BBP 108: Getting Personal: Tailoring Your Email Automations with Bev Feldman

Shownotes:

In this episode of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast, host Liz Stapleton welcomes Bev Feldman, who shares her five-step framework for email automation. Feldman outlines 5 key pillars. She emphasizes the importance of testing and tracking email flows to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. The discussion provides practical tips for bloggers to streamline their email marketing strategies.

Synopsis

Today, we’re diving into the magical world of email automation with the expert herself, Bev Feldman. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by tags, segments, or the chaos of managing multiple email lists, you’re in the right place. 

Bev shares her five-step framework for mastering email automation, making it easier for you to engage your audience and grow your blog. Ready to turn that email mess into a well-oiled machine? Let’s get started!

Step 1: Organize Your Tags and Segments

The first pillar in Bev’s framework is all about organization. Think of your email list as a closet—if it’s cluttered, you’ll never find that perfect outfit. Start by evaluating your tags and segments. Are they effective? Can some be removed? If you’re using ConvertKit, this might also involve custom fields. For other platforms, consider groups or lists. The goal here is to streamline and tidy up your email database.

Step 2: Optimize Your Opt-In Flow

Next, Bev emphasizes the importance of your opt-in flow. What happens when someone signs up for your email list? To get a clear picture, sign up for your own freebies and see what your subscribers experience. Track these actions in your email marketing software to ensure that subscribers aren’t being bombarded with multiple automations. This step is crucial for providing a smooth and engaging user experience.

Step 3: Make Your Offers Clear

The third pillar is all about your offers. After someone grabs your freebie, what’s next? Bev suggests strategically placing opportunities to sell your products or services within your emails. It’s like setting up a trail of breadcrumbs that leads your audience to your offers without being too pushy. Remember, the key is to balance value and promotion.

Step 4: Onboard with Precision

Once a subscriber makes a purchase, what’s the next step? The onboarding process should be seamless. Ensure that your subscribers are tagged correctly to reflect their purchase and remove them from any promotional sequences they no longer need. This might involve multiple platforms like ConvertKit, Kajabi, or even scheduling tools like Acuity or Calendly. The aim is to provide the right information at the right time.

Step 5: Optimize and Improve

Finally, the last pillar is all about optimization. You’ve cleaned up your tags, perfected your opt-in flow, made your offers, and nailed your onboarding. Now, it’s time to take things to the next level. Look for opportunities to enhance what you’ve already set up. This could mean A/B testing your emails, tweaking your subject lines, or refining your call-to-actions. Optimization is an ongoing process, so keep iterating and improving.

Bottom Line

By organizing your tags, optimizing your opt-in flow, making clear offers, onboarding with precision, and continually optimizing, you can transform your email marketing from chaos to clarity. These steps not only enhance your subscriber experience but also pave the way for a more efficient and successful blogging journey.

https://youtu.be/Az56TVjqMQA

Tools and Resources Mentioned

• ConvertKit
• Gmail
• Kajabi
• Acuity
• Calendly

Related Content

• BBP 095: How to Use Tags in Email Marketing with Allea Grummert
• How to Create and Use Convertkit Email Templates To Save Time and Maximize Earnings

Transcript

[00:00:00].00] – Liz Stapleton

Welcome back to the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast, where we share tips, tricks, and frameworks to help you streamline your blogging journey. I’m your host, Liz Stapleton, and today we have Bev Feldman with us diving deep into the wonderful world of email automation.

[00:00:20].07] – Bev Feldman

I actually have a five-step framework. It’s a framework. It’s five pillars, five email automation pillars. And the first one happens to be organized, and that’s all things like tags, tags and segments. And in the case of Convert kit, also custom fields. If you’re using another email marketing software, it might be groups or lists. So start by going through that. That’s the first step. It’s like, what tags are you using? Where could you be using them better? Which ones can you possibly get rid of? So that would be the first step. The next step is the… The next pillar is the opt-in pillar, and that’s looking at what’s the flow when someone signs up for your email list? For example, when I’m testing things out for my clients, I will sign up for all the freebies that I can find. So I can see what’s going on as a subscriber? What’s actually happening? Then I can also track it in the back-end of ConvertKit. If someone, for example, signs up for multiple freebies and I see that they’re suddenly being pulled into a bunch of automations, that’s something we want to look at. And then the next step is offer.

[00:01:37].01] – Bev Feldman

So this is then looking through what happens, where are you giving opportunities to sell your things within your emails? If it’s, for example, someone signs up for your freebie, what happens next? When are you selling your things, basically? Sorry.

[00:01:58].01] – Liz Stapleton

I just want to add just a quick tip. If you I have a Gmail account, even if it’s the one linked to your thing, you can do… So for mine, it’s like hello@ elizabethstapleton.com. I do like, hello plus test1.

[00:02:09].07] – Bev Feldman

Yes.

[00:02:10].02] – Liz Stapleton

And I see what happens. And if it’s not what I expect, I’m like, Hello+test2. Test 17, which I get up there when I’m doing Summit stuff, guys, because I do a lot of testing, and stuff still sometimes I don’t catch it. Test one, two, three, four. So that you know what you did to make it work, versus if it’s not acting how you’re expecting. So I just like that is such a useful tip to be able to test things.

[00:02:40].05] – Bev Feldman

Yeah. And that’s exactly what I do when I sign up for my client’s opt-in. I’ll have one I’ll use a different email address for each opt-in so that in my inbox, I can track to see what emails are coming to each one. I’ll also use one email address where I sign up for all of them as well, because I want to track each thing individually as well as What happens if I sign up for a bunch of things at once?

[00:03:03].05] – Liz Stapleton

Yes. And then I just every once in a while, I go in and I delete the amount of test emails I have in my conversion account.

[00:03:09].24] – Bev Feldman

Yes, definitely want to do that.

[00:03:11].12] – Liz Stapleton

It should be a lot. But it’s great because then you can do things like if you want to send a broadcast, right. And no one’s in that, been tagged with who you want to send it to yet because a different broadcast, I always just be like, That one. And I have a segment of test, right. So there’s always something in there. So that just quick little tip there. Okay, so I’ll let you, sorry. Let you get back to once you go through testing what your next pillar is.

[00:03:41].21] – Bev Feldman

Yeah. So the offer is on the offer. That one is actually less related to automations and cleaning things up. But the next one is the onboard automation. So what happens if someone actually buys something? Are people, are subscribers being tagged properly to identify that they purchased that thing? If they’re in an automation that’s promoting it, are they being pulled out of that automation? So it’s basically making sure they get the information they need as well as being pulled out of anything else that wouldn’t make sense at that point. And then I’ll also add in this step that your emails might not actually necessarily be coming through ConvertKit. So I’ve worked with clients who use Kajabi and ConvertKit. So sometimes your onboarding emails happen through Kajabi or maybe If you’re the example of someone booking a call, those emails might be coming through acuity or calendly. As long as that there’s some way that you’re onboarding your clients or people who book calls and that they’re being identified within Convert kit. That’s the most… Those are the two most important things. And then the last step is actually the last pillar is optimize. So that’s next level.

[00:04:55].10] – Bev Feldman

You’ve cleaned everything up. Where are opportunities to really improve on the things that you already have set up?

[00:05:02].12] – Liz Stapleton

All right. A big thank you to all our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and or share it with all your blogging buddies. Until next time, keep thriving and breaking through those blogging barriers. I’ll see you next time where we’re going to talk about how to make money your ally in your business.