How to Master Email Marketing with Mary Laske Bell

Discover how to unlock the true potential of email marketing with my guest, Mary Laske Bell, a dedicated professional who transitioned from a marketing and sales role in a boutique fitness franchise to becoming a email marketing expert. 

Mary's remarkable story of resilience, overcoming professional setbacks, and navigating the challenges of COVID to find her passion for copywriting is truly inspiring. She shares her journey and emphasizes the importance of balancing creativity with technical skills to thrive in the world of email marketing.

In this episode, we'll dive into 

• Practical strategies for small business owners looking to grow their email lists effectively through segmentation
• Engage your audience by understanding their preferences for lead magnets and content types, and 
• How allowing subscribers to self-segment can enhance engagement and retention
• How to vary the frequency and content of your emails based on client history and engagement
• The importance of tracking metrics like open rates and click rates to refine your strategy
• Creating more personalized and relevant email content

This segment offers invaluable insights for optimizing your email marketing efforts that you won't want to miss! 

Show notes: https://myweeklymarketing.com/60 

Chapters

• 0:02 The Power of Email Marketing
• 16:42 Growing Email Lists Through Segmentation
• 25:34 Email Marketing Strategies and Metrics
• 40:28 Email Marketing Best Practices

Transcript

Janice Hostager: 0:02

There are rumors all the time that email marketing is dead, but the research disagrees with that. Here are a few stats for you. In 2024, we expect to see an average of over 361 billion emails sent per day. Email marketing revenue worldwide is expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027. Four out of five marketers say that they would rather give up social media marketing than email marketing, and I would agree with that. By the way and this one surprised me Millennials and Gen Xers rely on email more than any other generation, at 98%. So doing email marketing well is something that will clearly benefit your business and my guest today, mary Lasky Bell, specializes in email marketing and has seen remarkable growth for her clients, and she offers some great tips about email marketing that you're not going to want to miss. So grab a pen and paper if you're not driving, of course and have a listen. Here's my conversation with Mary. Good morning, mary, thanks so much for joining me today.

Mary Laske Bell: 1:16

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat with you.

Janice Hostager: 1:19

So tell me what is your story. How did you arrive at this place?

Mary Laske Bell: 1:26

Yeah, so it's always like how far back do I go? But I guess I would start at in my last J-O-B. I was working in marketing and sales for a boutique fitness franchise and I was a fitness coach as well, and I got pregnant with my first daughter and I went on maternity leave and I got demoted from that job while I was on maternity leave. So I decided you know it's not, but okay you know I was not interested in a fight.

Mary Laske Bell: 2:05

I knew that they would push back and find a way to make it. You know, I just wasn't up for the fight. I realized that if that was the environment and the situation, I'm not going to come back and I could just have my first kid you know, experience motherhood for the first time, which is a lot and kind of figure my way out and come back to work when I was ready. But COVID sped things up because my husband's job involves live events and travel and all of that shut down with COVID. So we went from like a double six-figure healthy income household to one still healthy six-figure household income and I could get back in there when I was ready to nothing and having to figure it out. So I was one of those people Googling how can I make money from home? I had my daughter. Even the daycares around here were closed. So it was like what can I do? I have so many skills, I have a lot of experience. What could I do from home and still be able to take care of her but get us through this tough time?

Mary Laske Bell: 3:31

And I found a website that helps source flexible jobs. So, whether it's remote work or flexible hours or both, and they like vet all of the companies looking to hire. So I thought, okay, this is trustworthy. I think I paid 50 bucks to have a membership to the site for a year. I found a job within a month being like the general assistant to a functional medicine doctor in Maryland a functional medicine doctor in Maryland and that's when I first found out that there was this whole online world making money online. We built a health program together online for people. You know that people could join from all over the country and it just opened my eyes to what was out there and I fell in love with copywriting and email marketing in particular and just never looked back. I invested all my skills there and that's where I am today.

Janice Hostager: 4:34

That is so cool and perfect timing in that during COVID, people really did turn to online courses and use that opportunity, I think, a lot to learn. So in a way it was maybe meant to be, you know it sounds like and you know the opportunity to stay home, yeah, and right, and I was.

Mary Laske Bell: 4:54

I came from the fitness industry and a lot of fitness professionals turned to online offers. But being in a, in a franchise model, that's not possible. So the job that I did have well, probably would have cut back or made layoffs or something. I I always have this. You know people always say like in hindsight, blah, blah, blah, but I actually got to see what happened to the person who took my place she got let go. So I always have this beautiful piece that if I had stayed and gone back to a demoted position in a place where I wasn't respected or appreciated and still worked my butt off and hustled and, you know, was there all hours of the day I would have lost my job anyway and I would have lost all that time with her. So the whole thing was just worked out in my favor for sure.

Janice Hostager: 6:02

Oh, that's awesome. So how did you now? You specialize mostly in email favor for sure. Oh, that's that's awesome. So how did you now? You specialize mostly in email marketing right now. So how did you move? I know you said you fell in love with copywriting, but how did you move into email marketing as a specialty?

Mary Laske Bell: 6:19

Yeah. So I kind of dabbled in, you know, the tech side. So writing copy and sending it to a client in a Google Doc, you know that's kind of the old way to do things. I found that a lot of my clients didn't want to handle the tech themselves, so they wanted a copywriter who could not just write the emails but plug them in, schedule them out, send them and do all of that so that they could be more hands off. And I found a mentor who was actually teaching that skill and I invested in him. He's been my mentor for about two and a half years now and I just never looked back. So I got really good at the tech side. I also enjoy that balance of, you know, right brain, left brain, having the logic and the tech side but also having the creative and the writing side. That really like fulfills both of my needs. So yeah it just. It just ended up being a good fit for all of those reasons.

Janice Hostager: 7:23

And both of those sides of your brain are really necessary for growing a business too. I mean, you certainly have to understand the tech side of things if you're going to just roll up your sleeves and figure things out and so much of small business is like that. But also because you have to be creative, you have to think outside the box. There's a lot of focus on detail and then backing way up and looking at the big picture of things, so it really does exercise your whole brain, I think, when you're in business on your own for sure.

Mary Laske Bell: 7:57

Yeah, absolutely.

Janice Hostager: 7:59

What are a few of the things that business owners are unaware of? That will land their emails in the spam folder.

Mary Laske Bell: 8:08

Oh, that's a great question. So I find that usually if clients come to me and their emails are going to spam, it's typically one of two issues that they're facing. Either it's very technical, and I don't know how familiar you are with it, but like their DNS records aren't set up correctly. So that could be one issue. And then the other side is more strategy related, and it's usually that they aren't properly segmenting their list and they're just blasting people whether they've opened emails or not, whether they're interested or not, whether they are old email addresses that nobody even monitors anymore or not.

Mary Laske Bell: 8:52

So it's usually a strategy thing. You know, if the DNS records are set up correctly, it's usually a strategy thing. And we have to come in and like resegment the list and rebuild the, because your domain reputation can get damaged following a poor strategy like that. So in a lot of cases it's strategy and rebuilding. It becomes this dance of like a little bit of strategy, a little bit of tech, little bit of creativity, good copywriting, you know all that good stuff little bit of creativity, good copywriting, you know all that good stuff.

Janice Hostager: 9:27

So if you have an existing list, do you clean out your list kind of as you go, or do you?

Mary Laske Bell: 9:39

how important is it to?

Janice Hostager: 9:41

keep a clean list. Of course it is important yeah.

Mary Laske Bell: 9:57

So how do you go about doing that, or how would you recommend that other people do that? Is that something you do like once or twice a year? Or do youBounce just to see if there's any old email addresses? Like I said, that nobody's monitoring anymore because those can turn into what we call spam traps? Yeah, and you know, if you're sending emails to those email addresses you get flagged as spam because the watchers out there know that those aren't real email addresses anymore. So part of it is you know you could download your list, run it through something like Never Bounce and see if it needs cleaned and if you need to get rid of some of those old contacts. Once you've done that and you have a pretty cleaned up list, then it becomes well, how long has it been since they've engaged with your emails?

Mary Laske Bell: 10:47

And so for a lot of our clients we're setting up engagement tagging and segmenting by engagement periods and usually sending most of the bulk of the emails to a super engaged or a relatively engaged segment and every once in a while, trying to re-engage some of the older contacts.

Mary Laske Bell: 11:10

And you can do that through a one-off campaign every once in a while, or you can set up a drip or an automation and have it run automatically in the background. If somebody hasn't opened in 60 days, maybe the automation drips out an email, and if it goes to 90 days maybe they get another one or a series of a couple. And all of that is just kind of monitoring. You still have to pay attention to how many people are ending up in there. What are the open rates and engagement rates inside that automation, because you don't want to set up an automation. That's going to hurt deliverability either. So it's kind of like you got to figure out what your sunset policy is like how long a contact isn't engaged before you call them disengaged, and kind of find the sweet spot. You don't want it to go too long, but you know, it's just about it's a little bit of art and science mixed together, I guess.

Janice Hostager: 12:12

Yeah, for sure. How can a an engagement campaign hurt your deliverability?

Mary Laske Bell: 12:20

Well, what I, when I what I usually see, is that people will have, you know, I mean, and list sizes vary, but let's say they have 10,000 contacts who haven't engaged in a while. You don't want to just send those 10,000 contacts a campaign to re-engage them if you only have you know, 20,000 people on your list, because with that one time you know re-engagement campaign you're going to get a very low open rate. We already know that, right, um? So I would break it up or put it in an automation where it drips out slower, so that you don't send this big, you know an email to a big segment that you know is not going to open. But again, it's not like, it's not like a black and white rule.

Mary Laske Bell: 13:17

I have one client who the list is fairly small. We have like 2000 people on the list. The list is fairly small, we have like 2000 people on the list, and so every once in a while when we're reengaging, um, we're maybe sending to 2,500 instead of the 1800 who are super engaged, or something like that, and in that case I lump the disengaged in with the engaged and send one email to everybody, because then I know I'm going to get good engagement from my regular people who open all the time, and we're just going to add in this group who hasn't opened in a while or hasn't even been sent anything in a while, so that it doesn't hurt our engagement rates too much. So there's kind of there isn't like a hard and set rule.

Mary Laske Bell: 14:01

So there's kind of there isn't like a hard and set rule there's a little bit of playing that you have to understand and understand what the risks are. You know I've taken some risks and got spam complaints and then we had to dial it back and pull way back and start sending to like a seven or 14 day segment to build back up again. So you know it's. You got to know what you're doing and you got to know how to like course correct if you go too far.

Janice Hostager: 14:30

Right, right. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't understand that if you're sending out emails and it's just not resonating with people, if you're not segmenting it correctly, that the email service provider will send you to fewer inboxes because they think your customer is not engaged or interested. Right, but I love what you said about sending it to everybody and getting an engagement. One thing that I have done for my own business and for clients is just kind of set up a regular. If it's been 90 days, they get an email and then we wait another like 15 or 20 or 30 days, depending on the customer. They get another email and they get an opportunity for a download. So we want them to also engage. Do you think that's a good way of doing it? Because it's never occurred to me before that that could actually hurt me. I thought it was helping.

Mary Laske Bell: 15:24

Yeah, no, I love that approach, and especially if you're giving them something that's either super click worthy- or something that's going to get a reply, and then, of course, you want to reply back to that email, because that, you know, appears to be more of a communication email as opposed to a good strategy. I had one client where even the drip was too fast and too many people who they had like a dead list of probably 40,000 people, and they were trying to put them through really slowly, but it was still too much too fast, so we had to slow that way down too. So it yeah, it's typically not a problem, but if you've got a big list with a big disengaged segment, they got to be a little more strategic.

Mary Laske Bell: 16:28

But yeah, for a typical sunset policy like a 60, 90, 180 day re-engagement, is perfect.

Janice Hostager: 16:37

Okay, good to know. Yeah, so switching it up a bit. So how can small business owners grow their email list organically? So it used to be when I first started doing this whole thing that all I had to do was post on social media, but of course, engagement in social media was way higher back then that I had a freebie and people would flock to it because it was relevant to them and I just grew my list. Now it's gotten so much harder. I think people are expecting more from lead magnets they're not probably getting. I have found that I am not getting the engagement that I used to get with my own lead magnets or with my clients, and so is there a way that you have found that people can grow their email list organically a little easier than others?

Mary Laske Bell: 17:34

Yeah, I think part of it, too, comes from asking the audience that you currently have what they want from you. So, whether that's topic, right, I have a client right now who's going to put together an ebook to help grow her list, and one of her tasks that I've given her is ask your social media followers, ask your audience, whose eyes you already have. You know, hey, I'm going to write an ebook. Which topic would you be most interested in? Right, so, letting them kind of guide the topic. It could also be the deliverable that you ask about. You know, hey, I want to share some info on this challenge or problem or outcome that I've helped my clients get.

Mary Laske Bell: 18:20

Would you want to see, like, would you attend a workshop? Would you want to see it in an ebook? Would you want a checklist? Like asking them what type of deliverable could be really helpful, too, and you could do a combination, right, you could test different things. So could you turn a certain topic that your audience is interested in into a workshop, a PDF, an ebook, and see what bites? Right, so there's a little bit of creativity there too, and it's it's not just like one thing works, go run with it. Your audience is going to help dictate what's going to work for you Right.

Janice Hostager: 19:01

Absolutely. I love that because they do. They do have opinions and they do have struggles and it really is all about the audience, right, it's really all about what they are looking for and what will help them and what they're struggling with. Yeah, absolutely so. You talked a lot about segmentation, so what are some effective ways to segment an email list and why is segmentation really that important, do you think?

Mary Laske Bell: 19:25

Yeah. So segmentation is super important because it allows you to send more relevant emails to specific people on your list. You know like I often recommend to my clients that we send a daily email, and people who aren't currently sending a daily email are like whoa, what, like? What am I going to send every single day? But it's not even necessarily that everybody on your list is getting the same email every day. When you properly segment, you can send an email to this specific segment that you know is going to be really interested in that piece of content or that offer or whatever that video, everything. You could send that to that group on a Monday and then on Tuesday you could focus on a different segment and have a really detailed or not detailed, but just really relevant email for that group of your list, right? So some people might get a daily email if they're in all these different segments. Some people might get one a week. That's another thing you could do is ask them how often they want to hear from you.

Mary Laske Bell: 20:37

You know, you could let them sort of self-segment into yes, I want to get all of your emails. Or, hey, I'd rather get your Friday summary or newsletter style. You could let your list self-segment into different topics. So this is great, especially for coaches, who maybe have who coach on. You know a couple different areas or have a couple different audiences right, you could let the list self-segment into hey, are you a freelancer? Are you a business owner? Are you an agency owner? Are you a coach?

Mary Laske Bell: 21:19

Pick which one, and then I'll make sure that you get the emails that are targeted towards coaches or freelancers, right? So agency owners aren't getting these emails about coaching, right, right, right, yeah, so there's. We could. I could go on and on. There's so many fun things you can do with segmentation, but that's that's what it's really about is making it a custom journey and experience for the people on the other side, and so, whether it's what they're interested in or behavior like what they've clicked on before, then you know, oh, that group is really interested in this thing. So anytime I'm sending an email about this, I want to make sure that those people get it in particular. It just makes it more relevant. They're happier to be on your list. They engage more, which is good for deliverability. Like it all comes full circle.

Janice Hostager: 22:17

Right, yeah, and really it's all about personalization, right, that making sure that what your subscriber receives is relevant for them and it's personalized to them. But to my listeners right now, I can kind of imagine them saying like, oh, this sounds really time consuming, but it doesn't have to be right, so we can. You can send out it even in your welcome email sequence. So when they first subscribe and you send out a drip series of several emails, you really can just have them click in there, right, and have them self segment yeah.

Mary Laske Bell: 22:54

Yeah, and I even a lot of times when we're building a welcome series for a client, we let them pick their journey that they want to go on Like. You're new to the list. Thanks for being here. I have a couple different topics that might interest you. Pick the one that is most interesting and I'll shoot you some emails about that right. So if you have different offers or if you serve different audiences, that's a great way to retain new subscribers right, because that's a big issue people have too is they may get a lot of subscribers but they unsubscribe after they get their freebie right or shortly after they join the list. So you can keep them on longer, which gives you more time to nurture them and convert them into buyers if you actually let them select their own journey and what they get to learn from you.

Janice Hostager: 23:49

And we should add too if somebody does unsubscribe after getting the freebie and it definitely happens quite a bit Then it's probably not the right customer for you. If your freebie is aligned to what you are selling and the work that you do and they're not interested anymore, then they're not your people and you shouldn't fret about. I mean, it's so hard to watch people unsubscribe, but it is just the reality of life, you know.

Janice Hostager: 24:14

And we don't want people on our list because it does clog up the system, so to speak. Right, so it's just not like you don't want to have people that don't want to be there. It's also that it affects your deliverability and your open rate and your click-through rate and all that.

Mary Laske Bell: 24:30

Yeah, yeah, and we've. Even on the agency side, we have an internal marketing report where we capture every statistic you can think of on every single send, and so we are capturing unsubscribes on every send. But when we share summary and results with our clients, we just show them net growth month after month because they don't need to know. You know, like you're saying, it doesn't feel good, like, oh, people are unsubscribing, they don't like me, so we don't need to attach ourselves to that. We just want to make sure that we have positive net growth.

Janice Hostager: 25:07

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, now, you mentioned emailing every day. Now, that's not the norm, it's not right for everybody, right, cause I can, yeah, yeah.

Mary Laske Bell: 25:34

We send a daily email for almost all of our clients.

Mary Laske Bell: 25:37

We do Okay, we do yeah, but you know, again, it varies. We have some clients who either they've never emailed before or, in a lot of cases, they had the initial funnel set up so they would be blasting ads, building this huge list. They would go through like a two-week, 30 day funnel and then drop off. They weren't sending any daily campaigns. So we don't necessarily want to re-engage a list like that and blast them every single day, right? So sometimes we'll start with like three a week. I find that less than three a week you lose relevance in the inbox unless there's some kind of like really juicy newsletter you know once a week that they really want to get and if that's converting, right, because that's the goal here is to nurture and get buyers right. We're not just investing in this time and money to share information, like we. The goal is to, you know, gain customers. So, yeah, I find that more emails equals more sales, and so that's our philosophy.

Janice Hostager: 27:01

Love it. And I should also add that you do this for clients, so they're not trying to do everything on their own, they're not juggling all the things, trying to do everything on their own Right. So that makes a difference too, and so would you say like a minimum of weekly or minimum of twice a week, three times a week.

Mary Laske Bell: 27:22

I would say minimum three times a week. Yeah, okay.

Janice Hostager: 27:25

Okay, I don't have to try that.

Mary Laske Bell: 27:28

You know, it doesn't have to be so overwhelming. I think a lot of people get nervous about well, I don't have enough to say or what would I send. But if you just think about it in different categories, right, you could always tell a story. You could always share a testimonial or social proof or a client win. You could always talk about something current events or relevant that's happening in the world today that relates to what you're offering. You could always share an unknown fact or a weird curiosity-based email, right? So those are different types of emails. And then you have, like, your content pillars.

Mary Laske Bell: 28:13

So if you're a coach, maybe you touch on mindset and business tactics and networking, maybe you have these different topics that then could overlap and create a grid with those types of emails. So for just mindset alone, you could send a testimonial email on mindset. You could send a curiosity-based email on mindset. You could send a current event email based on mindset. So then you end up with unlimited email ideas and angles. If you just keep remembering that I've got this grid that I can follow, I can change the topic, I can change the type of email and still be giving them what they want to see.

Janice Hostager: 29:03

To just a little bit, just to have a touch base to keep your business top of mind.

Mary Laske Bell: 29:08

Yeah, and then we'll often send like maybe once a month, send sort of like an ask me anything email, so like, hey, you know, we haven't checked in in a while. I'm going to be creating some new content. I'd love your input. What are you struggling with this week, then? That's great for deliverability, because we're going to get a bunch of replies. It's great for market research, because we get to hear in their own words what they're struggling with. It can feed into our other channels, like we could create social media content, we could create YouTube videos, we could create workshops based on those things and it feeds our email marketing. Now we know, okay, we're going to write emails on this topic and this topic and this topic. So that's a great little trick to do every once in a while to love it.

Mary Laske Bell: 30:00

Love it.

Janice Hostager: 30:00

Yeah, so you mentioned metrics earlier. Is there specific metrics? Now you track a lot of them. So, in terms of like a minimum that solopreneur should be tracking, which which numbers do you think they should pay attention to and how often should they check them?

Mary Laske Bell: 30:19

yeah. So um, open rates used to be super important and then, with apple updates and privacy policies and everything that's happened, they're not as trustworthy or different esps handle them differently. So it depends on which platform you're on to how accurate those stats are. But regardless of how accurate it is, you'll see a trend right. So even if I'm tracking open rates, if I consistently and on average have like a 30% open rate and then I shoot an email off and it gets 20 or 15, that signifies a problem to me. Either the content wasn't good or the email went to the promotions folder or if it's super low, perhaps it went to spam.

Mary Laske Bell: 31:16

So it's more like trends that I'm watching there. Click rate is also super important. Of course we have to be sending them click-worthy stuff to monitor that. But same kind of thing. It's more.

Mary Laske Bell: 31:30

I'm looking at trends over time and if there's a particular email that had super high click rate now I know that's really key for my audience had super high click rate, now I know that's really key for my audience. And same thing I talked about with replies that can feed my ad strategy, that can feed my YouTube strategy, that can feed my social media strategy, whatever that clicky thing was that they wanted, we're going to put it everywhere now because we know that our audience is interested in that. Same thing with super low like either the copy wasn't good, we didn't make it curious enough or exciting enough to click on it, or they just weren't interested in the content we were sharing for them to click on. So you have to kind of interpret that with caution of like okay, it was a bad copy, or do they not want that kind of information and what else?

Mary Laske Bell: 32:26

You know, of course I'm also monitoring, like Google Postmaster Tools, making sure that our spam complaints are staying low, and you can sometimes see that on the ESP side too. You know how many people are complaining on spam, but Google will capture ones that even the ESP doesn't capture. So I'm looking there too. But yeah, those are the things that I'm most interested in. If I was to tell somebody who was doing it themselves, and if I was to tell somebody who was doing it themselves, I would say look at open rate trends and click rate trends, even replies, you know if you can capture that.

Janice Hostager: 33:06

Yeah, yeah, that's good. In the email, is subject line right? Because if it doesn't have a compelling subject line or even a compelling first line of the email, it's not going to get read right. So, do you have some tips that you use for crafting a real compelling subject line that helps your open rates?

Mary Laske Bell: 33:44

your open rates, I think. So there's a couple tricks I've used, and one of them I learned from one of my marketing mentors, and that was that you kind of have you could have a different audience depending on your list. So some audiences are more interested in why things are the way they are, so why subject lines are really good. You know why your mindset is in the trash this week. You know, like why they want the why. Others are more motivated by the how. They want to know how something works, not why it's happening. So how subject lines will do really good for that. That's even a good way to test whether you have a why list or a how list. You could send the same email but do a split test on the subject line and do one subject line that is how related and one that's why related, just to get a sense. For who am I actually talking to? Do they want more information on why things are happening or how to fix them or how to get past them? That can tell you a lot and, again you know, can then ripple out to all of your other channels and and marketing efforts. Right, um, so that, I think, has been a fun one.

Mary Laske Bell: 35:02

Same marketing coach also taught me and I've played with this a little bit to sending inspirational type emails at night and educational type emails in the morning, so inspirational at night. We're going to send them to bed with these really positive thoughts about us and what we've just shared with them and we've inspired them, and now they're going to snuggle off to sleep with these nice, happy, positive thoughts about us. They're not really ready to learn something before bed, right, but in the morning, at the start of their day, they're ready to learn. Their brain has had rest, they're ready to be educated and so, especially if you start, if you are doing daily emails or even twice daily emails, and you're inspiring them at night, and they're going to bed sleeping thinking of you, and that they wake up and you teach them something and then offer them to buy something, they're more likely to do it. So that I found was yeah that's been really cool.

Mary Laske Bell: 36:05

That was Alen Sultanic who taught me that, but we were talking about subject lines. I kind of went off on a tangent Well, no, no, I mean it's certainly related.

Janice Hostager: 36:16

Everything is related in this. But yeah, I love that idea.

Mary Laske Bell: 36:19

But yeah, I think the how, how, why is really cool to play with and see, like, what type of audience you have. I've also used one of my best performing subject lines ever was just Hormozy. And so it was when Alex Hormozy just done his, what was the latest book? 100 million or no? Which was the new one? 100 million dollar leads. Okay, were you aware of the big launch he did for that? I was not, but he did a huge like webinar style with live hundreds of faces on Zoom behind him and he launched his book and he gave everything away for free. So it was like it really created a ripple in the industry where everybody was like, oh, we got to do Hormozy style, give everything away for free, and then they become customers later, blah, blah, blah.

Mary Laske Bell: 37:21

But his name was a huge buzz at that time and so one of my subject lines for my clients who's a mindset coach so nothing about marketing in particular or anything like that, just the subject line Hormozy. Because I knew everybody was talkingosi, because I knew everybody was talking about it. I knew everybody had an opinion, I knew everybody would want to open that and it was one of the highest engaging emails we've ever sent. So paying attention to what your audience is paying attention to, right. So what are they seeing in the news or on social media? What trends are they following or loving or hating? And you can create like a one word subject line that you know is going to get their attention, because they're like oh, either I want to know her opinion on that or I have an opinion on that. I want to know if we match, you know.

Janice Hostager: 38:15

Right, right, yeah, I mean it really is powerful to really know your audience. If you don't really know your audience, then you're really at a disadvantage. So I always start there with before I do any other type of marketing. It's just really get really familiar with what their likes are, their dislikes to a point. I mean obviously you can't get to know them that well, but you can certainly get to know them well enough where you can talk to them as though they're one person when you're writing your emails or when you're thinking of content for your emails.

Mary Laske Bell: 38:50

I love that Absolutely. The last thing I'll say for subject lines too, because I think it's a good tip is a lot of times a question will make a good subject line and not always a question about you, but you say it in first person as if they're. If they read it out loud, it's about them.

Janice Hostager: 39:10

Right.

Mary Laske Bell: 39:11

So I also have a breathwork and business strategies business. I also have a breathwork and business strategies business. And so I just sent or have an email going out to my list about the nostrils and like clogged nostrils. So rather than asking, do you have a clogged nostril? It's do I have a clogged nostril, right? Because then when they read it, they're reading it as me, not you, right? Yeah, so that's another little sneaky hack. I've used Super interesting.

Janice Hostager: 39:44

Well, I have learned a lot this morning, so I really appreciate the fact that you shared your wisdom with us. Where can people learn more about you?

Mary Laske Bell: 39:53

Sure, so my website is the busy bell and that has an E at the endcom, and then I'm on social media everywhere as my name there, Mary Laske Bell. I was just say if you follow me or friend request me, shoot me a DM too, and let me know that you saw me on Janice's podcast, because I don't always know where people are coming from and it gets a little overwhelming. So if you just shoot me a message too, then we'll connect faster.

Janice Hostager: 40:20

That would be great. And then, of course, I'll share all the links that we talked about today, too, in the show notes for today. Thank you so much, mary. So what'd you think? Did you learn anything new about email marketing? I know I was really surprised that she recommended emailing her list daily, and I want you to keep in mind that she works with larger companies who have the bandwidth to handle doing this. So if you're just starting out, don't set yourself up for doing more than you can handle, and, of course, let your ideal customer enlighten you as to how often they want to hear from you. For links and information about anything we talked about today visit the the shownotes at myweeklymarketingcom./60 Thanks so much for joining me today. I hope to see you back next time. Until then, take care. Bye for now.