Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
Email Marketing: Everything You Need to Know - Naomi West, Parcel
In this episode of Numbers and Narratives, we speak with Naomi West, a seasoned email and lifecycle marketer (currently at Parcel). Naomi shared insights from her extensive experience in the email marketing space, including her work with various ESPs and her recent venture into course creation. The conversation delved into the intricacies of email marketing, its importance in the digital landscape, and strategies for effective customer engagement.
Key takeaways from the discussion:
- Email's role in customer relationships
- Common mistakes in D2C email marketing
- How to start an email program from scratch
Naomi emphasized the enduring power of email marketing in an era where social media algorithms constantly change. She highlighted the importance of testing, personalization, and understanding your audience's preferences. The conversation also touched on the challenges of creating and marketing an online course, reflecting the ever-evolving nature of digital content creation.
Listeners interested in deepening their email marketing knowledge can explore Naomi's course, "Email Marketing: Everything You Need to Know," which covers a wide range of topics from basic concepts to advanced lifecycle strategies.
Find Naomi's course on her website: https://www.naomiwest.ca/shop-and-learn
All right, naomi, in the length of a tweet, a tweet thread or an Instagram thread. What did we talk about during this episode?
Speaker 2:So we talked about the value of email marketing through the creation of a course that I've just launched called Email Marketing Everything you Need to Know. So if you're looking to understand how email fits in with your tech stack, you should absolutely listen to this episode.
Speaker 3:I'm Amy Syed. I'm Sean Collins.
Speaker 1:And this is Numbers and Narratives. Do you mind giving an intro to the listeners of this podcast as to what you do?
Speaker 2:I'm Naomi. I'm a career email lifecycle marketer. I've been in the email space since 2015,. Primarily working in-house at SaaS companies as a dedicated email or lifecycle marketer. With lifecycle, that just means I also touch in-app and push and SMS in addition to email. I've also had the privilege of working at two ESPs now, the first being Braze, out of their London UK office. I was an onboarding manager there, which was quite a cool role where I got to work with a client for the first 90 days after they closed the deal and educated them on the tools and the best ways of using Braze. And I also work currently at Customerio, which is another ESP marketing automation platform, and I joined them through their acquisition of Parcel, which is the best email coding platform. So I joined them two years ago and I can't get enough of email.
Speaker 2:I do email consulting in my free time and that originated out of COVID, where I was either just going to spend time on my couch purchasing sweatsuits and watching reality TV and instead of that, which I did in copious amounts, I kind of leaned into the consulting side. So I work outside of my nine to five primarily with two to three different clients at a time, helping them with e-commerce strategies or email audits, where I just outline growth strategy, and I also teach email at a Canadian-based digital marketing academy called Jelly Academy. So I run a three-hour seminar once a month and I've been doing that for coming up on two years, I think. So I don't have a lot of hobbies, I just do email and that's fine's fine with me.
Speaker 1:First thing I do want to ask is like what is this email geeks group that you both are a part of?
Speaker 2:is probably the most amazing community I accidentally stumbled into and has completely accelerated every single career move I've made since joining it. It's like 20,000 email marketers. It could be more at this point, but essentially it's just this Slack community. When Slack was acquired, by what was it? Adobe? Did Adobe acquire Slack? Who acquired Slack?
Speaker 1:Salesforce there we go.
Speaker 2:Similar like behemoth. One of the founders of this email geek community, I think, tweeted at the founder of Slack, basically being like hey, you know, we have this online community. There's 10,000 of us. Any way we could like get on a community plan or something or have like a nonprofit discount essentially just a resource group of things about email. And he granted the community free access to Slack forever, which gives us search history and endless messages and that non-expiring thing that happens to messages if you're on a free Slack plan. But that can't happen anymore. So, yeah, it's just this community that is sick. Anytime I have a question, I go there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, in general, what's amazing about email marketers is it's a community of any other discipline of marketing that I've been involved in. When you join their slack communities, it's people trying to sell you on stuff. It's people trying to promote themselves. It's very transactional and it's like the douchiest of marketing happening. Email marketers are just people who love email and are constantly told that their channel is going to die and are constantly told that their channel is boring, even though it is always one of the most important channels for a company to have and to do well in. And so what you have is this group of people who just are all so passionate about email and want to help each other and build each other up. So there's no, you're not allowed to promote stuff. It is just like I need help. Here's what I'm struggling with. What's going on.
Speaker 3:You know there's channels for every single ESP and CRM you could ask for. There's channels about analytics. There's channels about personalization, about copywriting, about speaking. There's like reading groups, like I'm in a group of New York City email geeks and we do a Slack or a Zoom call every couple of weeks and like just catch up and talk through problems and like that's how I met Naomi, that's how I met Avi, that's how, like when I, you know, when I actually met Naomi in person was at Really Good Emails, which is, you know, an amazing conference. But it's an amazing conference because the email community is amazing, but it was like I'd known Naomi and Avi for years, because I've been literally slacking with them and asking for help for years, and then it just hits.
Speaker 1:It's great that those communities exist right, because, like, especially when you get to a size like 20,000, I'm in a couple where it's like a few hundred and you can start to see, like, if it's not actively moderated, if, like somebody, if people, the people like that are in it, don't care about, like what it's for, especially as more and more people join, right, like, more and more people join for sales purposes, for other purposes, and so that's pretty cool that you can have something that has 20,000 people but it doesn't seem you don't go, you don't like stop using it because it's like oh, this is just like a cesspool of people trying to sell me stuff.
Speaker 2:Now that's pretty sweet. I think also it helps that it's on slack, which is the tool that I have in front of me. Every single day I struggle with communities that are like website, forum based or even discord. I can't, I can't get into them. And I'm trying. I've joined so many and I'm like I'm ready to have the same level of engagement as email geeks on Slack in this new Discord community, and I forget about it. It just becomes this like icon on my desktop that I don't open. So half of its success, I think, is it being in Slack.
Speaker 1:It being Slack.
Speaker 3:Nice, that's sweet. You know I am a passionate fan of braze, and when they moved their community from slack to um, whatever platform it's on now, like I've logged in two or three times, yeah, yeah, and there's been like some communities that have popped up on slack because bonfire went away and I, like, am active in those Ooh Bonfire, that's a cool name.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:It's a very cool name.
Speaker 3:It's a smiley face in a fire. It's nice.
Speaker 1:I was going to say that you just described. You just described three jobs and you're coming out with another course, right? I assume that's not related to Jellybean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so it's four jobs.
Speaker 1:You have four jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they all are in their own little silos, but at the end of the day it's email and I love email, so it doesn't feel like four jobs.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, yeah, it's really nice when you're a big fan of something.
Speaker 3:You had email characters before that.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, I created a Google Chrome extension that allows you to highlight a length of text specifically with the intention that you'd be able to check the link of, like a subject line or a preheader preview line to determine if it's going to cut off on different devices. So I've seen a handful of subject lines that will come through my inbox that have, unfortunately cut off at not great areas of words. So it's just a nice little tool that you can install and check the character length of your subject lines and then it'll tell you if it's at risk of being cut off. So I just love, I think, for me. I love email, but I also love exploring different technologies and areas of the industry. So the Google Chrome extension was an area of learning for me, and teaching with Jelly Academy has been another area of learning. And then this course is me leaning into the creator economy with kind of the intention to learn more about creating disposable streams of income.
Speaker 3:And real quick. Before we jump into the course, I want to emphasize you described. How did you describe what Parcel is?
Speaker 2:The best email coding platform.
Speaker 1:That is what Sean sent me in the pre-read to this, to this recording as well, for the people that are listening. So Sean and Naomi both think it's the email best email coding platform.
Speaker 3:Verbatim oh, I didn't, I didn't actually know that. I literally just slacked him and said him oh, I didn't, I didn't actually know that. I literally just slacked him and said now it is product marketing at Parcel, the best email coding platform. I haven't been to your site in a logged out state in a long time, so I did not know your.
Speaker 2:H1. It's just ingrained.
Speaker 3:Tell us about this course, why you did it and what it kind of covers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So two years ago I wrote kind of in my annual reflection recap that in 2023, I wanted to create a course on email marketing, definitely inspired by how I see these students come through Jelly Academy so interested in learning more about email marketing. Their intentions and passion for learning something like this has led me to this light bulb moment that like, hey, maybe the world does need more content on email marketing in a really broad and generic live training type capacity. And it was also inspired by one of my own favorite creators. Her name is Bridget Casey and she's a Canadian financial content creator and I was just infatuated with this inner community she had created based on her own expertise.
Speaker 2:So the light bulb moment, you know, going into 2023, was like I want to learn about the ways of delivering a course on my own terms and I want to write down everything I know about email to enable someone to pick up email marketing and kind of run with it and feel confident launching their first newsletter or, in my own experience, creating their own lifecycle program and how to deliver content at the right time. So over a year I spent probably writing the content down. It was in a Google doc originally and then I ported it over to this really cool platform called Tome app, t-o-m-e dot app. It was this AI presentation builder because I am so bad at Google slides, like, if I want to ruin my day, it's into Google Slides and try and create a presentation. I can't stand it.
Speaker 1:Do you find that Tome? For some reason, I thought it was to me. Oh, maybe, I don't know if it is.
Speaker 3:I used to actually work with the founder Tome makes sense right Like it's like a big-ass book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh sick.
Speaker 3:How is it?
Speaker 2:It sounds like a big one, I think it's tell me, but I'd be interested in learning if it's, if that is the way no, no, I I don't know anything about it.
Speaker 1:I just I was like, oh sweet, now I know how to pronounce properly, pronounce the. You know that that's great I love it.
Speaker 2:I love the platform. As soon as it, I was like I want to create all my presentations on here, and I also love, potentially, the way that you can create a really long almost landing page slide. So if I am doing like a live recording, I can scroll down on my page instead of like switching to a new slide. It just feels really flexible in terms of being able to illustrate content. And they have this really amazing AI prompt feature so I can either, say, make a slide with an H1 and two H2s with two pieces of paragraph text under each, or I can write out the prompt, tell me what an open rate is in the context of email marketing, and it just completely changed the way that I crafted a lot of content for this course. So, all that aside, I leaned into this Tome app. I, you know, I created all this content. I had probably around 200 pages of of slides and at the end of 2023, I went and I hired a videographer and a studio to film the content for me and my intention was to just take all the raw footage and build it myself. You know, structure the course exactly how I wanted. I was like, I am, I'm, I can do video editing. This is totally fine. I can't do video editing. I can't do it at all. There was no storage on my computer. It was like a complete mess, and so I completely dropped the course at the end of 2023. I was like I'm frustrated, I don't, I don't think it's worth it. It's going to take me like a hundred hours to actually produce, with no video editing chops. I'm like what do I use? Imovie, what do other people use? It just felt like this endeavor that I did not want to embark on, so I just completely set it aside. I didn't touch it, and it wasn't until this summer that I kind of took the pressure off of this course doesn't have to be professional video of me talking, and I instead was like I'm just going to record on Loom. I use Loom every day. According to the monthly emails I get from them, I'm saving like 20 hours of meeting time. So it seems like a good tool to use and I did.
Speaker 2:I sat down for probably like an hour a day and I just recorded the modules, and that was exactly how this course creator that I loved recorded her podcast. She did it over loom or not podcast. Sorry, but how she reported her course. It was all done over loom where she had her little face in the corner, but your focus was the content that she was sharing and not how she was delivering it. So that that was how my course ended up. Being finished was this summer. For about two months I spent recording it and then editing it. I was going back and forth between hosting it on Squarespace, which is where my website is hosted, and they've recently come out with a course offering or using something like Gumroad Gumtree, one of the two Gumroad or Gumtree. I've purchased other courses from that platform before and I ended up just leaning into the Squarespace piece because it was already in my tech stack. So that's the recap.
Speaker 3:There's something beautifully email-ific about you just giving up on the really high touch, corporate, beautifully edited version and being like, ah, screw it, I'm going to do it myself. There's something that feels right about email doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel bad If the videographer is ever listening to this. It was not the content or the quality of your video. That was not the reason why I didn't pursue it. I just oversold myself as capable to edit the raw footage that was provided. It's hard. I fully thought I was going to be able to edit it Like no problem.
Speaker 1:But no, it's really tough. It also just like takes a really long time because you just need a massive machine to do it, I think.
Speaker 2:That's it, and I don't have a massive machine.
Speaker 3:I think that's it, and I don't have a massive machine. Yeah, it's super tough. I guess, like what with your course, like who should be taking this course?
Speaker 2:I envision the person that's taking my course is someone new in their digital marketing career. In my opinion, five, 10 years ago, digital marketing was a role where you wear a lot of hats, with social being a pretty large focus. I think in the last five years, we've seen that social marketing isn't necessarily as great as it used to be. There's so many different algorithms happening on Instagram. Twitter is obviously no longer. I think you can lose your audience really really quickly when it comes to social marketing. I think you can lose your audience really, really quickly when it comes to social marketing. Think about Clubhouse and how that became an overnight sensation and then no longer an overnight sensation really quickly. But email is really a channel where you own your audience entirely right. So I think I'm seeing a lot of teams realize and see the value of email. Teams realize and see the value of email, and I'm hoping these kind of junior digital marketers, or really anyone that has maybe focused on other aspects of the business, can come in and learn the foundations of email all the way through list management and website strategy for how you should be placing signup forms on your site and then deliverability information.
Speaker 2:What do you need to know about deliverability. If you run into a scenario where you're caught with low open rates, how should you be looking at the metrics that come through after you send an email? What metrics are important? Should you be kind of stressed about an unsubscribe? Are opens of the the best metric to determine the effectiveness of your email?
Speaker 2:And then I go through just basic content creation, best practices, how you should think about approaching designing an email and then full life cycle strategy. So what are the effective touch points you need to deliver over email in order to build a long-term relationship with that subscriber or that consumer or customer of yours or prospect. Even so, the intention of the course is to be quite broad. Today I want it to essentially speak to digital marketers that are open to learning the specificities of email, but for me, I also want to take what I hear back from those that do to know the technicalities around email design how to create a hover effect, how to add gradient backgrounds, that kind of stuff. So it's a cool learning for me to maybe make future content off of.
Speaker 1:Honestly, like, I don't really know that much about email marketing. I like as, like as like. I run a SaaS company. Right, I run a SaaS company and we do work with email marketers, but like, we plug in and help them do retention and all that kind of stuff. But, like, for my own purposes. I'm not a marketer by trade, I'm a data scientist. I actually do want to learn quite a bit about it. Like what, like I guess why, why like? What aspects of your course do you think I should look into Like as like? Maybe somebody who is in your target demographic where I'm not an email marketer at a sas company? But I'm probably going to be the first? You know I'm. I'm always like a d minus student at a lot of different things, like a d minus salesperson, d minus software engineer, d minus ux designer. Now I want to become a d minus email marketer.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's good to know.
Speaker 1:Like hopefully I can become an A plus, but like, as long as I'm D minus, like it's fine. Like then I know what a good email marketer is and I can hire one eventually.
Speaker 2:Okay, back to your question what should you know about email marketing? I think at a high level. My course introduces how email fits in with your digital landscape. If you, if you are currently a company that, like, has a website and maybe has a couple of social channels, this course will teach you how email, as a tool to build relationships, fits in with the other things going on in your digital ecosystem. So the one thing that I love to talk about is how the use of websites and social channels are great for top of funnel, but they're not great for anything in the middle of the funnel, driving someone from like a lead or prospect straight through to like a retained customer.
Speaker 2:It's going to be email that is going to do that job, because one you have data on them, such as their email address, their first name. You can implement touch points to get individuals information that you didn't get at time of signup, such as what are you looking for? On this platform, you can have a simple email with three different options and, based on someone clicking one of those options, you can assign a custom attribute on their profile that you can later use for personalization, or you can use that attribute information to steer them towards different parts of the. Let's say that they want to talk to someone in sales, or they want to talk to you, or they just want to sign up self-service, like. All those options are on the table and you can learn so much from your subscriber based on using email. So, yeah, do you?
Speaker 1:oftentimes find that a lot of it has to do with, like education, and upsell isn't the right word because we're talking about getting like, maybe converting somebody from elite to a a prospect. But something that you said was kind of interesting here is, like, if I know that you know somebody clicking on I don't know the customer experience part of my app. The next, the next likely thing that they are likely to look at, is like the competitive intelligence part of the app, and so I'm you know I send them an email being like hey, like did you? I saw, you saw this. Now, do you see, see this? Like sort of like you know, curating almost the educational content of my product based on, like what they did.
Speaker 2:Right, Absolutely, and that's the like key of success with lifecycle marketing is looking at the key moments, the key milestones that you want your customer to reach, and tailoring your communication around those.
Speaker 2:So I look at my customer journey with a couple of aha moments, the end one being hopeful conversion and I'm like what other events lead up to that?
Speaker 2:Is it that they click on this certain thing in the app or they look into the competitive intelligence piece? And every single touch point is kind of geared towards getting people through those different aha moments. A key example I used to work at a company called Invoice2Go and they did invoicing, not surprisingly, and we knew that someone was most likely to become a paying customer if they came in and they added their billing details and they added their branding and they added one client. So every single touchpoint from me whether it was an in-app message inside the mobile app or web app or a push notification encouraging them to add their billing details they were all teeing up for these different life cycle moments that the customer really didn't even know of. We knew that they needed to accomplish them and these events led to the highest rate of success, but the customer didn't, and so it's kind of this like weird psychology thing where you are leading the horse to camel to water, is there saying that's like you're leading someone to water, teaching a man to fish, something like that?
Speaker 3:yeah, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Is the the saying? There we go I like that it became camel and that that was great well, camels store water for a long time, so I that's right. Maybe you can lead a horse to a camel too, and still probably can't make it drink.
Speaker 2:Bring all of Noah's Ark to the water. Every customer will be happy. Yeah, so one aspect of the course is would be teaching you how to effectively understand how email fits in with your digital landscape, which I don't seems like you're open to learning about. And the other aspect of my course is, I think something you would find interesting is how to deliver content effectively. I see so many newsletters that are like packed full of content, so many different articles, so many different links, and at the end of the day, I'm like is that even effective? Like do you know how your customers are engaging?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds useful on so many different levels. Like I, sean, and I talk about this a lot but, like, why is our LinkedIn content one week performing better than other weeks? Like what is like even like even beyond email, like that's just generally, I think, a really good. I would love to learn that. So, all right, sounds like you've got a student.
Speaker 2:The thing with email, too, is I do preach in this course like one benchmark that you see online is not going to be your benchmark Like I don't think email is this one size fits all thing where you see one strategy being done somewhere and you can replicate it perfectly. The key learning that I have taken out of being an email marketer is like you really do always have to be testing in some capacity and your biases can really deceive you. We had Mark Robbins, who is just this infamous email developer. Email whiz joined the Parcel team a year and a half ago and the emails at my full-time job at Parcel have always been text-based because, one, I'm not a designer and two, they're just the easiest emails to get out the door.
Speaker 2:So when Mark joined I was like this is going to be sick. We're going to design so many amazing emails. They're going to have interactivity, they're going to have hover effects, they're going to look so good. So he designed out all these emails and we ran an A-B test where we can paint compare the text-based emails next to these beautiful ones that Mark created, and conversion and click-through rate were so much higher in the text-based variant than the designed one, and I was so devastated because my bias had led me towards believing that a nicer designed piece of content would perform better. So I find it difficult, like in the email space, you know preaching certain strategies, knowing that it's not going to work for some businesses or a majority of people out there. But you just have to be open minded to trying a bunch of stuff and then throwing. But you just have to be open-minded to trying a bunch of stuff and then throwing it out if it doesn't work, or potentially coming back to it in two years time and trying it again.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the big thing, right. Like just because it didn't work once doesn't mean it won't work again later. People change, trends change. You want to do psych? I think part of the reason your emails stood out was you're emailing email marketers with a plain text email Like that is a unique market of people who aren't going to be like wowed by little gimmicks, and so to have like a really cool email, you would have needed either all the bells and whistles or just like hey, let's, let's just get out of brass tacks, yeah, and so I guess that's that is key. It's like don't always be comparing yourself against others. Revalidate tests and test results all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to be constantly retesting. I had once interviewed for a job, actually, and it was with one of these dream companies like such a cool logo. I was so excited at the possibility and I was speaking with the hiring manager and she was like, how do you approach A-B testing? And I was like, well, is it in an automated campaign or like an automation where you're getting a ton of people in every day over a long period of time, or is it like a one off newsletter? She was like, for this example, it's a one off newsletter. It's like, okay, I'd run the test and I would actually probably run it a couple times.
Speaker 2:She's like but what if it comes back with statistical significance? Just after that one attempt? I'm like, well, I would question is it a fluke, was it just the time of day? Like I think it would be great to run it three times and see if it came back with statistical significance three out of three times. She was like, well, that's just not how we do things here. If it's statistically significant once, it means it's right. So I don't know why you would test it again. And I was like, oh, this is so disappointing, it's so sad.
Speaker 3:It's painful when all your heroes turn out to just be normal.
Speaker 2:That was it. I was like maybe I'm not meant for the big world, big corporate world, I'm meant for the small, small team, All right.
Speaker 3:So most of the people who listen to this podcast are either CX people or are marketers, all generally DTC brands. You've done a lot of consulting for exactly that persona. Give me two to three things that they're probably getting wrong, without seeing any data or seeing what they're doing and what they should do instead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, d2c is such a fun one because everyone I interact with in the D2C space is wearing like a hundred hats. I'm like they are overworked, confused and interested in company growth, which I'm like good for you. You're out here doing work, which I admire, and then when we start to talk about email, it's often this space where someone has set it and forget it. They have set up like their ESP marketing automation platform. They're collecting emails, they're maybe sending out, you know, a sale promo, but the life cycle strategy is just not there, because email is just this thing that can happen in the background and they don't need to pay attention to it. So I think what I would absolutely recommend every single D2C person do is one look at their website strategy for how they are collecting emails.
Speaker 2:If there's not a pop-up or an option to sign up to email in some capacity in the website footer, you're missing out on potential top of funnel lead generation.
Speaker 2:And then with that, there needs to be a welcome email of some sort on the other side confirming that the recipient has opted in in some capacity or outlining the value.
Speaker 2:That is potentially what is to come with the email program, even if you don't have a newsletter strategy in place, take time to build out just the first couple touch points in a welcome series to show off what your product is or how your product can be used, or customer testimonials, and that's going to be a really scalable way of communicating with a customer without a ton of manual effort on your part.
Speaker 2:The amount of times I go to a website and sign up to hear from the brand, from their website footer, and then get absolutely no welcome email or like no newsletter ever, I'm like I wanted to hear from you, like I came here for you and you're just there's nothing. It's no two way street with this brand. So you can carve out a couple hours to go into your ESP marketing automation platform and set up like a three, four, five email welcome series. Even sometimes work with brands that will set up this long three to six month evergreen welcome journey because they don't have the manual kind of effort there to create a once a week newsletter. So they essentially just repurpose all their blog content or product walkthroughs into this welcome series and try and use that as a way to convert a user to a paid plan or purchase of a product, and that, I think, is a great use of time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I used to just whenever I was agency side, I would find like the campaigns that had won and like just done really good things and I would just make those the onboarding for like while we started things off, like just like, hey, this sold a bunch of things when you sent it last time, let's just send it more.
Speaker 2:You don't need to reinvent the wheel Like I. You can completely repurpose content that has worked really well for you in the past. There's no problem with it. It's a great way of saving time.
Speaker 3:It's also disappointing. I let this domain expire and so the Google sheet that I had with all these stats is gone, so I'm partially making these numbers up, but I signed up for like 500 newsletters from like e-com brands that I thought would be great at marketing. I was going to collect all these examples and like 23% of them never emailed me or texted me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so funny because it goes either one of two ways You're either so fatigued from the brand because they send every single day, or they're just not sending at all. Because they send every single day, or they're just not sending at all, like I. There's probably 10% of e-commerce brands out there that are actually sending like on a weekly basis, using personalization, not overwhelming the audience, actually delivering value over email. So the opportunity is huge. The opportunity is just.
Speaker 2:It's so huge for people to actually start using email as an effective tool without fatiguing an audience, and I don't see enough people doing it, which is sad because it's such a high impactful channel both for building customer relationships but driving revenue for the business. There's one aspect which is, yeah, email can lead to more money for the business. There's one aspect which is, yeah, email can lead to more money, but it's also like email can lead to these relationships with people that will inspire the future of your product, and learning things from your customers is a great way to just forge a better product roadmap or business strategy, and email is essentially that channel that you can have those conversations over. So I wish everyone used email a little bit more.
Speaker 1:But before we jump off, is there anything else you want to pop to our listeners?
Speaker 2:There's probably one other thing that I'd love to share about the post learnings after launching the course. I went into launching this course with the intention that as soon as I launched, it would be this kind of course that would drive an income stream on its own, and what I've come to realize is I actually think in order for it to succeed, I do need to be marketing it consistently in some capacity. It's not just going to be SEO and consistent traffic to my website that will result in that success. So my original marketing plan was to promote it on social once every two weeks with this kind of static post to my followers on LinkedIn and Instagram, and instead, where I've learned I need to pivot is to actually open up the course for a week period, close it off, leave it for the quarter and then do a kind of mini launch once quarter. I found that the kind of launch buzz was what drove a ton of signups initially and then it tapered off, which is totally fair initially, and then it tapered off, which is totally fair.
Speaker 2:But I've looked at other course creators and the inspiration I took from Bridget Casey. She does the same approach where she launches it once a quarter. She builds up this hype, this wait list, this FOMO. If you don't purchase the course in the first 24, 48 hours, you're going to miss out and I'm super excited to test that out over the remainder of maybe, like each one next year, and see how it goes. So that's the only other thing I wanted to share is I've completely pivoted the marketing strategy for this course and it kind of ties back to how you have to be opening, open to pivoting your, your email strategy just as much.
Speaker 3:That's super cool. Yeah, it's like creating scarcity gives you a chance to try out new messaging if you want to edit anything in the course or add anything you can like. That's really cool.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me, though. This has been really fun.
Speaker 3:This is great. Thanks so much for coming on yeah, nothing like a nice Friday afternoon call. We really appreciate you doing this.