by Alex Cavallari from The 7 Group and Johnny Swift from Impact Communications. And we are back for session number two in our masterclass on social media and email strategies. We call them push strategies because it's a way to push out your message to the right people at the right time. So Alex, you're going to be driving the slides. Would you go to the next slide, please? And so we're looking forward to continuing this series, concluding this particular masterclass with our next session. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a bit. But don't forget that we have one more masterclass coming up later this year. And our guest coach for that one will be Greta Chang. But there is a little bit more that I want to share with you. We've also added two more guest coaches. I was hearing a little bit of background noise. I think we're good now. But we're adding two more guest coaches to that last masterclass. And their names are Jody Jacobson and Natasha Knox. So when we get ready to talk about the dates for that, you'll be seeing the names Jody and Natasha. And so we look forward to welcoming them for that last class. So Alex, let's look at the next slide. And this is just a reminder for what we're doing here from theory to practice. Let's move on quickly so we can get to the core of the program, the marketing trilogy playbook. So we start with the why, why you want to do something, and then we drill down into the how. So today we're focusing on the how, but we did a little bit of the how last time, focusing on social media. So today we kind of mixed it up, and we're going to have more on the email side of things with a lot of the why and the how on that. And then Johnny will also be adding his comments to Alex's comments about email marketing. All right, let's move on. So let's move past this slide. One more. One more. All right. So you all know me, Marie Swift Impact Communications. No need to spend any time on this slide. It's for reference only. And Johnny Swift, who has been with me as a co-host of these sessions, the playbook series, for a couple of years now. And then our special guest co-host today and presenter is Alex Cavallari, founder of The 7 Group. And you're going to learn more about how Alex thinks about email as a strategy for getting your content out in just a minute. So without further ado, let's move on. Alex, take it away. Awesome. Thank you, Marie. And thank you, everybody, for joining. I'm excited to be back, excited to talk through email marketing. And we appreciate you taking a lot of time out of your day. I know there's a lot going on within the market and more broadly around the country right now. So we appreciate people joining and chatting with us to learn more about email marketing and what you're doing and to help you guide you through what you're going to be doing from a marketing perspective for all your clients, as well as your prospects. So when it comes to email marketing, a big thing that we'd like to think about is where are we within the lifecycle of email marketing? We talked a lot about in the first session about social media and how you can leverage social media to build your brand and engage your audience and also stay top of mind. But email still matters after all these years, more than pretty much every channel. If you look at some of the stats here, 91% of US adults receive promotional emails from companies that they buy from. Email, from a conversion standpoint, because of where it sits in the funnel, is 40 times more effective than Facebook or any type of social media in terms of driving new conversion. And most professionals are using email marketing to drive customer acquisition, partially because it is lower in the funnel and also partially because it's the most intimate place we have to actually consume content. It's not out there in the public. It's behind our own accounts. We're able to view it in privacy. And a lot of that time, people are taking a little bit more time to consume email when they're engaging with email that they want to read on a regular basis. And when you think about the evolution of email and you think about kind of where we've gone from over the past 10 years, so originally you started with promotional emails back in the day where it would be a specific product or specific set of products. And that would just drive you to a bunch of links, or it would just be very product or promotional oriented. Then we got to this place where email would start to become a little bit more content oriented. And from a content perspective, you would still include a lot of the links out to things, and you would still include a lot of things as it relates to promotion, but you saw companies start to root it more in value add about media people wanted to consume or topics they wanted to talk about or read about. And what you've seen over the past two years, when you look at popular companies like Morning Brew or HubSpot and The Hustle, or even investment companies like Robinhood Snacks, you get to this place where companies are building massive platforms over email. They're building massive platforms as it relates to driving content through email marketing in order to drive deeper relationships as well as engage lists, prospects, and clients. And these companies have built multi-million dollar businesses purely from doing very strong email marketing. So it's proving that email is not only not dead, but it's proving that email is actually, when done the right way, one of the most viable, vibrant, usable channels that you can use and deploy from a marketing perspective. And from a seven group standpoint, our members are doubling down on it. Every member we have on our platform, the sevengroup.com, they're using email within their marketing at some point within the funnel, whether that's mid funnel and they're deploying newsletters to engage both prospects as well as clients or down funnel to really help nurture people who come into pipeline that they need to help educate on not only what they do, but the topics they can help educate them on, on a go forward basis. But when you think about email, the first thing to understand is where does email fit within the funnel? So if you think about the marketing funnel, and Johnny talked a little bit about this last time, at the top of the funnel, you have you going out to the public, you going out to the people who you may not know, who you're putting out content to an audience that you're hoping to attract into your practice. And that could be via your blogs, that could be via your videos that you're putting out, that could be via social media, that could be via search, that could be from COI partner events, whatever the case may be, essentially, your top of funnel is really focused on engaging those folks as it relates to driving them into your practice. Now, where email sits, it really sits mid funnel. So email is really that specifically that mid funnel channel, and that bottom funnel channel to start to engage those people who have now become known within your marketing funnel, those people where you've captured their names, you've captured their contact information, and you've also either engaged them from a prospect standpoint, or they may be a client. So where we see email fitting is really that mid funnel section, where you're able to engage those people who've come into your platform more specifically. Hey, Alex, if I can just amplify something you said there. So as you pointed out, you know, email is not good for getting people into the top of your funnel. But our first masterclass this year was on lead magnets that was all about collecting email addresses, social media, which we talked about last session is all about getting people into the top of your funnel. Once you get them in your funnel, email is the most effective for continuing to follow up with them and for dripping educational content on them over time, which eventually builds trust and authority and share of mind over time, and which leads to conversions. Completely agree. And one thing we'll talk a lot about is just staying active in the inbox, which is something we preach to our members all the time and making sure that your name, your email address is coming consistently across to your prospects, as well as your clients to when they can expect it. And we'll get into that in a little bit. So when it comes to email marketing, there's a lot of different types or buckets or ways you can think about email marketing. But generally, we like to think about email marketing in four core buckets. The reason why we break them out in core buckets is as a practice, whether you're a solo shop, or you have three to four members on your team, you have to think about how you're going to scale your content creation. And you have to think about how you're going to be able to do it in a manageable way without necessarily the resources of a massive firm that may have a marketing team within their business. And so what we like to think of is you have four types of emails, and we're going to dive deep into each of these four, specifically on the newsletter side, automated nurture prospects, inbounding pre-workflows, and outreach templates. So these are the four types of emails in our mind that you should be one, creating on a consistent basis, and then two, making sure that you have templates built out for each of these buckets or tranches or types of emails across the board. And we're going to get into specifics on these. Before we get into the specifics on the types of emails, we're going to talk about segmentation. So when it comes to email marketing, most people think about their email lists as just one big list. You have one big email list, whether it's 50 people, 300 people, 3,000 people, 90%, I would say, and that's not a real number, but my assumption is that most people are just thinking about their email list as a single email list that they're blasting out emails to on a regular basis. And they don't necessarily care if they're a client, if they're a prospect, but the key to good email is to segment your lists. The reason for that is three core reasons. First, people live in different parts of the funnel that are on your list. People could have signed up for that list last week. People could have signed up for that list and been receiving your emails for 16 months. People could have signed up for that list and been receiving your emails for six months. They could have been clients for 10 years. So really what you want to get to a place of is determining within your email database, what are the different segments that you have within your email database? And this allows you to not only help you send the right amount of email, but it also allows you to have better delivery rates and ROI. Basically what these email systems are doing is that if you have disengaged lists that can actually damage your deliverability from an email perspective. So email hygiene, email list hygiene is critical. Not only building your list organically, but also making sure that you're segmenting out these lists in a way that makes sense for the types of emails that you're sending. So when we're recommending how to segment your list as an advisor, we usually recommend five segments across the board. And granted, you may have three segments. You may have seven segments. I've worked with advisors who have 12 segments. So there's really, it needs to work for you and your practice. And if you use a certain CRM, you can essentially replace segments with tags. Certain CRMs or certain email systems use tag systems tagging instead of segmentation. But generally we like to think about it in these five areas. The first of which is having a client list built out, separated from your larger list. In case you need to do client communications, in case you have a client only newsletter, whatever the case may be, you want to make sure that your client list has a specific list that you can deploy one to many emails on, on a relevant and a timely basis. The second is new leads. And sometimes we see new leads and hot prospects bucketed together, but we view new leads of people who have signed up for your list in under three months. So essentially those are new leads who have been in your list for less than three months. And that could be its own list because they're going to get a lot of, they're going to get much different content than someone who's been in your list for six months, two years, three years, four years. Then we like to have a hot prospect list. So these are prospects who have been in your pipeline for a while. You've probably had three or four meetings with them. They might've fallen off in the process, but they're still engaged in your content. These are people who are very strong business opportunity, people where you might want to take the opportunity to educate on a specific topic, if it's timely, or if it's something that, you know, has been plaguing them and others within that hot prospect list. The fourth email list that you could segment out is your cold prospects. So these are people who've been in your pipeline for over six months and who've just gone cold. They haven't necessarily engaged in your emails. These are people who actually might delete from your database over time if they're not engaged with your content. But your cold prospect list to really carve them out to identify who are these folks that are in pipeline, but may not be that engaged. And then finally, your last list is really your COI list. These are people who you want to have partner webinars with, who you want to potentially give business updates to. So keeping these segments clean, even if you're sending one email to all of them, keeping these segments clean built in your database is going to allow you to be much more effective in email over the long term. Hey, Alex, can I add a couple other segments there? So something else I've seen advisors do is if you target a certain group of people and you present webinars to that group, or you attend events or conferences around that group, you can set up tags or segments around a specific conference or event where you collected some contacts that you're adding to your email. So you can send follow-ups to just those new contacts. Then maybe they'd also go into the new leads category, or you can put them in multiple different segments or tags. And then another good one is your lead magnet downloaders. Obviously, masterclass number one was all about lead magnets. And so I think it's good to keep track of how they came into your audience sometimes. And so you can tag them as a lead magnet downloader or something like that. Completely agree. And there's no perfect way to do your segmentation or your tagging. It's what works for your practice. It's what allows you to be flexible. It's what allows you to be nimble as it relates to what you're doing across the board. I want to jump in with a question. So I might be channeling my inner advisor. I'm not an advisor, but I work with a lot of them. And I'm betting some of the people on our call today are thinking, well, it's hard enough to create the content and to get the list built. Who's going to do this list hygiene? What's the best practice for that? Yeah. So essentially, if you have an external resource to help you do it, that's always a benefit, right? Whether they're doing it live with you on a screen share, or if you have a consultant that you can engage to help you think through segmentation, even thinking through it, getting you to a place where, so for example, we helped an advisor last month essentially rank their five-star prospects all the way down to their one-star prospects. So they got to a point where their one-star prospects, they can almost cleave out of their email system. So even having that sounding board of different firms or consultants that you can engage to help you think through the segmentation process, because you're segmentation may not fit into the five buckets we talked about. Additionally, a lot of these systems actually start to do it for you. You look at a lot of these smart email systems now, and they're starting to identify the disengaged contacts. They're starting to rank your more engaged contacts as it relates to the leads or the folks within your list who are opening those emails more regularly. So if you're using a third-party email provider, see if they offer that and see if they offer the ability to identify and segment and look at your higher engaged contacts. Like for example, ConvertKit, their email platform out there, they'll do a five-star to a one-star ranking. HubSpot will do a disengaged list. So there's a lot of these opportunities to not only use third parties or consultants, but also use the email systems, the smart email systems to be able to identify and cleave off the groups that may not be worth it to keep in your list. And I would add that if you do not have a resource or a consultant or a marketing person you can work with to do this, most advisors are going to be able to figure out how to do this yourself. It just takes a little bit of time, obviously, but maybe if you can spend a couple hours on a quarterly basis, just going through your audience and, you know, cleaning out the cold prospects who no longer engage, maybe re-evaluating your segments and your tags and ranking, as Alex was talking about here, a quarterly basis is a good time to do it and then doesn't take up too much of your time on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Yeah, the key, exactly, and the key to Johnny's point, the key to list segmentation is that you don't go six months or a year without cleaning it because at that point it's going to end up being a three-day project and you're going to just never do it because you're just going to keep pushing it off. So the more you can look at your email list when you're sending it out, paying attention to your performance data on your emails is so important to how you're thinking about your segmentation, your list hygiene, things like that. So now let's get into the types of emails. So before we talked about the types of emails that you can deploy, right, you have your newsletters, your automated prospect nurtures, your inbound inquiry flows, and then your outreach templates. These all serve a different purpose from an email marketing standpoint, and first we're going to go into newsletters, and Johnny's going to walk you actually through some examples of newsletters in a little bit, but before we get into that, what I want to talk through is just best practices around newsletters. Now, newsletters have been talked about ad nauseam for advisors forever, right? You're told every day that you need a newsletter, you're told all the time that you should have a newsletter specifically, but what makes a good newsletter? What makes a good newsletter in 2022 that it didn't in 2015, or that was different in 2015? And generally, we have nine best practices for any newsletter that's being created. Now, these nine best practices are things that we've seen work for us, as well as other advisors that we work with, so the key here is that you have to find what works for your practice, but I'll walk you through the specifics on the nine best practices. The first of which is, if you're building a newsletter for your practice, which is usually the first standard email type of email marketing that you're building as a business or as a practice, I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is, do you need a newsletter, right? You may not, and that's something that a lot of people don't realize is that staying in front of your clients from a traditional newsletter perspective may not make sense for your practice. So the key here from a newsletter standpoint is to survey your clients and ask the question. So one of the things that we see super valuable is that when you're building out your content strategy or your marketing strategy is before you do anything is to actually ask the question. Do they want to read emails from you? If so, how often? And if so, what type of content do they want to consume? Get those answers before you go to build because that will essentially shape your entire content strategy for you. The second best practice is to really figure out who it's going to. We've seen advisors do newsletters that are just for clients, and they crush it they have 75% open rates, they're getting read rates that are 70% plus. And it's a super highly engaged newsletter, which is great for their practice because it builds brand with your current clients and it makes your clients sounding boards and word of mouth for your practice as it relates to growth. So we've seen advisors who do client only newsletters, and then we see advisors who built a really healthy prospect list that are super engaged maybe they didn't convert for whatever reason, and maybe your newsletter needs to go out to both. So really figuring out who your newsletter is going to is very important, not only from a practice standpoint from a content perspective, but also just from an engagement standpoint if you're going if you're sending your newsletter to unengaged people, it's going to actually hurt your email deliverability versus help. The third best practice here is just making your newsletter actionable. So the biggest thing that we see that a lot of people mistake is that essentially they put a lot of information in there and they don't necessarily have actionable items that someone can take out of that newsletter or things they could think about or things that they could do as an individual investor. So making your newsletter actionable example on the right is five things to do for tax season during your tax season newsletter, making sure that you're in a place where if I'm going to leave reading that, that newsletter within my phone, what is going to be the one thing, the two things that I take from it that I can actually use in my day to day life. The fourth best practice here is just setting the right cadence, making it, getting to a place where you're setting the right cadence for your email, as it relates to what makes sense for your clients. If you're sending a weekly email, and you're seeing open rates, maybe your cadence is too aggressive. If you're sending a monthly email and your open rates are super high, then that can be something where you just want to keep that cadence, right? So figure out the right cadence by looking at the data. Keep your subject lines interesting, using questions, using data points, using personal stories, keep them short. Remember most people are opening email on their phone. So if your subject line is too long, it will truncate, and it actually won't show the whole subject line as we all know and we receive emails on our phone, keep your email subject line short. And then the sixth thing here, six and seven go together, but these are the two biggest things that I will say differentiates newsletters now versus good newsletters versus average newsletters. And that is keeping the content in the email and making it scannable. You read any newsletter that does well. And you look at Morning Brew, you look at the Hustle, you look at all these big newsletters, you open the email, yes they have links that drives you out to content, but for the most part, they're keeping the content in the email. You're reading it on your phone, you don't have to click out and go to a blog, go to a video. What that means is that you're removing friction from consumption. And that is so key. So if you're building a newsletter just keep the content in the email, you don't have to link out to anything. If you're writing a post, write it within the context of the email and have people read it right on their phone, but make it scannable. Break it up with bullets, break it up with lists, people loves to scan. If you look at any popular newsletter out there, they break things up in sections in bullets and keep things scannable. And then I know there's some questions that Marie and Johnny may want to go over that have just been submitted, but add visuals to the mix. Visuals do really, really well. You do have to be careful with visuals because now because of security purposes, they aren't preloading a lot of visuals on phones. So just making sure that you have your visuals built out, you're keeping them light, not heavy, not heavy data graphics within the context of the graphics that you're sharing. And then provide a couple of call to actions, right? You want to make your newsletters actionable. If you want someone to dive deeper into a video that you did or a webinar that you did, you can keep those call to actions in there. But limit them and keep a lot of the content within the context of the email as I mentioned before. Let's do jump in and take a couple of these questions because I know that's one of the key points of being here live today. So Mariah asks, what are some good ideas for newsletter email subject headings? So to me, there's a subject heading and there's a subject line. So I think anything that really appeals to the emotion and hooks the reader in to what's in it for them, that's where I would be thinking. And test a couple of different ways of approaching the subject line and the title of the newsletter. Now something that's nicely branded if you're going to do a newsletter. Name it something catchy that you can call so it's a thing. But think about the subject line with the question, as Alex, you said, and maybe try out a couple different theories to see where you get the most opens based on the subject line alone. Johnny, what would you add to that? For the subject line, you know, current events, hot topics are always good, asking a question, providing educational valuable content. You did say subject headings, so you meant different headings and subjects, different areas within the newsletter. We can talk about that more in a bit. Like Alex said, I'm going to show an example that has some different sections and headings within that. So we can talk more about that there as well. But Alex, any other ideas for subject lines? Yeah, so subject lines, so we like to call it, we like to call them hooks. But basically we have four types that we usually preach. And Marie hit on this, there's the question, you can ask a question in a subject line. So like on the example you'll see how can 2022 tax rules impact you, right? That's a question. The second is a data point. X percent of pre-retirees are doing this thing. Getting that data point in the subject line, because essentially that helps the person root themselves in that stat. And we root ourselves a lot in stats as it relates to like us as individuals. The third type is, as Johnny mentioned, current events. Mentioning a current event, you know, what does this mean for you in the subject line? And then the last thing is personal experience. My clients, not my clients, but I did this, I learned this by doing this. So from that perspective, it gets you to a place where one of those four hooks, and then to Marie's point, test it. How many people do not pay attention to their email data? Pay attention to your email data. Test one month sending a question versus the next month sending a data point and be deliberate. Literally map out for the next six months. And it can be simple. It's in a Google sheet, you know, you're just saying this month we're going to test a question. This month we're going to test a data point. This month we're going to test a question. This month we're going to test a data point. And then use that data to fuel what the next three years of your subject lines look like. And then I know there's a question on, and I'll just add on to that, keeping your subject line short. Yes, there is. So there's a question of like greater chance of not going to spam if you keep your subject line to five to seven words. Yes, accurate. Keep your subject lines short. Truncates on phones. In general, so just keep them short, the shorter, the better, particularly because most people are opening their emails on phone. All of us. Alex while you're talking here you see the question from Jacob about email deliverability will you expand on that and then Johnny would you pick a couple and just give some answers to kind of tick these off the list I think you can kind of collapse a couple of them. Yeah, so email deliverability. It's huge. As someone who has built an email, an email product, you have to be kind of obsessed with email deliverability. If you're building email product, like we are at seven group. You have to be very obsessed with it right you have to be constantly checking everything as it relates to like the IPS you're sending from to just testing emails in terms of deliverability so okay so here's the thing. Deliverability matters and there's a few things that go into deliverability. The first of which is essentially one, how you built the list. Right, if you've built the list is an opt in list, people subscribing to your newsletter, people signing up for a lead magnet or download a lead magnet then you sending them a confirmation that you're going to send them emails on a regular basis. Basically people raising their hand for your emails is going to be have a much better deliverability rate because those people have raised their hand versus if you bought or scrape the list so that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is that list hygiene like we talked about before is critical. Essentially, if you're sending emails that don't have high open rates and you're sending them from a specific email address or specific IP, and you're getting these low deliverability rate or these low engagement rates over and over and over again and you're getting just people who are just not opening, or they're not delivered or whatever the case may be because their emails are bouncing. That will impact your delivery rate so keeping your list hygiene, going through it quarterly as Johnny mentioned is so so so critical. The next thing I would say is that if you have people who are unsubscribed or unengaged that just making sure that you either have a logic to where like they're not being sent another email, or you're removing them from your list. That can get to a place where people then start to flag spam on you, which when you start to get into flag spam flags, that's when it gets very very very. I don't want to use the word like dangerous but like that's when it gets like very very tricky because when people start to label the spam flags, that's when you're starting to go pretty quickly to spam especially now because security filters are so so tight And then the last thing I would say is that make sure and this isn't kind of like a hidden thing because a lot of people just sign up for these email platforms and don't actually check this. Make sure your whatever email, email service provider you're using MailChimp, our platform HubSpot, any platform, whatever. Make sure your domain is connected into that platform. So, basically when email, and this is probably getting a little too nerdy but I'm gonna do it anyway. So when you when emails get delivered. They're, they're basically delivered via. If your, if your domain is not connected they're delivered via an alias. So like if you sign up for MailChimp and you don't, you don't add the MailChimp records to your domain records wherever you bought your domain in GoDaddy. It will send through like a via alias domain. Right. So basically how the email systems read that is they read that as, oh, this is coming from Alex Cavallari, but it says his email but it's actually coming from like this MailChimp alias and they can't So essentially what that does is that triggers a lot of these more strict spam filters to say wait a minute, hold on, these are not matching. So I'm going to throw this in spam, or I'm going to throw this into a block. So make sure that whatever email provider that you are using, you're able to connect your domain into that email and add the records to wherever you bought your domain, which means that that email will be coming from your true domain. And I want to tack on to something you said. So, as Alex pointed out, if a bunch of people start marking your emails as spam, then more and more times you send out emails more and more inboxes it's going to be sent to spam. So that's another reason why it's really dangerous to purchase a list with a bunch of cold prospects that aren't going to recognize you and might mark you as spam. And if you send some of your actually good prospects, those emails might start going to spam as well. So be careful about purchasing lists and it's way better to grow your list organically if you can. Let's tackle a couple other questions here really quick and all three of these questions are about statistics and open rates and no matter where you look, you're probably going to see different numbers. What I'm consistently seeing within our industry and many industries is that the average open rate is around 30% and the average click through rate is around three to 5%. So I would say, if you're getting over 30% open rates, that's pretty good. If you're getting over a three to 5% click rate, that's pretty good as well. But also it depends on if you're sending to just clients or if you're sending to clients and prospects. Those numbers I gave there were kind of more with your whole audience in mind. Obviously, if you're sending to just clients, your open and your click rate is probably going to be higher. And Alex, I want your opinion on that in a second. But in terms, someone also asked, should I believe MailChimp statistics? Yes, you should. They're accurate. They're not trying to fool you. They're trying to give accurate statistics. Yeah. So a couple of things to add to that. So as Johnny mentioned, if you're sending emails to clients, so I mentioned 75%, obviously that would be more of like a client email. If you're getting 75% on full database, email marketing, and you have prospects and clients on it, you probably have more incredible content than you could ever imagine. All your higher percentages are definitely going to go to client emails. Like for example, our member emails were at 68, 75% because we're sending those only to members. And that should be true. And now if your client emails are getting 20, 30%, you should ask. One, are people getting your email? Maybe it is going to spam. And then two, if your clients aren't opening your emails, then that could be not a cause for concern, but it could be something you may want to bring up in their quarterly meetings. Oh, are you getting my emails? Et cetera. So that's something where you should measure if it depends, to Johnny's point, depends on who it's going to is going to affect your open rates. As much as click-through rate is a good metric, if for example, on a newsletter, I'm preaching keeping the content in the email, you may have, if all your content is in the email, you may have a 0% click-through rate and that's okay. So click-through rate is very, very, very contextual to the type of email that you're sending. If you're sending an email that has all the content within the context and the body of that email communication, it's okay to have a 0.0001 click-through rate because someone clicked on your web URL to go to your website. So that is the click-through rate is tricky because like people focus so much on open rates and click-through rates and then click-through rate really core depends on the context of the email that you're sending. And then the last thing I would say is, yes, you should, to Johnny's point, you should trust MailChimp, you should trust email service providers. However, one of the things that you may not necessarily render is that when Apple updated their privacy settings, a lot of the time, if you don't hit, you know how you have like the load content button now in your Apple Mail, whoever uses an iPhone on the webinar. If you don't hit that load content button, a lot of the times the email actually won't render as an open. So a lot of people's emails are email open rates, even though people are opening them on their phone, but they may not download the images. That may not render as an open in certain email systems. So it is important if you're sending out your lists, or if you're sending out your emails to gut check with people every time you talk to them. Are you getting my emails? Have you gotten the email? We do it on our monthly calls as well with advisors for our own emails to make sure that, you know, we're keeping that healthy. All right. Awesome. So that's newsletters. We're going to jump off the newsletters, but we can go into more questions if people are interested down the road. Okay, so we talked about lead magnets in the last session and we talked about driving people to lead magnets and as well as automated nurturers and kind of how do you engage those people off your assets that you're creating. Automated nurturers are probably one of the more underutilized and I would say underappreciated things within email marketing. Your newsletter, obviously something you're going to go do consistently. But what should your automated nurtures look like and what is an automated nurture? So when you think about automated nurtures, these are really meant for kind of two types of prospects. So you want to be a downloader to lead magnet, either via advertising or on your website, or people who have submitted a form on your website. So generally automated nurturers, that should be something where if you have a new prospect or someone who falls into that new lead segment that we talked about before, this is the perfect opportunity to drive them through an automated nurture. Now, when you're sending out automated nurtures, you want them to be very topical focused. So something to where people are, if they download a lead magnet on retirement, that automated nurture should be about retirement. It should not be about college planning or general financial planning. You have to map your content in the email that's going out from an asset download or a submission to specifically the content that they've downloaded. So for automated nurtures, this could be one to five emails that you're sending out after someone downloads something. And that should be topical based on how they came in. So if you're promoting a lead magnet on your website, you should have a nurture that comes off of that. And then basically that should lead them down the funnel. So email one should maybe be recapping what they've downloaded and then driving them to another email. Email two could be expanding on the topic or expanding on a topic that's similar to that within the context of that broader retirement bucket. And then generally it should ultimately lead them at the end of those five emails to get to a place where you're booking that meeting. So getting to this point where you have at least one automated nurture set up on your website. And then if you're running ads via Facebook, for example, like Legion ads, you could have automated nurture set up to go out to those leads as well. So automated nurtures can be huge for your practice for new leads who come in into the pipeline. I'll stop there. I don't know, Johnny, if you want to add anything on the automated nurture front. All right, cool. So this relates to automated nurtures, but generally if someone submits a form on your site, whether it's automated or manual, you should have an email ready to go or fired out if someone submits a contact form on your site. So generally if you're driving a lot of traffic to your site obviously form submissions are ideally going to go up, assuming you have the right messaging and you're attracting the right audience. When it comes to form submissions, a lot of the time when we're partnering with advisors early, you'll look at their form submissions and you'll say, have you followed up with any of these people? And you'll see there'll be 10 people, 12 people in pipeline over the past two months. And they're like, oh, I didn't ping any of these folks. And so there's huge opportunity missed when you're driving people and you're marketing to your website. The idea from people submitting a form to email should be immediate. So if you fill out a form on seven groups website, you get an email, a second later, that says thanks for submitting the form, someone will be in touch within 24 hours. And then in 10 minutes you get this exact email from our system saying let's have a call. And the speed to answer on inbound inquiry follow-up is critical, it needs to be within 10 minutes. So you hear a lot of these lead gen systems like Promote, the speed to follow-up is everything, right? It is, it truly is, and I'm not just saying that, it is. And you can send this out manually from Outlook, whatever, but generally the speed to follow-up is so critical. So if you get an inbound submission, whether it's going out automated from your system or manual, and you have some type of notification set up, just make sure that you're sending out your emails immediately. Because after 10 minutes, people just move on. The second thing is, if you have someone who submits a form and you have an inbound sequence that goes out, or some type of email goes out, make sure they can see themselves working with you, how you're gonna work with them, give them an asset that discusses you. So if you haven't built a pitch deck for your practice, build a pitch deck or some type of guide for your practice that breaks down your services and who you are as an advisor and then obviously link to booking, link to book a meeting is so, so important. Hey Alex, before we move on too much further, I have a question for you. How much time do you recommend between emails and a follow-up DRIP sequence? Yeah, so there's the two types of DRIP sequences, right? So there's the, if someone submits a form on your website, which if they're submitting a contact form on your website, like they're ready to have a conversation. So that, if you have a sequence going out and you have a form submission, that should go out, that email should go out right away. And then basically your next email from that should go out two days later. So that should just be like, if they don't book. So basically if you can build some type of logic within your email system that says if they don't click the book a meeting link, then another email is gonna go out two days later to those people just to remind them to book a meeting. Because if someone submits a contact form on your website, that is the most down funnel opportunity that you can possibly have within marketing. And that's the best opportunity. Now, if someone's downloading an asset, a guide, you're promoting an ad on Facebook, you're driving people from Google ads to a form submission, whatever it is. If you're advertising to some type of form or download, and it's a DRIP sequence, so you should have that first email go out right away. And then usually what we like to do is for anywhere from three to five weeks, every three to four days, you're sending out that DRIP. And then you're building an automation to one to five emails, right? So every three to four days you send the next email and it's very value-add oriented. So if it's asset-based and you're building an automation off an asset-based form submission, then that DRIP sequence should be value-add, educational, every three to four days for three to four weeks to four to five emails. And then after that, you can basically just add them to your newsletter list and then continue the DRIP sequence from there. Okay, cool. The last type of email that you should build for your practice. So we went over newsletters, we went over educational or asset-based DRIPs, we went over inbound sequences. The last type is outreach, right? We're all in sales, whether we like it or not. We're all selling something at the end of the day, we're all doing outreach to referrals, to COIs. And generally what we like to tell every advisor is that these can be saved on your desktop because these obviously aren't gonna be automated emails that you're doing. But if you have a business development opportunity, and I say business development because I know how certain people feel about the world's sales. But if you have a business development opportunity, building three types of templates can be super valuable to do outreach to. So if you have like an alumni association that you're going out to people on LinkedIn or you got connected with a bunch of people and you're going to do biz dev out to those folks, or you are working with a corporation to go out to those folks, there's essentially three types of templates that you should build for your practice. So the first of is the rapport builder, which is what we deem, which can be great for an alumni association outreach, can be great for, I don't know, whether it's from college or potentially like an organization that you're a part of. But using that relationship or that commonality to do outreach, to drive to something of value as it relates to an event, coffee chat, interview, a webinar can be big. So have that template ready to go if you're ever doing outreach. Referral friendly, build a business development template for referrals that come in the door. There should be no reason why you have to recreate the wheel on an outreach to a referral that comes into the practice. Just have that template ready to go, do a little tweaking or customization, talk a little bit about how you work with the current client at a high level, obviously, but make sure that you're allowing that referral to see themselves in their shoes of working with you. And then finally, if you're getting into an organization, so if you're going after Google employees, if you're going after a specific company, make sure that you're giving them something, right? We all get the emails as it relates to people who just blanket us and they don't actually take the time to understand what it means for us. So if you're building an outreach template to certain corporations or certain types of folks, just make sure that you've built an asset that can be tied with that email, a blog, a video, a podcast that dives deeper into a topic that may matter to them. And so these templates can live on your desktop. Like I have my BizDev templates living on my desktop. And if I'm doing any outreach, whether it's LinkedIn or email or whatever, I leverage those templates. I tweak them obviously per person, but those templates are leveraged that you can keep coming back to the wall too. I'll just answer this question out loud. If you are a NAPA member, you can watch this recording through the NAPA archives, the library there. If you're not a NAPA member, then you'll probably, I'm not sure what the protocol is. Unfortunately, Heidi had to leave. She's got a severe weather warning and she had to take shelter. So we wish her well. And we are here to see you through to the top of the hour. We will end on time. Oh, Heidi's still listening. Okay. She says that if you're not a NAPA member, you can purchase the recording. So Alex, did you have anything more to share because I'm looking at the clock and I know we wanted to do a little bit more show and tell. So let's get to that. Yeah, for sure. So I'll stop sharing. Yeah, well, I did want to show the tools really quick, Alex. So the tools and platforms that you recommended, I'll go ahead and share my screen here. I have that pulled up, but talk us through these tools here and what you think are most important, most valuable to know there. Yeah, so there's obviously a bunch of tools that you could use from email. We talked about a little bit throughout the presentation, but our platform at 7Group, ActiveCampaign is a great email system, ConstantContact, HubSpot, MailChimp, ReadStack, ConvertKit. They're all good. Some have better delivery rates than others. Some have better templates than others. Some have better automation than others. Really just make sure it works for you. It can integrate into your CRM in some way, shape, or form, and it's able to work for your practice. So from that standpoint, can't really go wrong with a modern day email system. It's just make sure your domain's connected to the email system. Yeah, and just go to their websites and check out and see what feels right to you. For most of them, you can request a demo and get a behind-the-scenes look into the platform before you sign up for something. Yeah, Marie, go ahead. I say we choose MailChimp when we have clients who want us to do custom campaigns for them. We've used ActiveCampaign, didn't like it. We've used ConstantContact. We just like MailChimp the best. I have not tried ReadStack, and I would love to have some people give us feedback on 7Group and tell us how that did, because I'm a believer that it can be a great thing. Alex has got a great product. So Johnny, show us some of the work that you wanted to just pull out and show what does a great newsletter look like? I was gonna do a quick MailChimp speed run today, but I don't think we're gonna have time because I wanna show a couple of newsletter examples built on MailChimp, and then also answer the last few questions I have and make sure we end on time at the top of the hour. But like Marie said, we really like MailChimp. It's easy to use, drag and drop, template-based, like a lot of these platforms are. So here's an example from Stratus Wealth Advisors. And this newsletter breaks Alex's golden rule, actually, of keeping all of the content in newsletter because Sam just has so much content going on. He's writing lots of blog posts. He's getting featured in lots of articles. As media mentions, he's writing byline articles. He's doing webinars. So he works with a lot of business owners, specifically in the lumber and building materials industry. So he's partnered with publications within that industry. And so we kind of just put his newsletter together. We send it out every other week or once a month, usually once every two to four weeks. But we kind of just list all of his different assets and media activity in his newsletter. And even though we're kind of driving people off of the email platform, off of the newsletter, his open rate is really good. It's above average. And you would suspect that his click rate is also really high because all the content in here is clickable. So his byline article, a webinar he did. And whenever he does a webinar like this, he gets an email list of the webinar attendees. He segments those in his audience and sends a automated sequence and nurture campaign to the people that attended that webinar on the topic of the webinar. So succession planning strategies. If you recall, I showed off his lead magnet in the first masterclass, which was a succession planning kit with a bunch of good checklists and tools within that. So we follow up with the webinar attendees with the succession planning kit and all that good stuff. But media mentions, bylined articles, news releases, webinars, all that good stuff, just kind of featured in a long list. And it drives people to the website. It drives people to other media assets that Sam was featured in, but it's also providing a lot of really good educational content and positioning Sam as an expert. In the next newsletter I wanted to show, this is actually a quarterly newsletter. So Intercontinental, they just don't have time to do a biweekly or monthly newsletter and they aren't producing a ton of content. So they prefer to do it in a quarterly form. I think that even if you are gonna do it only quarterly or however often you do it, it's just good to be consistent and give people an idea of when they can expect their newsletters. And Intercontinental here has other email correspondence. They do webinars, they send out invitations and follow-ups to those webinars when those come and other big announcements or big pieces of news, news releases and things like that. But for their quarterly newsletters, they start with an updates from around the office intro piece. They do a team member spotlight. So they spotlight two team members every quarter, usually someone from the trading room, someone from the operations team, just to give everyone a chance to be seen in a more personal light, helps build rapport. Clients and prospects love to see the more personal side of the people behind the firm. So this is really good for that, talking about family and travel and all that good stuff. And then here's their lead magnet, the special report on navigating the complexities of family wealth conversations. They promoted their recent webinar on market volatility due to Ukraine. And then all their recent media activity, all their recent blog posts, all their recent videos and webinars. So this is kind of just, it's a long newsletter, but it's mostly geared towards clients. It does also go out to prospects, but it really provides a lot of educational content. It has the business and personal side of things within it. And it's just really comprehensive and it allows them to create their main newsletter more on a quarterly basis, which is better for them. So think about the audience, think about how much content you're putting out and creating and think about your capacity for doing email newsletters like this. But I think these are two good, but very different examples. And obviously this one links out to a lot of different resources as well, but it has a lot of content in the email. And a lot of these links lead them back to the Intercontinental website, which is helpful as well. And they get really good open rates and really good click rates as well. So I'll stop there. And Marie, maybe we should tackle any remaining questions we have. Yeah, why don't we both look, all three of us look at this. I don't have any experience with Connect 365 or AdvisorStream. I know AdvisorStream, how about either of you? Not a ton. I know advisors that use AdvisorStream. I have not heard from Connect 365, but I think if they are happy and they're getting good engagement and clients are happy, then keep working for you if it works for you. Johnny, you want to take this next question from Gregory? Sure. So what do you recommend? Is there anything you can do for someone who was unfortunately email spam flagged and had a good following from a cold list besides email hygiene? I'm actually not sure about that. Alex, what do you think? So cold list, I assume, Greg, means either you might have sourced the list in some way or just a cold list as it relates to the list being cold of people. Now on spam flag, a couple of things that you can do there. So one, wherever you're sending your emails out from, the email service provider, if it's a big one, so if it's a MailChimp or if it's a HubSpot or if it's a ConvertKit, I would talk with support there to see if you've done everything you can from a domain connection perspective. And then also to get an understanding of how they are monitoring their IP addresses. So remember, IP addresses are everything in email. And the minute your IP address gets put on a legitimate blacklist, because there's non-legitimate blacklists who just try to basically ransom you for money. If you're put on a legitimate blacklist, then it can be very tricky to get off. Now, a lot of these blacklist providers, they end up putting a bunch of IPs that are tronched within the email service provider. Like if this email service provider has like 10 IPs they're sending emails through, that blacklist may put all 10 of those on their blacklist. But generally I would just see what you can do from an email service provider standpoint, reach out to support, do the email hygiene thing that we talked about. And then from that standpoint, what you should do is start to, I would say, potentially segment out your list to like the highly engaged and start to build your engagement back up. Meaning like go group by group and start with smaller groups. So for example, like the more emails that you send out or the more emails that you send to, if you're sending out a list to 3,000 and 2,000 of those people are not engaged, that is gonna be a tougher delivery rate than if you're sending out to a list of 1,000 that are highly engaged. So break out your list into smaller groups when you go to send. So tranche them out into like groups to 100, groups to 150, that's gonna also have a better effect on deliverability. So check with your email provider, list hygiene, and then segment out your groups a little bit to smaller groups. I'm gonna bottom line this, we have two minutes left. So Johnny, will you take the question from Chris Brown about Snappy Kraken and FMG, but before you do that, I'll just mention that there will be the opportunity for all of you to work on something in the domain of social media or email marketing. And so in the slides, there's a reminder that we are going to have our third session where you have the opportunity to get live interactive coaching from all of us. So the three of us will be there and we're gonna be sending a short survey about a week or so before the session to see who wants to share so that we can determine if we're gonna all be in one big room, like a Zoom room like this, or if we're gonna have to break out into breakout rooms. So Johnny's got the slide up here or maybe Alex did that, thank you guys. But that's the session on June 22nd. And then we will be talking more about the last masterclass. But Johnny, will you take Chris's question and we'll stay one minute over the top of the hour because I know everybody has to go after that. Yep, and if you have to go, thanks for joining us. But in terms of how Snappy Kraken or FMG Suite fits into the equation and 7Group is also a good provider of that type of content. I mean, and I think 7Group offers additional capabilities in terms of customized content and things like that. Correct me if I'm wrong, Alex, but I think that it's a piece of the puzzle, specifically something like Snappy Kraken, they provide really good canned content, but I don't think you should rely on that content specifically and only that content for email outreach. You wanna mix in custom content, you wanna mix in things that seem more personalized and Snappy Kraken is a good way to keep ongoing engagement, especially if you don't have time to do a weekly or bi-weekly email outreach, it just helps you stay top of mind with your prospects and provide semi-valuable content as well and educational value. But Alex, would you add anything there? No, I think canned content, I think start with your foundation, right? So even if you're using canned content, most of these platforms, ours included, I think Snappy's included, I think, I'm not sure about FMG, but you can customize it and make sure you're adding your own personal flavor on it. Don't just go out with the foundational can, add an opening paragraph, add some content within the body of the email, add your own personality, add your own flavor. Foundational content, canned content, however you wanna think about it is, a lot of it now can be customized, can be leveraged in different ways. So really think about how you can take what has been built for you via these platforms and then just add your value prop, your personality, your flavor on top of it. Okay, so I'll get the last word here today. So bottom line about harvesting contacts on LinkedIn, just don't do it. Ask people, would you like to be added to one of my value added emails? I get so annoyed with people just screen scraping whether their first connection LinkedIn or not. I don't know how the rest of our panelists feel today. Alex, Johnny, thumbs up or thumbs down, just make the sign. Agreed. Yeah, not a good practice. So, and then the last thing about the content, can you trust custom content providers? Yes, maybe. So do your due diligence, Brian, make sure that you're working with a reputable firm, that they're not just using canned content and then repurposing it for all their clients. If you're concerned about not getting custom content and you're paying for custom content, you probably are getting something that's diluted or that's plagiarized. So I will give a shout out to Shauna Ohm at content 151, content 151. She has a library of content that she will help you customize. It's not 100% custom, like what we do at Impact Communications is all custom all the time, but it's a canned content library that she helps you customize as an ex-journalist. So I think we should wrap with that. I wish we could stay longer, but we know we need to get back to work and so do you on other things. So thank you all and see you for the next session, our conclusion to this masterclass. Thanks everyone. Thanks Alex. Thanks Johnny.

social media marketing

email marketing

push strategies

targeted messages

newsletters

automated nurtures

segmentation

email service providers

MailChimp

engagement