The Benefits of Emailing Your List Every Day
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Last Updated on October 4, 2022 by candidcashflow
Today I’m going to talk about the benefits of emailing your list every day.
Late last year, 2019, I began studying copywriting not as a new thing, but just sort of something that I started paying more attention to.
The difference between copywriting and regular web content is simple. Copywriting is specifically intended to sell products and services rather than just convey information like web content.
That’s the differentiation between those two: copywriting sells stuff, content informs.
So, while I was studying copywriting, I came across the name, Ben Settle.
Now Ben’s kind of this cocky dude and he’s earned his stripes in copywriting to the point he doesn’t even write for clients anymore.
He just writes to his email list on a daily basis and then he writes this monthly newsletter called Email Players that costs $97 a month just to get your hands on this thing.
Did I mention it’s a print newsletter? Yeah, he prints this thing off and sends it via snail mail to his subscribers.
I think the last time I heard him mention numbers, he said he was in the 500 range, so I’ll let you do the math on that.
I sighed up for Ben’s email list and I started listening to his old podcast episodes. A lot of what he was saying began to resonate with me. He doesn’t do a lot of social media. In fact, I don’t think he’s even on Facebook at all anymore.
He doesn’t do Twitter and Instagram and all this stuff. He writes to his list and he puts out the Email Players newsletter. That’s all.
I don’t usually gravitate toward arrogant people. That tends to be a bit turn-off for me, but there’s something a little endearing about Ben. Maybe it’s because he’s an unapologetic introvert.
I don’t know, he just seems like he doesn’t care. He does his thing and you can listen to him talk about his thing or not. He doesn’t really care because he’s making his money on the back end.
He has a very simple business model. He has one flagship product which is his Email Players newsletter. Most of his daily emails have one goal and that is to sell Email Players memberships.
I find that kind of simplicity extremely interesting, appealing even.
Emailing Your List Every Day
I’m here to talk to you about emailing your list every day.
This wasn’t something I ever considered for my own business. I found people who emailed every day to be extremely annoying…until Ben.
I don’t read his emails ever day. Sometimes I just tuck them away in a folder for when I have time to read them or you know dust a few off here and there.
Here’s the thing with Ben, he doesn’t put out much free information, so his emails are really the only way to get examples of his copywriting.
When you get an email from Ben, you get more than just whatever he’s trying to sell in that email. You get a lesson in copywriting. It’s sort of a case of reverse-engineering.
So, emailing my list every day wasn’t something I ever considered, but Ben inspired me to dust off this old email list I had laying around. It was just sitting in my MailChimp account waiting for me to do something with it.
The result was cathartic.
I wrote 5 emails the first day and I just scheduled them all out rather than you know send my list 5 emails. I thought, “Great, I’ve got 5 days worth of emails ready to go.”
Now, I just kind of fly by the seat of my pants and write most of my emails the same day that I send them out. This isn’t necessarily ideal because if something comes up, I either have to scramble and write an email or send it later than I’d prefer. It’s working out fine though, and these are the things I signed up for when I committed to emailing my list every day.
One thing I am going to say here is to do as I say and not as I do because as I said, I started with an old list. It wasn’t from just one website, it was a merged list from a few websites, a couple of which aren’t even online anymore. Some of the contacts were upwards of 5 years old.
Start fresh.
What I had was about 260 subscribers on this list and between list hygiene and a handful of unsubscribes, I ended up with exactly 42 people on my list.
I removed more than 200 people from the list who were no longer engaging with my emails. They had not opened any of my 10 most recent campaigns. Mailchimp allowed me to segment those people out and remove them.
I think most, if not all, email marketing services have similar tools to perform this type of work with your list, so regardless of the service you might be considering, you can do this.
Even though my list is very small, the benefits of writing to them every day are many. Here’s kind of a quick list of those benefits:
- I get to practice copywriting every day – On a daily basis, I’m putting what I’m learning about copywriting into practice
- I get inspired to write about all kinds of things from life which wasn’t happening before. – As many of you know, I help take care of my elderly parents, so I have a daily commute for the first time in like 5 years. I’m seeing more of the world on a daily basis, so these situations from life from just that tiny bit more interaction in my day generate a lot of content
- A lot of my emails generate more topics for email – This morning I emailed my list about finding their target audience because I’m working on a series right now about Internet Marketing 101 so you don’t have to pay some guru to rehash all the trash out there for you. I’m telling you the basics for free and I’ll be able to compile those emails, expound upon them a little and put them in an ebook to use as a lead magnet. I’m not having to brainstorm topics periodically the way I was doing.
I had one email where…the title was Killin’ It in a KIA. I was driving down the highway one day, and this person passes me on the left going about 80mph, and I looked over and on the bumper of this KIA was a lone bumper sticker that said, “Killin’ It”. I had to smile not because it was funny but because that person was my tribe. This was someone I could relate to, “Yes, we’re killin’ it” I thought as I sat in my KIA.
The content and ideas for content wasn’t something that I expected. Had someone told me, I would have wanted to do this more. - I get feedback from an engaged subscriber base who replies to my emails – I didn’t even know these people were there. They know me from my podcast, my website, from clients, or Facebook Groups. I get email suggestions and encouragement from them. It’s just nice to have because before there wasn’t anybody there. If you’ve listened to The Candid Cashflow Podcast for any length of time, you’ve heard me say before that I don’t get any feedback on the show. That’s no longer the case. About a year into it, I started getting a little response back from people who were listening. It’s great to receive an email saying, “Hey I know you from your podcast. Thanks for this email.” when I’m having an off day. It’s a nice little morale booster
- I’ve met new people in my network – My subscribers are not just this group of people that I call subscribers, they’re not just my audience or my target audience or some other equally boring buzzword. To me, they are my friends. These are real people that I can reach out to. I could go and pick any email from my list and have a conversation because I’ve been able to build a rapport with them so they know like and trust me. In turn, I try to give that back to them. They’re my friends. If one of my subscribers emailed me and asked me to mention their podcast or blog or something, I would definitely consider going it if it was something that I felt would be beneficial to my audience and fit with my niche. I would totally be willing to plug whatever.
These are just a few of the benefits of emailing my list every day. It’s a super small list, but I have a lot of room to grow as I learn better how to send traffic to my opt-in forms and how to promote that list to others.
If you’d like to see what other people are saying or consider opting in to my list yourself, you can visit a page that tells you all about it at CandidCashflow.com/email.
The 30-Day Challenge to Write Every Day
I’m actually currently running a 30-day challenge with my email list for them to write every day whether that’s to their list or not. They can write in a notebook or jot a few sentences on a napkin as long as they write something every day.
At the end of the 30 days, we will revisit the content we’ve written from the past 30 days and see what we have that we use in our business for blog posts, emails, or even books.
I’m about to turn some aspects of my projects into even more content by tracking my goals, projects, and progress on my website and that’s going on live over at HeyYoAva.com/goals/.
I’ll be tracking my daily stuff on that page and it’s over at HeyYoAva.com because that’s my business and personal stuff while CandidCashflow.com is just for the podcast and make money line side of things.
Repurposing Content
When you’re generating content, it doesn’t matter what kind it is because there are dozens of opportunities to repurpose content just like we discussed in Episode 31 of The Candid Cashflow Podcast. You can check that out at HeyYoAva.com/revive-old-content/.
Repurposing content is one of my favorite things to talk about. I like to keep that in the back of my mind and consider new ways to do it. With this whole email thing, I’ve just added a whole new facet of that on to everything that I’m doing.
I think there were 18 or 20 ways to repurpose content. For example, one thing you can do is if you have a YouTube video, you can take the transcript and turn it into a blog post. You can do the same thing with a podcast and I do it with my podcast.
There are lots of ways to repurpose content and everything you create is a new piece of content. So you can have a YouTube video and a blog post on the same topic. That’s 2 different pieces of content.
If you take your video and you tweet it, you write a Facebook status about it, and maybe you take the thumbnail and upload it to Instagram, now you have 3 more pieces of content. Then you can do the same thing with your blog post.
You end up with all these pieces of content that are promoting this one single idea or one piece of information that you’ve created. Things get kind of huge really quickly and the more pieces of content you have out there, the more traffic that’s going to see you online.
That’s a Wrap
That’s something I’m going to be something that I’m focusing on for this year. I’m convinced that 2020 is going to be an amazing year in my world because I’m going to be fleshing out my content platform to bring in a decent-sized audience and turn these online endeavors of mine into a full-time business.
I think it’s high time and I’m looking to move away from client work some and be more self-sustainable with what I’m trying to create and who I’m creating it for.
I hope that you’ll stay tuned and consider subscribing to The Candid Cashflow Podcast in your favorite app by visiting CandidCashflow.com/listen-now/.
The show notes for this episode are available at CandidCashflow.com/Episode57.
Until next time, turning your passion into cashflow!
