a sales funnel, a future promotion, or just to fill a week or two of content if you're going to be away from your business, we're not talking about repurposing.    

16:41  We're just simply going to reuse it as is. All of these results are results that my actual clients have gotten when we work together. So This is why I know that this strategy works. So let's talk about your next steps. I know we've gone through a lot, so I want to help you distill it down so I am giving you my 4 email sequence cheat email sequence cheat sheet that's going to breakdown exactly what you're going to write in each one of those 4 emails that we just talked about.    

17:14  It follows my framework Connect, Nurture and Sell that I've created, created in order to help people write better emails. So get this CHEAT SHEET. It's going to walk you through step by step. And as a bonus, when you get this CHEAT SHEET, you're also going to be joining my email list so you can see my topic based strategy in a strategy in action first hand.    

17:39  As a subscriber i feel like that's the best way to learn so I'm so excited to have you join my list. And you can do that at gni collected dot com forward slash CNS four four stands for Connect Nurture Cell 4 because we're only writing 4 emails using this framework. Another thing that I want to tell you about is that I have a free no opt in training you don't have to sign up for my email list you don't have to to do anything like that you just go to gmacollective.com slash 4S and watch my foundational training for online business owners. It's four elements of emails that connect and convert.    

18:19  This training is for you. If email marketing has ever felt tedious, really heavy, boring, or didn't bring you any sales, this is a must watch. All right, well, that's all the time that I have today i appreciate you guys watching this presentation. I hope to connect with you you can always send me an email anna at gmacollective dot com and I look forward to connecting with you guys in the inbox.    

18:43  Take care and we'll talk soon.