Hey, welcome to the build your life coaching business podcast. My name is BJ. I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that turns out need to be done in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love helping life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun doing what they love to coaching. So let’s dive right in. Welcome back, coaches. Today I’m talking about how to turn emails that you write into clients that pay you money.

All right, I’m going to jump right into the secret. The secret is test. Test. I know you’re probably thinking, wow, that guy got that from every single blog post out there on the Internet and yeah, pretty much did. But the real secret is how to do the testing. What are you looking for? So you go through your email marketing software, you look through your broadcast history and then what? So I’m going to be going through one tip and two strategies on how to do the testing. The first is the tip. So here’s what you need to know about your email.

Your email marketing is that the efficacy of your emails comes from repeatedly delivering value. So you heard me say repeatedly, and you heard me say value repeatedly means whatever frequency that you say to yourself that you’re going to be creating content in sending it an email form to your audience on that you are doing it. There’s a lot of reasons why we don’t do it. I’m going to talk about why it’s important to do it and that you’re delivering value. Every decision in your business needs to come from what is best for my clients and that should show through in the emails that you are writing, it helps you be in touch with what challenges are they experiencing. If you can give them just one little bit of information that tweaks a thought or adds a thought or just brightens their day, that will help them move along from where they are today to where they want to be. And that’s what goes in your emails. That is what builds the know like and trust factor.

The know like and trust factor, first of all, makes business fun. And also it leads to sales. It is what is required in order for people to hire you, in order for you to provide this life changing coaching. It’s a service that you are providing for them. But how do you ensure that you are writing these emails? I call them weekly emails because if you’re doing it less often than weekly, then you’re probably not doing it as often enough. People might kind of forget about you. Your audience turns a little cold. If you want to do it more, that’s great, but I also don’t want you to burn out.

The first is a belief in a couple of different things. So you have to believe that your business is incredibly important and effective. It has to be important for you, which is very clear. That’s obvious, to see that you probably need some money in order to live, in order to pay bills. But definitely more than that is that the satisfaction that comes from providing this life changing coaching changes your life. So you also have to believe that it’s important for your clients, your potential clients. They have a challenge, they are suffering and you need to help move them from where they are to where they want to be. Probably very similar to a transformation that you yourself went through.

So you know how important going through that transformation is. The third thing is that you have to believe, I should say something good will happen from writing that email because that’s probably the easiest way. The best excuse that we can give ourselves is that if we don’t write this email, nothing different will happen. Nothing will happen. So you have to find a way to believe that if you write this or if you write it enough, you will find your potential clients or you will find better clients, whatever it is for you. So the next strategy to make sure that you’re writing these weekly emails is to do time blocking. I talked about time blocking as part of productivity 101 in my last newsletter and podcast, time blocking. There’s a time set aside every week for you to do this work.

And you know when it’s due, you know when to do it and you know when it’s due. So you know you can do it. If you’re having trouble getting started, like, what am I going to write about? This 15 minutes investment in this problem is going to be totally worth it. Write down 30 ideas in 15 minutes, those ideas will feed your 30 emails. So you know how to keep writing the emails repeatedly, delivering value. So these two strategies on how to actually do the testing on your email marketing software, we’re talking about the open rate. So as you go through your email marketing software, you look at your broadcast history and look at the open rates of all of your emails. Some are going to be higher, some are going to be lower than others.

You want to be able to find the trends, what caused your open rate to be higher or your open rate to be lower. And the biggest factor in your open rate is your subject line. So when you find the good open rates, take note of those subjects. The bad ones take note of those subjects. Don’t do those, do less of those, and do more of the ones that are helping. Now. Yes, preheader is a factor in your open rate. Preheader is the text that shows up below the subject line.

It makes it look like it looks like content that’s in the email, but you get to choose what it is. In most email marketing softwares, if you leave it blank, it’ll just show the first number of words of the content. Now, another variable that is in this relationship between subject and open rate is the time of day that the email is sent. You could do a test for one particular client at one time, like within the same week I wrote an email and sent the same email. I segmented out her audience into a couple of different times and found which time of day had the best response. And doing that one test told me which time of day is best, and then I just send it out at that same time every day. It’s not perfect, but it lets me help me do what I’m talking about more effectively because I don’t have that as a variable. So when you find the good subjects, keep a list of them.

Keep a list of those as examples. It’ll be great for your next launch, your next offer. It’s both good for you and if you have a copywriter in the future, your copywriter is only as good as you train that person. Think of a copywriter like chat. GPT any large language model is only as good as the data that you feed into it. If you’ve done some experimenting here, you’ll see that the more information that you can give it, the better the response will be and the more you can train it to sound like you. But if you just say write an email, oh, it’ll write an email. It’ll write a lot, but it won’t sound like you.

The more that you can keep. Now do this strategy. Keep this information for the future. The second strategy, when you’re doing your analysis of your emails, you’re looking for what’s working and what’s not working is look at the click rate. Again, not rocket science here, but I’m going to talk about through some of the variables that go into determining the click rate. And that really is where the magic happens. The biggest factor in determining your click rate is your content. When you have a good click rate, it’s because of your content.

When you have a bad click rate, it’s because you have content that’s not working. That is mostly always true. There is another kind of offshoot here is that looking at your opt out rate, your opt out rates will tell you if people on your list are not a good match. So I do want you to remember that when you have people opting out that is good, it just means that those people are not a good fit. Right now what you’re looking for is you’re finding the variables that lead to the good click rates. The reason why opting out is just fine is that you pay for everyone on your list. If you have fewer people on your list and the people that left weren’t doing anything anyway, great, you’re paying less. It also helps your deliverability when you have a higher percentage of your emails that are being engaged with either opened or clicked.

That tells the email service providers like Google, Yahoo, outlook to let more of your emails in to people’s inboxes because this deliverability is a little bit of a black box in the sense that you send an email but it might end up in someone’s promotions folder or worse into someone’s spam or trash folder that can be harder to figure out. There are services out there that they’ll give you a list of emails. You send one email to the list of emails that they give you and it’ll tell you where your email landed in each of those email addresses. But that’s for definitely a different day. Here’s how to get your click rates to go up. You’re going to pull up your list of broadcast history, find the emails that have the outliers of click rates. So the click rates that have the highest amount and the click rates that have the lowest amount. And we want to be doing more of what’s working and less of what’s not working.

So find the emails that have the higher click rates and we’re going to dig into that content because it’s the content that’s the biggest factor that’s determining the click rate. So the problem becomes that there’s a lot of variables that go into what is good content, what is going to drive people to click. I’m going to go into two of them which are fairly straightforward in terms of they’re black and white, you know exactly what they are, they’re easy to measure. And then there’s a rest that are more, there’s more that are more gray. So the first one that’s easy to identify is what is the call to action? Is it to click a video? Is it to click on a gif, click on an underlined hyperlink, which is kind of normal for what you would find in an email. So clicking on a video, a lot of times marketers will take a screenshot of the video, put a play button on top and it signifies click on this to watch the video and it can take you to YouTube, Vimeo, or you could host the video on your website. But what does the call to action actually look like in the email? So pay attention to if any of those call to actions are doing better or worse than others. The second clear type of call to action variable that we can look at is length of the email.

Do short emails, medium long emails work better or worse than others? So the rest of these variables are way more gray. So what time of day? I talked about that in terms of the subject being effective going into the open rate, the time of people could be more likely to click at different times of day. Pay attention to that. The tone that you’re using in the email, whether you’re using first person, third person. The next variable is story. Are you telling a particular story? The story itself is compelling. Or perhaps telling any story is compelling. Perhaps people don’t want to hear stories.

But I don’t believe that usually the way people really get bought into stories as the way that we inform and educate. The next variable is how educational the email is. Are people looking to be educated? Chances are they are. The last very gray variable is efficacy of the hook is how effective the hook is. The very first part of an email should be a hook, something that convinces them to keep reading. It’s the subject that in the preheader that gets them to open the email. It’s the first sentence or two that is going to convince them to keep reading. And that is a hook.

All right, that is it. I told you. One tip into strategies. The two strategies are that for both your open rate and your click rate you’re going through and finding what’s working, doing more of that, finding what’s not working, doing less of that. You should be doing these exercises on some frequency. Definitely going into a launch. If you aren’t doing launches, it’s always kind of evergreen. Then pick a frequency that works for you.

You might want to answer almost every email that you write at how the previous one did, but you want to be looking at trends because your email list is constantly changing. You have new people coming in, you have people opting out, especially if you have an ad running that the new people are coming in tend to be colder. It cools off your whole audience. You want to keep an eye on how your emails are performing. That’s it. For today. I’ll catch you next week. Bye.