Who gives a crap about email marketing: Jules Dan

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Email marketing is alive, well, and thriving. 89% of marketers use email as primary channel for generating leads, and 59% of b to b marketers prefer email for lead generation. As well, email marketing generates $42 of ROI for every dollar spent. Today, I'm talking to Jules Dan, an email copywriter who helps coaches and consultants convert more leads into customers. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Jules Dan: Mark, it's a pleasure to be on the show, and thanks for having me on. Have you had an Aussie before on the show?

Mark Evans: You are the second one I've actually had on the show, not the second marketer. So you don't get that honor, but it's very exciting to have someone halfway across the world on the podcast. This is a a global podcast, by the way. So, you know, I try to reach out to all continents. Thank you. An obvious first question, amid the vast digital buffet of marketing channels, why is email so powerful? Why does it work so well? And as important, what's behind the staying power? I mean, every time you say or think that email is gonna disappear because of Slack or text messaging or another medium, it keeps on going. Yeah. Provide an explanation about why email is still around and still the marketing channel for many companies.

Jules Dan: Of course. I've got a little story to illustrate this point, and it's really dear to my heart because when I first started this game, I was doing a lot of Facebook ads and chatbots at the time, so b o t s. And everyone knows how at the time in 2018, if you were dabbling in chatbots, how Facebook would just change the rules all the time. And I remember I created this brilliant campaign where I just sucked out leads for this client. And then overnight, my whole chatbot sequence I'd spent twenty, thirty hours building was flagged as breaching the terms of service. There was a critical sort of step that I couldn't do anymore, and it was just all gone. And I realized at that point, I had no control over that media. And I don't think that's a really good spot to be in, especially if you're being a freelancer like myself. I don't wanna be walking on eggshells all the time when I'm trying to work with clients, and that's when I swapped to focusing on email because you own it you own it. There are a few rules you have to go around. Obviously, you can't spam stuff, but for the most part, you own the asset. It's it's not regulated as hard as Facebook, and it's it's super easy to just send out emails to to customers just to follow-up with them to when they give you the email address, it's easy to break down objections. It's it's one of my favorite medias. I know you had a few different questions there. What was what was the second part of your question there, Mark?

Mark Evans: Well, I'm just wondering why email has staying power. Every time you think that we're at the end of email or email is gonna lose of effectiveness or that marketers aren't gonna use email as often. It keeps on going. Can you explain that?

Jules Dan: It has something to do with I don't know why, but everyone just loves checking their emails. Something to do with just like, oh, I've got this notification. I have to open it. And I don't know what the statistics are, but it's if you check out HubSpot, it's something crazy. So many people check their email. So the fact that that they're checking it and then we're able to at least deliver a message to that to that medium, to that media, I think it's really powerful.

Mark Evans: I remember when the BlackBerry first came out and the the idea of mobile email was this amazing thing. It started this whole craze about people staring down at their devices all the time because the ability to get email on the road was astounding, and now we check it wherever and whenever. I guess it's a it's an addiction for many people. Over the last year, when we haven't been able to go to conferences and we haven't been able to see people in person, although in Australia, the situation is completely different. Things seem to be pretty open down there. Email along with content marketing have been leveraged by marketers to suspect that most people's inboxes are overflowing with email. And the question to you is amid this tsunami of email and the fact that we're all leveraging it so enthusiastically, what are the keys to email marketing success? I realize that is a loaded question and there's lots of ways you can go here. But what are best practices to breaking through when someone opens their inbox and there's dozens of emails waiting for them?

Jules Dan: So the whole point, it's like go back to that know, like, trust factor and setting the stage and the agenda early on. So when someone opt ins opts in for your freebie, you wanna be getting them to consume your freebie because that's I know it's really hard to do because not many people ever do that. But, you know, in that first email, you wanna get them to consume it. So having that link at the top. And then you wanna giving some setting some expectations. Like, I'm gonna be emailing you a few times a week. Something that I like to do with my clients is that over the next few days, you're gonna hear some stories about pain point pain point pain point, stuff that are really dear to that market. And in the PS, I'll be like, to help you cut through the clutter, look out for j d as like a prefix. And that's and that way, you know it's a real email from me. Those are just some things that I like to do to set the stage really early on. And do not do what a lot of people on LinkedIn do is where you add someone, and then they automatically add them to your email list. That's one of the worst things you could do.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It's a good segue into my next question, which is really about email marketing mistakes. And I think you and I see them every day when an email comes into your inbox and you look at it and go, oh my god. I can't believe the marketer actually did something like that. Can you highlight the things that email marketers shouldn't do? And must be some obvious things that set off red flags and almost cause you to respond to the marketer and say, listen. I gotta tell you something. That email you sent was just terrible, and can I please help you do marketing better? What are some of those mistakes that you run into?

Jules Dan: Okay. So would you be interested more in, say, like, the copy or just sort of sending elements that land in the inbox well?

Mark Evans: I think both. I mean, I think there are mistakes that marketers make when it comes to best practices as far as deliverability and there are mistakes that marketers make when it comes to content. So maybe you can touch upon both.

Jules Dan: Yeah. We'll we'll start on content first because that's I think you're gonna get nail that first before you worry about deliverability. One of the huge biggest mistakes I had when I first started writing email copy was that I had I was just my attention was scattered everywhere. There wasn't an agenda. There wasn't one thing to focus on. And what happens is that people go on tangents a lot when they write emails. So either they'll tell a story or they wanna promote more than one thing, and people are confused. People are just are distracted. So if you can keep the premise well, when you start writing an email, I always ask the question, what's my objective? And that just makes it a lot clearer so I don't go off on these side tangents. And look, as best you can, keep it to one call to action and one link because we could spend an hour talking about, you know, how do we structure a story, what's what are some persuasive tactics. But if you can just focus on one thing, one call to action, if you feel like you're going off on a tangent, reread it after you finish out loud, and that always helps. That's that's a good starting point for the the content. For deliverability, I see this a lot, Mark, and it's really simple things. But I I I ask to my clients, can you change this? And for some reason, they don't want to because it takes away from their branding. But you look at the top email marketers, and they're always in my inbox. And it's because they've got a plain email. They don't have social media buttons down the bottom. They don't have a huge banner. They don't have a whole bunch of images and links going everywhere. It's a really clean email like it's just come from a friend. And and that's just what I've noticed. And when I send my emails out, generally, they hit the real inbox. Sometimes they hit the promo box, but those are my two tips for content and deliverability.

Mark Evans: As I mentioned earlier, b to b marketers have been leveraging content marketing and email marketing over the past year. So one of the things that I'm interested in is getting some guidance or advice on how do you marry the two? How do you leverage the power of content marketing, which engages and educates and entertains with the distribution power of email marketing. What are best practices when it comes to getting those two things to work together?

Jules Dan: So when you're saying distribution, like, you wanna sort of educate and give them some value, but you also wanna sell them as well? Is that what you're asking?

Mark Evans: Not so much selling, but the idea is that marketers put a lot of time and effort into creating high quality content, ostensibly high quality content. Although you could argue that there's a lot of content that isn't high quality. And they leverage social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to get the word out. But email is still a great distribution vehicle to get content into people's hands. What are the best practices about using email for content marketing distribution to make sure that people see your email, see the content that you've actually produced?

Jules Dan: I guess we could use the same principle that I use for a lot of my sales emails, and that's excitement, but not fulfillment, if that makes sense. You wanna get people you wanna tease people. You wanna get them hot and heavy and excited. A great way to do these are using John Carlton's bullets. If you haven't checked that out, he teaches how to write bullets. He's a really good copywriter, and it just absolutely tases the crap out of someone who's interested in that content. And, man, like, I see some long emails. If you're just sending someone to a blog post or a video or or something that that's a piece of content, it's just a tease. The email shouldn't be longer than, say, a hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty words. Right. Maybe a little bit of a story how you discovered it, and then you leave a bit of a cliffhanger on the end, and that cliffhanger is click the link.

Mark Evans: Maybe you could talk a little bit about bullets. Like, is that just simply using bullets to break up copy to make it more accessible, user friendly? Because when I see a wall of text, in many cases, the first thing that I think I was, this is gonna be a lot of work. This is gonna take some effort, and I don't wanna work. I've got so much to do. I've only got so much time. Does Bullet sort of trick your mind into thinking that it's gonna be an easy read?

Jules Dan: Well, I like to think so. The Bullet is just supposed to be getting, like, getting you really excited to click the link. If the one thing I always try and avoid in my bullets is learn the top five because as soon as you say learn, it's like, oh, there's work involved. Right. And that's something I learned from my mentor. So if you can make, like, discover the hidden secrets, the secret tool to take away these little just action words and curiosity packed words that might help. I wish I had some examples in front of me to to tell your audience, Mark. But does that answer your question?

Mark Evans: It does. It does. And I think it comes down to the idea that email, like anything, has to be user friendly. It has to be accessible. And like any form of digital marketing, it really can't involve a lot of work because I always suggest that people are lazy and they don't wanna work. Mhmm. They want it to they wanna be spoon fed in many cases. One of the topics that I wanted to touch upon is the idea of personalization. One of my clients, Coherent Path, helps retailers create what they call content diets. Customers receive emails that feature content that is relevant and interesting, not only encourages you to buy more of what you've already purchased, but explore different categories. So I wanted to get your take on email marketing personalization because a lot of marketers, it's it's one and done. You blast it out to everybody or maybe you create a few variations, but I'm not so sure that there's a lot of sophistication when it comes to email marketing. Any thoughts about that?

Jules Dan: When you say personalization, that goes down into segmentation. Is that is that what you're asking or

Mark Evans: Exactly. The idea that the email that I get is gonna be different, maybe dramatically different from the email that you're gonna get because you have different interests than I do. You buy different things or download different things than I do.

Jules Dan: Well, so I'll give you my experience. I know there are some people who'd be like VP of marketing and they've got 10 different segmentations because they've got a huge company and they've lots of data. For me, I just work with clients who've got smallish list, one and a half to 3,000 people. But, usually, what I recommend is to have a buyer's list and a non buyer's list. And the reason why we do that is if you wanna test a little offer, it's it's better to test it to the buyers first than it is to I know we're talking about content marketing before. Yeah. I've always found that when you wanna test stuff, it's good to send it to the buyers, and that's as sophisticated as I get. I hope it I don't I know it didn't quite answer your your question mark, but if you're gonna have some kind of segmentation, you don't wanna get overwhelmed, I would start there.

Mark Evans: I think for small customers, for customers that haven't got extensive email list, that makes a lot of sense because you don't wanna slice and dice a relatively small database. It probably causes more work than it's worth and you probably don't get the results that you expect. Yeah. But I do believe that people are expecting email to be more personalized, to be more relevant, to be more about what their interests are. And that if you're just doing one email for a vast audience, that's not gonna work. It simply won't resonate.

Jules Dan: Can I counter you on that? Because the hard part is is is showing up, and some people are afraid to show up. I don't know why, but there's this fear of sending out more than one email a week or, god forbid, god forbid, two emails per week. And if if you can get to that stage first, one or two emails a week, sure. Like, let's explore segmentation and how we can optimize deliverability. But think the habit of showing up your audience knows on this day, Mark sends an email on Tuesdays and Fridays, then that's when you can get fancy with segmentation stuff. But if you wanna talk about segmentations, probably not the right person to to talk to. But if you wanna learn about emails that sell, let's ask about that.

Mark Evans: Okay. And it it it is interesting when you talk about multiple emails a week. Just from personal experience, for about four years, I sent an email out featuring curated content on Saturday mornings. I was quite proud of it. Look, I did all this reading. I'm sharing these Yeah. Creative links with you. The email did okay, but at some point in time, I decided that it had run its course. And I was talking with my business coach, and he was saying, well, you should send out emails every day of the week, five days a week. And I thought, wow. That's gonna be that's gonna be a big challenge. And I'm not so sure people wanna hear me five days a week. And in the end, we went back and forth a little bit, and I settled on three days a week. And much to my surprise, the reception has been really good. People are actually open to the idea of multiple emails for me as long as the content's relevant, as long as it's it's interesting. And to your earlier point, as long as it's not too long because they don't mind reading short snippets from the same person. But if it's too much work, they won't they won't open it and they won't read it.

Jules Dan: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I'm on three days a week as well. I think that's a good amount, and it all comes back to what you asked at the start, like, what's the best practices? And it's setting the agenda at the start. If you're sending one email a week and then you're like, hey. I read Ben settle sends out an email every single day. I'm gonna do that too. You're probably gonna get a lot of unsubscribe. So setting the agenda, getting into the habit, or if you are gonna be sending more emails, just let them know in advance. That's a good practice.

Mark Evans: What brands stand out to you as email marketing champions? Who's doing an amazing job with email? Now personally, I look at a a company like Grammarly that does email marketing really well. It's engaging, sometimes entertaining, interesting, and prescriptive. And along the way, they're trying to upsell you to Grammarly premium. Do you have any champions or companies that you look to when you're crafting emails that not only engage but sell as I

Jules Dan: have a few quite a few personal brands. I have one, like, brand where there's no face behind it. Which one would you like to hear?

Mark Evans: Let's talk about well, give me a couple of examples. Sort of one publicly facing and one that that maybe is behind the scenes.

Jules Dan: Okay. There's an Aussie company for toilet paper called Who Gives a Crap.

Mark Evans: Okay.

Jules Dan: And just the way they drip out content, the way they engage you to refill your toilet paper, they do it in a humorous way. Obviously, by the name who gives a crap, they've got some, you know, some lightheartedness to it. So I love using humor inside of emails where appropriate. Right. Especially in a follow-up when you're asking for a sale about toilet paper, like, I I think that's a perfect match. When it comes to personal brands, there's a few people who I'd really recommend you go and look at. So Ian Stanley, Dan Henry, Frank Kern, he's really good. Oh, I could get my whole Justin Goff. I've got I'm listing a whole bunch of writers, but they know how to write emails really well and suck you in with a good story.

Mark Evans: So what's the common denominator between all those those writers? What do they do well that makes their emails engaging, interesting, emails that you wanna read because they're always something good that they're gonna tell you.

Jules Dan: I won't lie and say that the the personal brand is a writing exactly like who gives a crap. Who gives a crap is very short to the point uses humor, but the personal brand is now I'm not actually a 100% sure if this applies to big brands, if they wanna include a personality behind it and they wanna get people invested in the the person behind the keyboard there, but that's what they do really well. They they let you into their life. They they they don't share too much, but they share enough that you're emotionally invested. They'll tell stories of what's going on in their life, and then they'll segue into something that's relevant in their offers, and then they'll show you a pitch. And it's not like a really hard sell. It's like, by the way, if you wanna check out what I just spoke about, here's a link. And they all do that very well. On top of that, if they use a subject line, they always give you a payoff towards the start. It's always linked to the email. It's not this clickbaity subject line you might see a lot with some companies. Having that pay off is right after they read the first few lines is really critical.

Mark Evans: Now you've hinted along the way about email marketing that encourages people to buy things. And I think a lot of marketers are focused on education and engagement. If I can tell a prospect or a customer about something new that we've developed or an event we're going to or an a new hire or something along those lines or interesting third party content that's seen as a focus. But what about driving sales? I mean, if we're gonna get down and dirty about this, you're really looking at email marketing as a conversion tool to somehow get people to do something, which in many cases is make a purchase. So what are some of the keys to making email marketing a revenue engine? What what should marketers be thinking of when they craft those email campaigns?

Jules Dan: It's a really common mistake, in my opinion, to as soon as someone signs up, to flood them with content. We're inundated with content, to be honest. So what I like to do with clients is that I like to pick out when I have a really deep dive conversation with them to figure out, you know, what's this person's day like? What are their struggles? What are their problems? Who's burnt them before? All these sort of questions that are going inside someone's head when they opt into someone's list, they're a bit wary that, oh, okay. What are they gonna sell me? Or, okay. Do I have to open this email? So I love picking out stories of people, of past customers who've been in their position that answer a specific objection in their head and walk them through, like, they're not alone. Like, they've been in their shoes. Like, the purse someone else has been in their shoes before, and the person on the other end of the email, person's doing the selling, is the guide. They're not the star of the show. They've just helped the other person out. Generally, what I do with my clients is it's a link to book a call. Scarcity urgency goes a long way. There's only so so many things you can do with booked calls, but one thing that you can do honestly and with with integrity is say, look. I've only got enough time on my calendar to do eight calls per month, so there's only about two per week. To avoid disappointment, click the link to to book a call. And that's that's a good starting point especially if you're in the b to b space.

Mark Evans: The other thing or one of the many things that marketers are obsessed with is newsletter subscriptions where we've got that sign up CTA everywhere and anywhere. We're begging for people to join our email data list. So I've got a couple of questions for you related to that. One is, how do you encourage people or what are the things that you need to do to make newsletter sign ups more appealing? And on the other side, there's a whole conversation going around about gated versus ungated content. The idea that whether I need to give you my email address to get content or whether I get it, no questions asked. Why don't you address the gated versus ungated issue first, and then we'll talk into how to drive subscriptions?

Jules Dan: Well, we completely can with your audience, know, list building is not my strength, but I have you know, I still do it. I still listen to people. And it was actually interesting. I had a guest on my show called Andrei Zikovich, and he was talking about content upgrades. And that goes back to your point where how much is gated and how much is ungated. And it was really interesting. He said when he was having these content upgrades where, you know, there was a pretty good blog post, it gave most of it. But if they wanted more, they had to give their email. And this was from, you know, keyword keyword research, SEO blog blog posts. And he was finding that the leads were really or the people on the list were just not engaged. They weren't interested on clicking the links. They weren't his audience. And I found that really interesting because so many people are are like, leads, leads, leads, build a list, build a list. But if if if they're not the right audience, they're not interested in what you have to say after, then it doesn't make a lot of sense. So what he did was after that guided content, he he asked them some questions. Just like a he made them jump through hoops on purpose. Saying like, what kind of industry are you in? What are your struggles with right now? And it was like a drop down thing. And if people didn't answer it, then they didn't go into his list. But he found when he filtered it, yeah, he got much, much more of a responsive list because of that.

Mark Evans: And then the related question is about email subscriptions. Everybody wants people to sign up for their newsletters and that's in some respects, that's a key metric for a lot of marketers, especially email marketers. Any thoughts about how to make new how do how do encourage people to sign up for a newsletter? Like, is it is it the CTA? Is it is it the sales copy? How do how do you make that happen?

Jules Dan: Number one, avoid calling it a newsletter because we've all heard we all know what we're in for for a newsletter. Right. It could be some negative emotion attached to it. You you just don't know what's going on in their day. So call it something. Call it your own thing. I haven't got one myself. I like to call it Jules as well, but I don't publicize that. Right. I don't call it well, I don't say, like, welcome to the list because it just sounds like they're part of a herd or something. But things that I like to do is going on podcasts and, you know, talking about a freebie and then not revealing everything about the freebie and then leaving it as a CTA. Or with when I'm on social media on LinkedIn, love I love doing this. It's where you tell a short story and that's related to a problem that you can solve for your customer. And then in the comments, you would have some little PS. Oh, by the way and always link it back to the story. By the way, if if you're finding that you can't if if you're finding you can't nail the right subject line, here's 50 more, here's a link below, something like that. And that leads to your landing page and your content. That was just an example I pulled out of my butt, but I think you guys get the picture.

Mark Evans: And then the flip side, what about unsubscribes? Personally, when somebody unsubscribes to my newsletter, it just it's just a little painful prick. It's like, oh my god, I disappointed somebody even though they probably got lots of reasons. Maybe their inboxes are overwhelming. How do you deter people from unsubscribing?

Jules Dan: I'm gonna challenge you on this one, Mark, because I I encourage people sometimes to unsubscribe. So at the start, especially for client emails, like I said at the start, like, set the expectations who this for, what they're struggling with, and, you know, there might be at some sort of part of the journey. So if there might be from intermediate to advanced, you'd say. If you're starting out in your journey, I don't wanna I don't wish to waste your time. Please unsubscribe here. But but like you, Mark, you know, sometimes I feel a bit cut that someone unsubscribed from my list, and I know exactly what you mean. Like, you put all this effort into content marketing and people are leaving. What did I do wrong? But the I know a good mindset shift that I heard from someone who's got a bigger list, encourage you to she encouraged me to think, goody, this person isn't the right fit. It means I don't have to waste my time anymore trying to convince you or trying to persuade you. Okay? You're not the right fit for me, and I'm okay with that. I guess there's two two sides to that unsubscribe question.

Mark Evans: Just for fun, have you read a good book recently, or is there a podcast that you're really excited about that you listen to all the time?

Jules Dan: Okay. So one book I'm reading one chapter at a time is called The 48 Laws of Power. It is a really good book. It has got so many stories in there that just engage you, and it it it gives you such a deep dive into the history of how different historical leaders have used, I don't know what you wanna call it, persuasion, manipulation, coercion to gain power. And it's not necessarily how to you you're not reading it to become evil, but it helps you understand power dynamics and how you can avoid getting sucked into other people's traps and know what's going on behind the scenes, so to speak. And I think it's been a really good book to read.

Mark Evans: I haven't read that book, but I will add it to my long reading list. Well, now that COVID's over, maybe I won't have as much time to read. Yeah. But final question, where can people learn about you and what you do?

Jules Dan: If you would love to learn a little bit more about me, go check out my podcast, Storytelling Secrets. I do one solo show per week where I document the journey. I I give you some results. I give you heaps of little tips along the way, and I also have one guest podcast per week.

Mark Evans: And as far as finding out what you do, LinkedIn, I guess, is the go to place for many of us these days?

Jules Dan: Yeah. LinkedIn, best place. I'm Jules Dan on LinkedIn. I'm not sure if your audience wants a freebie, but I I do have that on offer as well. If you just wanna check out the content the podcast or LinkedIn, that's fine.

Mark Evans: Jules, it's been a great pleasure to have you on the podcast. Although, I'm I'm sorry to say you weren't the first Australian on the podcast, but it's always good to to get different voices from different places. Thanks for being on the show.

Jules Dan: It's been an honor, and thank you so much for having me on the show, Mark.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co. I'll talk to you next time.