The Author's Guide to Email Marketing Featuring Matt Treacey

If you're feeling frustrated and overwhelmed by your lack of book sales, despite your efforts to utilize email marketing, then you are not alone. Many authors find themselves stuck in a cycle of sending out newsletters, freebies, and promotional emails, only to see minimal results. Instead of seeing increased book sales and stronger connections with readers, you may be experiencing low open rates, unresponsive subscribers, and a sense of wasted time and energy.

"Email is the most overlooked marketing channel, but it's the highest ROI channel with the highest engagement. It is — or it can be — a huge and active group of people, and it an an audience you own.  It's the most reliable and direct access you can have."
— Matt Treacey

In this episode, you will learn how to:

• Boost book sales and connect with readers through effective email marketing strategies.
• Unlock the power of email lists to maximize your author platform and reach a wider audience.
• Create a thriving ecosystem with your email list, fostering stronger relationships with your readers.
• Unleash the benefits of email marketing and watch your book sales soar.
• Personalize and segment your emails to engage readers on a deeper level, resulting in increased book sales and reader loyalty.

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

Sign up for Matt Treacey's email marketing consultation services: Visit Matt's website to learn more about his services and how he helps clients improve their email marketing strategy.

Purchase Matt Treacey's book Natural Orders: Email Marketing Automation Strategy for Small Online Business to discover valuable insights on taking your email strategy to the next level.

Join the Ingenium Books Books podcast community: Subscribe to the Ingenium Books Books podcast on your favorite podcast platform to stay updated on the latest episodes featuring authors, publishers, and changemakers.

Follow Matt Treacey on social media: Connect with Matt on social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to stay updated on his latest insights and tips on email marketing.

Attend a webinar or workshop on email marketing: Keep an eye out for upcoming webinars or workshops hosted by Matt Treacey or other industry experts to deepen your knowledge and skills

Transcript

Transcription

00:00:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
You okay, authors, I have a question for you.

00:00:04 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
It's a question you may have heard before, maybe many times before, especially if you have been querying publishers. Are you ready? Here's the question.

00:00:15 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
How big is your email list? Oh, yes, size sometimes Matters. How big your email list is indicates how big your network is. And how big your network is suggests how many books you might sell through that network. But bigger isn't necessarily better if you don't know what to do with your email list in the first place. And that is the focus of our conversation today. Some of what you are going to hear might surprise you. Our guest today is Matt Treacey, author and the email marketing consultant for some of the world's top business authors.

00:01:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Hey, that's us. Our guest today is Matt Treacey. He is author and the email marketing consultant for some of the world's top business authors. Matt, thank you very much for joining us all the way from Australia.

00:01:48 - Matt Treacey
Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

00:01:51 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Thank you.

00:01:52 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So I'd like to know just a little bit more about you, Matt, and your background. Now, first of all, you are an author.

00:01:59 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Tell me a little bit about that book.

00:02:02 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, so it came out, I think it was in November last year, in 2022. It's called Natural Orders. And the subtitle of that book is email marketing Automation strategy for small online business. And basically the idea behind the book is that a lot of people are doing email marketing. Like maybe they're sending a newsletter or they've got a small list or they're doing some basic automation. They're sending a welcome email. After people sign up, a lot of people get to this very basic point and then they ask themselves a question. Well, I hear so much about email as a channel, what it can do for me. Like it's the highest ROI channel, it's the highest engagement, it's the largest and most active group of users online. All of these things. But there's no real guide out there for how to take your email strategy to the next level. So the book is really written to answer that question at a high level, so where it fits in your marketing mix, how to really think about it strategically in relation to all of your other marketing efforts.

00:03:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So this is really exciting. Many of the questions that we get and that we get at Ingenium Books Books related to authors trying to engage in marketing, but also questions that we hear in many of the social media platforms where authors gather, has to do with not just email marketing, but marketing in general, but email always being recommended as something that is important because it's the only piece of your marketing mix that you own. You own your list. Nobody can take it away from you. But before I go down there, I need to talk to you about. This was your first book, was it?

00:03:55 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:56 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
I need to know what that was like for you. What did you think about that whole process, writing it, the whole publishing journey.

00:04:04 - Matt Treacey
How that was for me?

00:04:06 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yes.

00:04:07 - Matt Treacey
Harrowing. It was a very enjoyable process. Look, overall, it's crazy. I suppose the average person thinks that when you write a book, you sit down, you write the book, and the book's done. Everyone listening to this? No, that's not the case. Right. I probably rewrote my manuscript five times. It's a 200 page book. I forget how many, what the final word count was. Something around 50 or 60,000. I mean, I probably wrote 200, 250,000 words when it's all said and done, because I took it through kind of a lean validation process where I had a group of early readers and had people pulling it apart at various stages. I really refined it over time to make it something that I was very proud of and that, more important than that, was going to be very useful for the readers.

00:05:01 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right? Yeah.

00:05:03 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
But I'm glad you said the word harrowing. We hear that a lot. I think there's a reason that more people don't actually write their books or finish writing their books.

00:05:14 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
It's not a straight line from here to there. It's not necessarily easy.

00:05:19 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Anyway, so you know what we're talking about, this community of authors. Our podcast is geared towards authors and publishers and change makers, as you know. So in addition to being an email.

00:05:31 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Marketing expert, you also know what we're talking about, what we're going. Yeah.

00:05:36 - Matt Treacey
And interestingly enough, I suppose a lot of my clients historically and still today, are authors, right, as you mentioned. And so I went into the process, I suppose, not completely blind, because I've been part of book launches before and I know what goes into writing a book and how to approach it. So I knew what to do. The project was all planned out, but it still gets away from you. You think you have this book outline and it's just all going to go so smoothly. In fact, my outline I wrote to be just quite a simple concept because I didn't want it to be evolved into something that would get out of control. Even that simple concept, I mean, it just balloons, right?

00:06:15 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:06:15 - Matt Treacey
And then there's the whole marketing side of it. Right. Writing the book is one thing, marketing is another. And one thing is you think once the launch is done, the marketing job is kind of capped off, at least for a little bit. But it's really the starting line after the launch. So I guess the advice of not burning out for the launch is good. In fact, in retrospect, I'd probably take the approach of a softer launch and just treat as a marathon rather than a sprint, especially as someone who's not going to, not trying to sell a bucket load of books and you don't have those huge leverage points where a big launch is going to be something. We're not in 2012 anymore. Book launches aren't as they used to be. I think taking this idea, there's going to be a very long promotion window, two year promotion window for this launch. That's probably better.

00:07:13 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yes, exactly.

00:07:14 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Okay.

00:07:15 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Thank you. Thank you for that. So email lists, except. No, I'm sorry, I've got one other thing I need you to explain. So your book title is Natural Orders. When you look at your cover, it's very full of greenery and it's like, oh, I'm going to go on a little journey in the forest kind of thing. This is connected to your other background. Will you tell me a little bit about your other background?

00:07:47 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:07:48 - Matt Treacey
Well, I suppose anyone who sees my book, it goes against all the rules for creating a great cover for Amazon. Right. But I don't really mind that because I'm going for quite a niche audience and I hope it attracts the right people. And so far it has done that. So I've thought a little bit laterally about the COVID But yeah, to answer your question, my background before getting into marketing was actually in ecology. So I studied ecology and then worked very briefly in the field in Australia before going over to the States and getting into tech adjacent marketing stuff. And that was what got me into email marketing. But the idea behind the book is that you should grow your email marketing list a little bit like an ecosystem. So the reasons for this is there's two big reasons for it. So number one, there's a few common mistakes people sometimes make, when they go into email marketing, they get poor engagement. So like opens, clicks, unsubscribes, which leads into this kind of death spiral of poor sender score in your email marketing system. And poor deliverability can be very hard to get out of. This is a little bit like, I call it in the book, the top down cascade. It's a little bit like an ecosystem collapsing. There are some things that are very similar between the way an ecosystem works, the way a database works. Right. But the second thing, and you talked about this a little earlier, was when you treat it a little bit more like an ecosystem, like this thing that you're growing over time, you avoid some of those risks that come from relying on other platforms. So if you have a big audience on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, those can be taken away from you at a moment's notice. Policy updates, algorithm changes anything, right? So when you actually have an email list, you're competing with these walled gardens, as they've been referred to by building your own walled garden. And that analogy helps that in a lot of ways, both in helping avoid those risks, but all the way through the book, I mean, the analogy just serves really well in the different discrete stages you need to take to grow.

00:09:55 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
The thing and make it profitable and healthy. Yeah.

00:09:59 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So owning your audience is one really good reason why an author would want to both engage in email marketing and then learn how to do it better for better results. But why should I bother with an.

00:10:19 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Email list and with developing my marketing strategy around it?

00:10:26 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, it is really the most overlooked marketing channel. It shocks me today still that people, sometimes people say email is dead. That just seems crazy to me because I noticed early on in my kind of marketing, digital marketing career, I was like, wow, there's all these shiny objects in terms of all these strategies and things you can do for big growth, there's growth hacks and all of this. But the most reliable thing is email. And I talked about some of these things before. So it's the largest and most active group of people on the internet, right? So something like four and a half billion people have email addresses, active email addresses. You compare that to the next largest ecosystem meta, which combined between Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, some of that 3.53.6 billion. Don't quote these numbers, but these are ballpark figures and they're also the most active. So two to 3 hours a day in their inbox, the average office worker, I don't know about you, that could be on the low side for some people.

00:11:26 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
It's probably on the low side for me.

00:11:28 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:11:29 - Matt Treacey
So it's a huge and active group of people, but it's also the highest engagement. So there was an article way back in 2012, there was this author, Ryan Holiday, great author, actually. And he was bemoaning the algorithm changes in Facebook, where he used to get much higher post visibility, but dropped to 15% for each post he put out. Now, let me tell you, if you're getting 15% post visibility for each post he put out on Facebook today, you're doing extremely well. You may not get that if you're paying for it, whereas the average email open rate across all industries, which is a very low conservative figure, is something like 14%. I mean, really, if you've got a healthy and engaged list, it's going to be double that at least. Opens aren't particularly reliable anymore. But that's another whole can of worms we won't get into. But the fact stands, it's a much higher engagement channel overall. Right. No Matter what metric you're looking at. The other thing is, of course, the direct access I was talking about cannot be taken away from you. You own your audience and crucially, you can build data on top of that audience in a way that you can't do on some of these other channels. And that's a huge part of the book. I split it into three stages of development. The second stage is all about going from this basic email address and then defining actions that are important to your buying journey, and then associating that data back to that email address. And then over time, you can make really smart, interesting marketing decisions about how you segment people, how you personalize emails, what path you send them down in what I call the subscriber journey, you can do really interesting things you cannot do with any other channel. But probably the biggest thing of all is it's the highest ROI channel. So I forget the year I got this from, but a recent figure put email at $36 per one dollars spent ROI. That's if you're using it properly. If you're doing all this stuff of like segmenting the list, personalizing, focusing on repeat purchases, focusing on average order value, those are really big levers that you can pull uniquely to email that you cannot get on any other channel. You compare that to something like Adwords. For a long time, the ROI has been something like $2 per one dollars spent. Now look, I don't know about you, but I don't know any investment strategy where you can get 36 X return. Right? I think if you use email correctly, it's absolutely fantastic. So I've really focused on it in my career. It's great.

00:14:01 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:14:02 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And so for authors, we are like.

00:14:08 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Many other, and I would say every.

00:14:10 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Other business, but specific to authors, we're always talking about how am I going to sell more books? And there's the tension between reported sales.

00:14:23 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
To places like Nielsen's and BookScan and all of those places.

00:14:30 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So if you sell direct with email, you aren't depending on what's going on in the backend. I'm taking this down a rabbit hole. We're not going to go here, but it is something that, if you use it properly, is going to help you sell more books if you continue to work your list well. So in order to help us figure out how to do this, you've talked about segmentation, and before we can talk about how to better segment or how you treat segments differently, can you talk just a little bit about what a segment is and why?

00:15:07 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Segment? Yeah.

00:15:11 - Matt Treacey
Okay, so zooming right out, segmentation, personalization, these can be buzzwords sometimes, right? And maybe people listening now are thinking, okay, well, I've heard of these things before. What does it really mean? The reason that we have this high ROI that I was just talking about is because of segmentation or personalization. So if you think about it, actually what a personalized email is, it means that it's really relevant and it has great timing. I sometimes say, like, an email's relevance is the difference between it being spam and being valuable.

00:15:47 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:15:48 - Matt Treacey
So you can send a really well designed solution to a problem your reader doesn't even know exists, and it actually has zero value. It goes, it's spam to them. Right? So, yeah, like a 15% discount on an irrelevant product is spam. Right? So poor timing is also another thing there. If you can send that same 15% discount. But if it's a year too late after you bought the product, as an example here, then it's not valuable. So personalization, segmentation, they're all about making sure that your timing and relevance is really spot on. You know, a great example of this, everyone's probably experienced this before, is.

00:16:29 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
In email marketing.

00:16:30 - Matt Treacey
They call it a cart abandonment sequence. And this may seem at first like it's not relevant to authors, but it absolutely is. You go to an ecommerce site, you put something in your cart and you decide, I don't want it. So you go away. But they've got your email address, and then an hour later, day later, three days later, they'll send you emails, hey, you forgot something in your cart. So the ROI for those sequences is something like one in five abandoned carts gets recovered when they're set up correctly. So that's a significant amount of revenue. So if you're a $5 million a year ecommerce store and your abandonment rate is, let's say, 20% and you're recovering one in five of those, that adds a lot to your bottom line. And the reason for that is because if you think about those emails, they're sent with perfect timing because it's for someone who actually has that thing in their abandoned cart and they're extremely relevant because it's a product that they had already selected and put in their cart.

00:17:25 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:17:25 - Matt Treacey
That is the reason. That's personalization in action. If you just think about it, something that I talk about in the book in the second stage is.

00:17:37 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Once you've.

00:17:37 - Matt Treacey
Started sending a series of emails to people, you can look at a whole set of different factors and then start dividing them up. Let me think about this. One way you can do it is engagement. So say you're just sending an email every week or email every two weeks. One really easy way that you can segment today is you can just look at all the people who have interacted with a certain type of link that you've included in the last five emails you've sent out and then create a segment around that. Create a tag called Engaged Link One, or whatever link one means. Maybe Link one is going to your book or going to a certain page on your site to book a call or have viewed a course that you sell off the back of your book, right? That's how you start segmenting. And then you can start making really much more interesting marketing decisions. You can say, okay, well, all of these people that get this tag, they're going to receive this new sequence, right? That's how you make these decisions over time.

00:18:40 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:18:41 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
I am notorious for not staying linear in my interview questions. So I want to go back to the beginning now of a journey for somebody who's new with their email list. We've gone down a little bit into the little bit more advanced on the segmentation and engagement. But for those fairly new with their.

00:19:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Email lists, typically they will start sending out a newsletter.

00:19:11 - Matt Treacey
Absolutely.

00:19:12 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right?

00:19:12 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, look, you ask the questions, I answer them.

00:19:15 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, no, exactly. Which is totally, totally fine. Anybody that knows me, this is the way my conversations go too. So it's just a little organic. So we've got the email list. We're started, we're sending out our newsletter.

00:19:30 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yay.

00:19:30 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
We're sending out a newsletter now.

00:19:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
What?

00:19:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
What's next? What can I think about doing next?

00:19:37 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. Okay.

00:19:37 - Matt Treacey
So newsletters are one place to start, something that might actually be much more powerful for authors. And something I often recommend is, especially if you're an author with several books and a whole series of ideas that you need to introduce to people, rather than putting people into a newsletter, which is very topical and timely and relevant by nature of it, because it's being sent every week or every two weeks or whenever you send it, create a sequence that really builds a narrative for your readers, right. And takes them through the idea maze of your books and everything you're about, and introduce those ideas in a sequential way that's going to really build them up and people come out the other side understanding a lot. I call this sometimes the awareness sequence, and there's a few reasons for that. And just to save us getting too technical, I won't go too far into it, but the real power behind it is that it reuses your existing content. It builds really strong engagement and list health and the foundations for a strong ecosystem, which I talk about in the book. And something that I don't talk about so much in the book, but really applies to authors, is just this ability to build a really strong narrative and guide the way that people go through their, what I call, subscriber journey. This is another thing no other channel will allow you to do. If you try and do the same thing on Instagram or Facebook, it won't be possible just because the engagement isn't there.

00:21:03 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right? Yeah, I'm running out of my self.

00:21:10 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Imposed 30 minutes time limit.

00:21:12 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
We're down to our last five or.

00:21:16 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Seven or eight minutes. And of course, we can go longer if we want to. But I want to talk about what are some of the mistakes that you see.

00:21:28 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
People making?

00:21:29 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And now let's think about people that aren't necessarily really new to their list. Maybe they've had their list and they've.

00:21:37 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Been working kind of casually at it.

00:21:40 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And I don't mean casually as in casually not thinking it's serious, but casually as in juggling a million other things that they're trying to do, running their business. And whenever they can, they pay attention to something on their email list. So what are some of the mistakes that you see people making where they could be doing much better?

00:22:04 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, that's a great question. And really, the way I've structured the book is around some of these common mistakes. Right. So one of the ones I mentioned earlier was this thing that I called the top down cascade coming in, falling in on itself because poor engagement. So this awareness sequence that I was just talking about, that's my solution to help mitigate that. And really it's about making sure that you have strong engagement when someone just joins your list. If you think about your typical scenario when you sign up to an email list for any industry is they start hitting you up with offers within the first couple of weeks that 90% of people doing email marketing will do this. You sign up to a site somewhere and then they've got offers to send you, they've got promotions to send you, they've got things that they're asking you to do. It's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. I think that you need to approach email marketing from a position of providing value, from expanding on the ideas that you talk about in your books, from going above and beyond, from not just using as a way to promote your ideas, but having it be a world that people enter into that you've created that helps them go a step further. Right. It's a more personal relationship. So just something that I often say for this is three things you should think of when you're sending an email. Educate. Inspire. Entertain. If you're not doing one of those three things, at least one of those three things send something else. If you follow the way this awareness sequence I talk about is structured, you'll make sure that at every stage of the subscriber journey, even when it comes to the point where you really should be sending them offers, it will be perceived as valuable to them because you're developing the subscriber from a point where they're only vaguely aware of you and what you do and you're sending them something valuable and you're helping them identify their problem, identify solutions to their problems and get them to the point where they're ready to hear about whatever products or services you offer, right. And then you can talk about them and they'll be well received and they'll get good engagement. So it's about structuring the way that you actually do that, but always send.

00:24:13 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Value that you're talking about content that.

00:24:25 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
They probably have already or that they know already, repurposing content. And I was going in my head to, okay, so I get the content, I get it ready, I've got it planned out in when the sequence is going to drop. What's the interval? Talk to me a little bit about automation. Automation, I think, is something that has changed quite a bit over the last ten years or so.

00:24:55 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Should we.

00:24:56 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Is there too much automation? What should we beware of with automation?

00:25:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Can it backfire?

00:25:08 - Matt Treacey
That's a good segue, because that's the other mistake people often make, is automation is incredibly powerful. It's one of the great things of email. And that hi ROi is largely to do with the ability to automate.

00:25:22 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:25:23 - Matt Treacey
You can't get to advanced email marketing without automation. Right. It's in the title of my book. It's all about building automation, but doing.

00:25:31 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
In a smart way.

00:25:32 - Matt Treacey
So we've covered a lot of ground today, right. We've kind of gone forwards and backwards, left and right, but that's fine.

00:25:39 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yes, I apologize.

00:25:41 - Matt Treacey
I had a university lecturer like this once, actually, and you go into his class and he'd go all over the place and you'd think, what? And then it comes to exam time and you realize you've actually learnt everything. It's just been in a bit of a chaotic way. So hopefully that. A little bit like that. For those listening, we'll pepper you with ideas and they'll all come together.

00:26:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Exactly. Quiz to follow.

00:26:04 - Matt Treacey
But here's something. There's a thing called Gaul's Law. So a complex system that works inevitably evolved from a simple system that worked. So the exact same thing applies to your automation strategy.

00:26:16 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right?

00:26:17 - Matt Treacey
So you need to build up from simple building blocks over time. This is one of the mistakes people make. They think, oh, I'm going to do automation. They pencil out this masterpiece, the spider web of all these interconnecting parts always fails, always gets away from them, always becomes too much to handle, things get turned off, it just becomes a disaster. Should be as simple as possible. Build from really strong, simple building blocks, strong foundations that build engagement. Respect the subscriber and you're going to go, well.

00:26:51 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So simplicity means in this case.

00:26:58 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Having.

00:26:58 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Put together a few of these automated sequences myself in our email system, it's like, oh no, that's too many connecting dots. There's too many conditions if they do this. So what do you mean when you say simple?

00:27:10 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Keep it simple.

00:27:14 - Matt Treacey
Reducing as much as possible those things that you've just talked about. So instead of having 18 different pathways, someone can take in one email automation sequence. Just try to keep it really simple for each one. And then only when you see a real opportunity in, say you've segmented people with a tag or something, you say, okay, everyone who's opened this email and they've populated over time and they look like it's a reasonably sized segment, then you can say, okay, well, now, there's an opportunity that's clear here to build something that's going to take advantage of that. Just keep it as simple as possible for your own sanity, but also for the benefit of the whole system.

00:27:58 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:27:58 - Matt Treacey
Because this is where you get into trouble.

00:28:02 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. So when you start to work with clients, what's your process? What are the first things that you need to know and what are your typical first steps when you start to work with somebody?

00:28:19 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, that's interesting. So I will typically work with someone who's already doing email marketing.

00:28:24 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right.

00:28:25 - Matt Treacey
So I'm not going to take anyone from zero one people who are doing email but want to go to the next level. So one of the things you really need to look at, and one of the places I usually start is just looking at your overall list health. So some of these things we've spoken about, like your engagement, your unsubscribe rate, how people are interacting with your emails, how many subscribers you're adding, how the list is growing over time, just getting a sense for the health of the ecosystem. Right. I mean, you really do look at very similar markets. From there, you can make a decision of what strategically is going to make sense very much based on the specific author, what their business model is like, or whatever other type of business it is. For software, it's another thing, again, but you really need to make sure that foundation is in place. In the book, I break it into three stages that follow this development of an ecosystem. So, I mean, just their dispersal, recruitment and establishment. So the first stage is about building that really strong foundation. You can't do anything without that. You need to make sure that foundation is in place. And then in the second stage, thinking about, okay, what is the journey that we're creating for people who sign up to the list? How can we make sure that they're receiving value at every stage of it? How can we make sure it's developing them into the point where they're more likely to buy any one of our products or services in a way that's not spammy.

00:29:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:29:54 - Matt Treacey
From there, the final stage is all about expanding the value of those people who've already bought. So finding those profitable segments. And as Jay Abraham says, there's only three ways to grow the business, right? You can get more sales, you can get people to buy more times, increase repeat purchases, or you can increase the average size of each sale, the average order value. Those are your three levers to pull. If you look at that in the third stage, from all the data that you've amassed through this segmentation and tagging, that's when you start seeing that really high ROI that email is famous for.

00:30:31 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Sounds promising. So where can people find your book?

00:30:38 - Matt Treacey
Yeah, so if you go to naturalordersbook.com, they'll take you to my site. Everything about the book and everything about me and what I do.

00:30:48 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And you can place your order right from the site directly?

00:30:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yes. Excellent.

00:30:55 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Naturalordersbook.com. And Natural orders has an S on the end. If that didn't come through Naturalordersbook.com and there's a way to contact you there as well.

00:31:07 - Matt Treacey
Absolutely.

00:31:08 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yep.

00:31:08 - Matt Treacey
Send me an email. If you have any questions about email stuff, I'll answer them. It's not a big deal for me.

00:31:14 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Excellent.

00:31:14 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Matt Treacey, I want to thank you very much for joining me on know circular and dizzying journey through my questioning and answering questions. Yeah, it's wonderful, but lots of really good stuff on email marketing for us. Thank you so much.

00:31:33 - Matt Treacey
Pleasure. Thank you.

00:31:34 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
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