27 | 3 Email Marketing Myths

What if you’ve been underestimating the power of email marketing this whole time? Buckle up as I debunk the myth that social media reigns supreme. Discover why a well-executed email strategy can be a game-changer for Creative Entrepreneurs and T-Shirt sellers, with email marketing's average open rates leaving Facebook's organic reach in the dust. You'll learn firsthand how email’s 1.23% click rate can significantly outshine Facebook’s meager 0.07%, proving that email remains a powerhouse for driving sales and engagement.

I also dive deep into effective email marketing practices that can elevate your business. From understanding the distinct motivations behind social media and email use to the critical importance of segmenting your email lists, we’ve got you covered. Uncover why text-rich emails with minimal images help avoid spam filters, ensuring your messages reach your audience’s primary inbox. This episode is packed with actionable insights and practical tips that will transform how you connect with your audience and maximize your email marketing potential. Don't miss out on these game-changing strategies!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Debunking Email Marketing Myths
• 11:31 Email Marketing Best Practices

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of Turn Down the Hustle. Today we're going to be discussing three email marketing myths. Now email marketing. To many creative entrepreneurs and t-shirt sellers, it does seem like this mysterious topic Email marketing. What exactly is that? Do I just open up a Gmail and just blast it? How do I get their emails? Or maybe you have a misconception about what goes into a marketing email before you send it. Well, today I'm here to bust three of the most common myths that go into email marketing that I see circulating some of our online forums. So join me today as we discuss those together.

Speaker 2: 0:44

You're listening to Turn Down the Hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online t-shirt business by working smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic tee and turn up the heat. Press, because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host. Digital marketer. Cold brew lover, t-shirt maker, freckled hype girl and owner of Sunkist Virtual Assistant.

Speaker 1: 1:11

Amy. Myth number one is that social media outperforms email marketing. Now, that myth may have made you laugh a little bit, because you might be at a point in your business where you're like dude, social media is not doing anything for me, so I don't know how it can outperform anything. But many of you haven't explored email marketing. Or maybe you have explored it but you haven't really built in the systems or even given consistent effort to actually test to see how well it would work for your business. But there are still creative businesses out there that do believe that social media outperforms email marketing. Now, even if you haven't come out and flat out said that, I would be willing to bet that you do believe that. Why? Because all of your time is spent on curating content for social media and no time is left for you to prioritize email marketing. So that brings us to myth number one social media outperforms email marketing. I'm going to kick this thing off by saying, if I could choose either 500 social media followers or 500 email subscribers, you know which one I'm going to pick? I'm going to pick the 500 email subscribers. So 500 is going to be our number for the duration of this episode, and just assume we're talking about either 500 followers or 500 email subscribers. So email marketing, for those in the e-commerce world or online brick and mortar type businesses, the average email open rate is 35% as of April 2024. Now let's compare that to Facebook. That's going to be the social media platform that I'm referencing for this episode. The organic reach for Facebook so no paid ads is roughly three to 6%. If you know you know Many of you already knew that, but I think maybe many of you did not realize the average open rate would be 35%. So what does that mean to you? So let's go back to our example of 500 email subscribers to the 500 social media followers. So if we take and send an email to 500 of our subscribers, the average open rate is 35%. So how many people is that? That's 175 people. Imagine if 175 people were reading your offer for your creative business. That'd be huge.

Speaker 1: 3:52

Okay, now let's take the same 500 social media followers or Facebook group members and you put a post out there for your members. How many is it going to reach or how many are going to see it? We'll, out of the three to 6%, we'll call it 5%. We'll give you a benefit of the doubt. It's 30 people. 5% of 300 is 30. And so a lot of times I see, like my post reach are so low. Like what am I doing wrong, girl? If you got a group of 500 and your reach is 30, you're doing good. You're actually on the high end of the average. Anything over 35, 40, you're actually above average.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Social media is not showing your content to all of your group members or followers. Do you know how many people are also competing for their attention in that newsfeed? Just not going to happen. So if you're going to spend time and you have something that you absolutely need your audience to see, or you have an offer you want to convert, then email marketing is going to outperform that social media post. So let's go ahead and talk about conversion rates now.

Speaker 1: 5:04

At the time of this recording, for e-commerce businesses, the average click rate is roughly 1.23%, so that's basically 1% to 2%. So this means that when someone reads your email, how many people are actually clicking something in the email or taking action to what you have offered them? Whereas the average click rate for Facebook is roughly 0.07% and you might be thinking, amy, you just said the average for e-commerce right now is 1.23 percent, which I will say is extremely on the low end. I think you're going to do better than that. And then you just said Facebook is 0.07 percent Like. That's not much different Like. So I wouldn't say email marketing really outperformed social media. Well, what did we cover? Just before conversion rate, we talked about open rate. So we had 175 people opening our email to the 30 people on Facebook that our posts are reaching. So, because of the higher open rate, that's going to give us a larger starting point to apply that 1.23% click rate versus the 0.07 Facebook open rate. So my 1.23% is always going to outperform, with a larger pool of people opening my emails versus the 0.07%, to this way smaller number that are actually seeing my post.

Speaker 1: 6:40

Just going over the raw numbers, you can see how your efforts to sit down, build out that email to send out to your subscribers consistently can lead directly to sales over spending that time creating Facebook posts from scratch and it doesn't actually move the ball forward for your business. That's exhausting. That's what causes people to get burnt out when their efforts are not being reflected and maybe growing your business or maybe getting more sales. That's exhausting. I would also probably not want to continue if what I was doing was not working With the very limited time that you have, working your nine to five, then coming home to try to put in a few hours in your small business, or stay at home mom raising a family, spending what little time you have after they go down for the night to work on your small business.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Email marketing is a more efficient way to ensure that your promotions are seen, unlike social media posts, though, that can be missed in the fast paced moving feed. You know what I'm talking about, like where you're trying to bump your post like hey, did you see this? Did you miss this? It's gone. If people don't catch it in the very early stages of when that post was posted, there's a good chance they're never going to see it. But I have good news, though, because emails sit in their inbox waiting to be read. So if you send it to them, it's not like oh, you missed it, it got pushed down in their emails. They're never going to see it, even if it's months down the road. They have to eventually come back to that email to clear it out. Even if they don't open it, they're going to see your name in their inbox. Not to mention, email marketing can be automated. It allows you to schedule campaigns or emails or newsletters or funnels for the future, or to work while you're sleeping, which also frees up time for other tasks.

Speaker 1: 8:37

I love it. So hopefully I busted myth number one for you, that's social media outperforms email marketing. Now don't get me wrong. Before we move on to the next myth, I want to pause and take time. Am I saying ditch social media? No, I am making sure that you understand that social media has a different purpose in your business. If you're feeling frustrated because social media is not converting your offers for you, that's not what it was designed to do. Social media does not want users leaving their platform. They want them to stay there. Social media is great for maybe finding new customers, connecting with your audience in ways that maybe email marketing doesn't allow you to do, connecting with your audience in ways that maybe email marketing doesn't allow you to do. But at the same time, email marketing is a great vessel to make sure your offer is seen by your audience, will reach more people and will lead to more results. So, just by the numbers alone of the reach and the conversion rates, email marketing outperforms social media.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Myth number two when it comes to email marketing is that it will annoy your audience. First things first, the good news is is that for email marketing, they cannot join your email marketing list unless they agree to be there. You cannot take people that have shopped on your website and just blast them your newsletter. It is different If you get their email from a purchase that does not give you implied consent that you can also send them newsletters or email mailings, anything like that. You have to get express consent from them to join your email list. Get express consent from them to join your email list so that, right there, if they sign up, they just told you they want to hear from you, so I could stop right there, because that debunks the myth that you're going to be annoying. They want to hear from you. Okay, sure, amy, they want to hear from me, but what am I putting in these emails? I do not want to appear to be too salesy, too pushy, and then I'm just unsubscribed. That right. There is a mindset block that we have to work to overcome. If they join your email list, they want to hear from you. Now did they join your email list because you said you would be sharing travel tips all over the world whenever you're a t-shirt seller maybe doesn't go together. So if they join your list with the intent of getting those travel tips and now you're sending about t-shirts yeah, probably confusing and I would also unsubscribe because that's not what I signed up for. But if they are joining your email list, it's because they understand that you have a product that they may be interested in and buying. Maybe they've already bought, maybe not yet, maybe they're just trying to get warmed up, but whatever you have to sell, they are interested in it.

Speaker 1: 11:31

And let's go back to social media for a bit. Think about it. When you go on social media, is it because you're thinking I need to buy something? Let me go see if I could scroll my feed and see if I can get a lot of ads targeted directly to me, or someone will have a local product. See if I can buy it. Right, our significant others are an exception who do just go on social media to look on marketplace. So if that is you, then you are an exception to this example. But whenever you go on social media, you don't even know why you're going on it.

Speaker 1: 12:02

When I ask that question, you're probably like I don't even really know why I go on it. I just click it and I'm on the app before I realize it. I close the app and then somehow I'm back on it again. Yeah, the terrible addiction of social media. More often than not you're going on social media to be entertained or you're bored or you're just trying to pass time. So, yeah, maybe you do see a few products on social media, but maybe that's not where your mind is at and you keep scrolling. So now that you're on the other side, as the business owner, if they keep scrolling, it's not because they're not interested. They're just not mentally primed right now to see your offer. But if you're on the other side emails People understand. Whenever they open their email there's a good chance there's going to be an email from a brand that they are interested in waiting for them. Think about the last time you bought something. Was it due to something you saw on social media or because you were notified of a sale or a new offer or something of value in your email which led you to go buy? Start to take note of your consumer habits and see if you can apply those now as a business owner. On the other side, once you get more advanced in email marketing too, you can start to segment your email list depending on the type of subscribers you have, maybe their interests, what they've shopped with, what they've told you they want to hear more about. Maybe, if they want to hear more about, maybe if they want to hear about something that's coming up, you can start to segment your email list to make sure that you're getting even more specific in your promotion, whenever you are sending out those emails to where it really feels like that email was just written for them only and it truly applies to them. That's something on social media you cannot do. You cannot segment and only show it to certain people within a Facebook group, even on your Facebook page. I'm here to tell you today that your emails will not annoy your audience, and the good news is is if, for whatever reason, they decide that they don't want to receive your emails anymore, they will unsubscribe, so they will no longer be your audience. Therefore, you cannot annoy your audience.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Moving on to myth number three, you need perfectly branded emails. There is a huge misconception in our industry that you need perfectly branded emails plus images in the emails before you send them. You're looking for those one graphic Canva emails where you grab the email template, you go into Canva, you build out your email, then you attach that image and you hit send. Unfortunately, when you send your emails with a lot of images, it gets picked up in the spam filter. And what happens? Those Gmail and Yahoo spam filters recognize hey, this email has a lot of images.

Speaker 1: 14:57

It's probably either one spam, so maybe the reader, my subscriber, my customer does not want this email, or it is promotional content. So, gmail, I'm going to throw it into the promotions folder. Now I don't want you to freak out if your emails are landing in the promotion folder because I mean, at the end of the day, it is a promotion what you're sending, or your business is a sales driven company. So sure, cool, you guys got it right. It is promotions and Gmail, but we want it to land in the main inbox as best as possible for it to be seen.

Speaker 1: 15:34

A lot of times your subscribers might say, hey, I'm not getting any of your emails, or I never see them, and then you tell them to go check the promotions or spam and they're like, wow, here they all are and all you have to do is just ask them to move those emails into their primary inbox and then it will tell their provider that, hey, I do want these emails from this individual, but if we can stay out of the promotions and spam folder, that's going to help us get our emails open. Therefore, we want to make sure we're taking all of the actions that are going to help us land in that primary inbox. First way to do that remove all of those images. If I'm just sending an email to like my mom to say, hey, I ordered the cake, it'll be ready Saturday at 9am, I'm not attaching tons of images in that email. So again, the filters can start to pick up. Hey, this looks like promotional content. A friend sending to a friend probably would not have all of these images.

Speaker 1: 16:33

More content, less images. You can still have a branded email with your colors. Make sure you're checking to ensure that it's easy to read both your font and your color choices, and then also the background you're using. Sometimes less is more and more simple goes a longer way. Think about being more authentic. How can you craft your words to make it connect with more with your audience, which is also going to make that email feel more personable. So when we start talking email templates, let's start thinking more about maybe helping you craft your structure, or maybe some talking points within your emails that you can use, versus a Canva graphic, maybe a one pager where you're typing in all the text directly into Canva, or a ton of Canva images to throw into your emails. I do not recommend that. But if you want to try it, do that and then see how maybe your open rate changes versus an email with 10 images to maybe an email with one image with a lot more text. See if you can notice a higher open rate with one over the other. Why? Because majority of those image filled emails are probably sending in somebody's spam or promotional folder. So myth number three debunked you do not need perfectly branded emails with a ton of images for email marketing. I actually recommend the exact opposite for email marketing. I actually recommend the exact opposite.

Speaker 1: 18:05

If you're a creative seller or a t-shirt maker, or maybe you make pins, acrylic tumblers, anything like that, and you're looking for assistance with your product drops along with hey, I'd love to start sending emails. I have no idea what to say. I don't know when to send it, how often, how do I craft it. I can help you. I would love for you to check out wwwsunkissvacom. Forward slash pdo club, papa Delta, oscar club, and every month I give you a weekly email template already crafted. All you have to do is insert one of your personal stories into those email templates, pair it with a product and schedule it to send to your audience. I got you taken care of. You can cancel anytime, so I'd love for you to come check out the club to see what's involved so you can start making email marketing a priority.