030: Email Isn’t Just for “That Kind” of Business — It’s for Yours Too

If you’re thinking, “Email doesn’t really fit what I do,” you’re not the only one. It’s easy to assume email works better for bigger, more online, or more “put together” businesses. 

In this episode, we talk about how email can actually fit what you’re already doing - whether that’s handmade, local, service-based, or something still growing.

Listen in for:

• Why email isn’t just for bigger or more “online” businesses
• What this can look like for handmade, local, or home-based work
• How to stay connected with the people already paying attention
• The shift from “this doesn’t fit me” to “this could actually work”
• How to make email feel like a natural part of your business

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• This Week's Free Action Guide: The “Make Email Fit Your Business” Map
• The Smart Soulful Business Facebook Community: smartbusiness.thrivecart.com/soulful-strategy-community

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Transcript

Becky Brown  0:01 
If you're a Christian woman, building a business and want it to be purposeful and profitable, we've got you covered. I'm Becky and I'm Laurie.

Laurie Graham  0:09 
We have both built successful businesses that we love without losing our faith, humor or our sanity. This is Smart Soulful Business.

Becky Brown  0:16 
Real conversations to help your business fit your life and not the other way around. Hey friends, and welcome back to Smart Soulful Business with Becky and Laurie. We are wrapping up our Email series today, and this one feels like a really important place to land. So, over the last few episodes, we have talked about a lot of stuff. If you haven't listened to them yet, go back and listen to the whole series, because there are just so many layers of these emotional, practical, mental layers to running an email list, and we want to hit all of them. 

So, we have talked about what email actually does in a business. We've talked about reasons that we avoid starting an email list. We've talked about why it can sit down, why it can feel hard to sit down and actually press the send button. We've talked about how to grow your list in a way that feels natural and authentic, and we've even talked about what happens after you hit the send button and are interpreting what your data actually means, but there's still this one thought that is really common for a lot of people to think, is, I don't know if an email list really fits what I do. I can't figure out how an email list would serve my business at all. And so that's the piece that we are going to lean into today and talk about, because it's really easy to look at email as a whole and think, Gosh, that's for bigger businesses. That's for people who run purely online businesses, that's for people farther along in their businesses who already have this figured out, and talk ourselves out of the idea that email could serve our unique business and we that leads us to decide, Ah, that's probably just isn't for me. 

So today we are going to walk that all the way out. We're going to talk that through. So first we're going to tackle the all too common thought of, yeah, like, email, okay, yeah, that probably works, but not for me. And I would say that's pretty common. It's not something that people always push back with immediately. But as we're talking to people about their businesses, this is a common thing that resurfaces is things like, Well, okay, yeah, email, but I'm just selling a few things here and there, and most of my work is just local, and I don't really have a big audience, and I'm still figuring things out. So email starts to feel like we are talking about a different kind of business than yours. Laurie, I know that we've been talking recently about this coming up for a lot of different people. Where have you heard people talking about this that you think that we can help them?

Laurie Graham  3:09 
Our people, our people are talking about this. And I want to talk a little bit about why I think this is happening. Most of the people that teach email lists in the business space are online entrepreneurs. They're people with PDFs and digital downloads, and most of them are honestly teaching people how to do businesses or how to grow an email list. Like you'll you'll see this a lot, and they send a lot of emails. And because we've seen that exampled, we think, Oh, that's where it works. I have not seen very many email lists exampled. I do have one in mind that are more local businesses or, like hand products or things in kind of different niches. And I think this is like, I can't wait till our group, our Soulful Strategy Group, because they're already writing books. We do a series on writing books, and we have people writing books. Some of the people who are in this group right now, they are probably going to model the way on how to make an amazing email list for a local business or for a different kind of online business. I was talking to a woman just a couple months ago. She sells online quilting patterns.

Laurie Graham  4:16 
She pushed back at me and said, I can't have an email list. I'm like, Oh my gosh, the people who are into quilting, they're into quilting, baby. Like they're into quilting. And she's like, well, I don't have enough to say. And all, you totally could drop just a little one paragraph line to people consistently about quilting, even if you don't have a new pattern coming out for two months. 

So the key of email, the magic of email is the connection, building relationships, staying in front of people. If you've been listening to the podcast series, the last episode, I think, or maybe the one before we talked about a baker I had met at a local fair and or festival. And I'm telling you right now, I will totally buy home baked goods and specifically scones. She does a lot more than scones, but I would totally buy home baked scones. I'm in an area right now, there aren't any mom-and-pop bakeries that are, I've even found I would totally buy home baked goods from a home baker, but I'm gonna buy from the one. And there's a bunch of this area. I saw them online. I searched for them. I'm telling you who I would buy from. I'd buy from the one who sells sends me an email each week. Now that doesn't have to be a lot of work. That literally can be a really quick blah, blah, you know, boom. That's who I'll buy from.

Becky Brown  5:32 
Let's just add that to the value of email. It's not that they are the best at selling the scones. It's not that they make the best scones. It's not that they're the best marketers describing their scones. It's that they're staying in front of you, right? It's yeah, they're just reminding you, Hey, I sell scones. Do you remember?

Laurie Graham  5:46 
Yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't need any slick words. I wouldn't need any polish. I wouldn't need any ChatGPT assists in the email. Like, I'm just saying, I don't care how big our audience is. I don't need a certain kind of offer, like, can we just make this? Can we, can we simplify this? That I get, that people think it feels logical to say that, Oh, the email won't work for me. I don't have only business blah, blah, blah. It's not logical. It that's fear, yeah, like we're just scared it won't work, or we think it's a waste of our time, or whatever. But there's a big disconnect here, because honestly, email is about staying in front of people. It's it's an easy, simple, cheap way just to say, Hey, I'm here. Hey, I have this. Hey, I do this.

Becky Brown  6:32 
And I think that it's so important to remember like you were talking about the people that are the loudest in this email marketing space. Those aren't the only people that email lists are working for, and so I think it's.

Laurie Graham  6:46 
It might even be the minority. Like, how many people have home-based businesses and don't have email lists? There's more. Like, let's get together and learn how to do this really well and grow your businesses to the scale that you prefer.

Becky Brown  7:02 
Yeah, and I think that that is so important to remember that email doesn't just work one way. It doesn't have to look like the emails that you've seen so far. It doesn't have to look like the newsletter style of picture, picture, article, article, list. It doesn't have to look like a huge launch with a timer, and it's like big sales ads. It doesn't have to, it doesn't have to look like a big story. It just there are a million different ways that it could look. And I bet, if you emailed us your business, I bet we could tell you how an email list could serve you really well for whatever business you're in.

Laurie Graham  7:40 
We should put a challenge out there. Like, yeah, try to stump us. We're gonna show you how an email list works, even if you're like, show pigs. Yes, a friend who does this showing pigs business, okay, truly like actual pigs. So let's talk about some real life versions of emails that I've seen that are simple and easy. And you know what these look like. I have one woman who I follow her emails because she's just so stinking personable, like she'll talk about her homesteading. That's not her, that's not her business. She actually helps people develop quizzes and but she'll just drop, hey, this is how my homesteading is going. She bought a ranch. She does this. She has chicken, she has kids. I'll probably never meet her in real life, and I just feel really, really connected to her. The one business that I've seen that is, I believe it's a bakery. They send out regular emails. It's a gluten-free, I think it's a direct bakery. So I have a daughter who's gluten-free, and they send emails out just on, you know, sometimes new products, sometimes what's happening in their business, sometimes seasonal things. They're not super salesy. They're really down to earth. They're very easily written. But if you are a person who needs and likes gluten-free, keeping their name in front of me, I've ordered holiday stuff from them. I've done, there's a lot of places that do that, but this is the only one that emails me. Do you have any examples of not, like super online typical businesses of email lists that you follow?

Becky Brown  9:13 
Yeah, actually one that shows I found out about because they come to our local farmers market. It's a meat company. They sell meat from a local farm that they have, and they email once a week before the farmer's market, letting people know what they're going to be bringing with them, usually with a special of the week. Hey, you can grab these short ribs this week for this price, and they're normally this price. These are farmers. They are not email experts. These are simple emails. It has their logo on top, but simple, you can tell this is written by a real person. This is not AI. They are not using graphics. They don't show pictures of their meat. It is simple email, short to the point. And I still read it every single week, and I do every single week.

Laurie Graham  9:57 
I think, if you're an author, if you're an author, and you write books even a couple times a year, like this is about connection. I have two other thoughts in my mind right now. Both are women in our groups or in my community that I've had conversations with. So with my online conferences, I buy gifts for my speakers and my moderators, physical gifts, and I try to find unique things. And so four times a year, I'm buying pretty decent batches of, oftentimes, homemade gifts, right? And so I bought some Christmas ornaments from somebody for one of the conferences, and she follows us, and she does Christmas ornaments. She said, Yeah, I keep trying to figure out what to do with an email list. Like, we just have an Etsy shop. I'm like, just you have an Etsy shop that focuses on Christmas ornaments, like I am a Christmas ornament freak. Do you know how many people literally look for Christmas ornaments all the time? How many people are on the planet? Becky, I don't know stats. It's billions, though, right? So I used to live in Tucson, a city of a million. How many people there probably loved Christmas ornaments, hundreds, maybe thousands, right out of a city of a million. Like, we talk about email lists, like, oh my gosh, only 10 people. That's totally not true. We have another friend in our community who does homemade gifts, like she does engraving, like in leather products.

Becky Brown  11:15 
Personalization is powerful.

Laurie Graham  11:17 
Yeah, custom like, notebooks or keychains or things. What could she do with an email list? Oh my gosh, Susan, please email me. I would be on your email list. So many times I look for handmade gifts for my kids. Almost bought some from you last Christmas, and then I forgot about it. I would have ordered it honestly, had she sent me an email saying, hey, don't forget, we have these journals, I literally would have clicked and ordered it like because I wanted those for my kids. There were, like, custom scripty things. So, you know, you literally could have just an email going out. Hey, you know, like, this is what I'm working on. This is a new product, and this particular person is so good at asking on Facebook, hey, which one would you like if I made this? Would you buy this or this just to get that same content in an email?

Becky Brown  12:01 
Absolutely yes.

Laurie Graham  12:02 
Oh my gosh, I would totally be on your email list. Yeah. So, woo. I got kind of passionate about there, like you bring us back to whatever we're talking about.

Becky Brown  12:10 
We're just, we're talking about staying connected regularly to the people who want to know about what you're doing. And it doesn't have to be big and elaborate and perfect and polished, it just has to be a touch point with your people, and it's just about not losing the connection that you already have with your people. And so email is just a relationship-building tool that we have available to us where you can reach a lot of people really easily with one simple email. So yeah. So if you're trying to talk yourself out of creating an email list for your business, we just Oh, yeah. We just want to challenge you on that, because it can work a million different ways, far beyond the examples that we have brought up to you today.

Laurie Graham  12:56 
If you're trying to talk yourself out of it, we're going to try to talk you into it, because once you really see email as simple as just a way of staying connected with people who have found you, people you want to stay connected with, people you already have a connection with that you don't want to lose. Once you start seeing it that way, it really changes the question from how do I do email the right way, to what does this look like for me and my business, like there's not one right way. Yeah, your business is different than our businesses. So instead of, how do I email the right way, or does it fit? First off, we already answered that question. It does fit. Email fits your business. So instead of thinking, How do I do it the right way, it becomes, what does this look like for me? So Becky, what are some simple ways somebody could start shaping this to fit their unique business?

Becky Brown  13:45 
Yeah, hopefully we've already given you a ton of examples of different business models that this can fit really well, and we have, if we haven't covered yours, then the options are still there. You know, me, I always start with one small change. So don't make this a sticking point by making it bigger than it is. Start really simple. If you're in our Soulful Strategy Community, we can give you super specific feedback on what that could look like for you, where you are right now. But basically, you want to think about how you can regularly show up for your people. For me that's sharing articles on my site with a little bit of personal anecdotes and encouragement woven in for you. If you have homemade products, handmade products, it could look like sharing about those new products or popular products that a lot of people are buying right now, or something seasonal, or the backstory behind your products and how your homestead and your chickens were the inspiration for your new Christmas ornament. You know, the options are just endless. It's just, it's really important to just be yourself in how you show up for your people. So it's sometimes online can be tricky, because your person isn't sitting right in front of you. And so I know I keep bringing this phrase up in especially  during this email series. But if you were at a coffee date with your person, what would you be telling them about this thing that you're creating, this article you just wrote, this product you just created, what would you tell them about it? What feels important about that? And share that and just tell them what's going on with you in that in that area.

Laurie Graham  15:18 
I was thinking of a woman I talked to recently who doesn't create products all the time, right? Like, but it's, it's more seasonal or quarterly. And she said, Yeah, but who's gonna want to hear about my inspiration or what was happening in my life? Because she's like, I can't talk about the product 18 times. You know what I mean in the same emails, right? But it made me remember what you had said once with your emails Becky, you had shared, at one point, correct me if I'm inaccurate, but at one point your emails were sharing less personal stories, and you realized you were getting less feedback because a lot of your replies in your emails would come from you sharing more about your life and your boys and your marriage, and, you know, challenges and struggles and insomnia and things like that. And I think sometimes we think people don't want to hear that, but if we think of email as being relational, they do want to hear that. Yeah, like, and we're not saying you should dump all your stories into every email, but you know, when you're, you know, putting together a product and somebody says, Hey, this is where the inspiration came from. Or, Hey, this is why I created this. Or, hey, a little story about how I got started, like that can be part of the strategy, not all of the strategy, right? But what? What do you think Becky makes this feel doable, regular emails in unique niches or different types of businesses? What helps us, makes it feel doable instead of overwhelming?

Becky Brown  16:37 
Yeah, you know, we have kind of touched on the concept. We bring it up a lot. We haven't done a deep dive, but on the idea of batching, writing a lot of things at once, so that we're not sitting down every single week, like, oh, well, how do I talk about that again? Well, what do I share now? When you can come up with a general format for yourself? Obviously, this can look so different, but, so mine is simple. It's, I'm sharing a blog post every week and and so it's just like changing the topic and what I'm writing about it. But for you, maybe, maybe the first week of every month is sharing the inspiration behind the product, and you, you take your audience along on a story and you, and then the second week of every month, you tell them something unique about the product like this. I've seen a lot like this, but this is what mine is, and this is why this was important to me and you walk yourself through kind of a general format every single month, and it looks different for every product and every month of the year. And that can just make things simple, that we've talked about having a general format for those things, and so when you can create, you know, we've talked about the specific plan of, okay, my goal is to email once a week. We've talked about batching, giving yourself longer chunks of writing and times to just focus on connecting with your audience, scheduling things ahead of time. And, yeah, just thinking about, like, What do I want to tell my, my audience about this thing I'm creating?

Laurie Graham  18:08 
Yeah, and what would they want to know? You know, we think about different niches and like, you know, what is there to share about that? What did you look up when you were researching.

Becky Brown  18:18 
Frequently asked questions? If you think of, what have people asked me about this? Can it be shipped? Can it be in blue? Like, what do people ask me about this thing? Let me answer that in an email, because other people probably have that question too.

Laurie Graham  18:30 
Yeah, this is a great place for a brain dump, and for not overthinking.

Becky Brown  18:31 
Ooh, a brain dump, we need to have a whole episode on brain dumps.

Laurie Graham  18:38 
We do. Because every email doesn't have to be the same. It doesn't have the same content. Honestly, it's better if you vary it anyway. Some are shorter, some are longer, some are technical, some are relational. Some are a sales email. You know, whatever you want to throw out there, I think the differences actually add a lot to it. You know, most of us have so much more to say than we think. Again, it's not about saying the perfect things, and definitely don't overthink it. Yeah, it's actually easier to have a simple way to say what we want to say, simple structures.

Becky Brown  19:12 
Let's just make this easier. Yeah, and I'm hoping that you're hearing in this episode,  if you came into this episode thinking, emails don't really fit my business. I am hoping that as we're throwing all these different angles and ideas at you, you are starting to get a little inspired and hopeful and thinking, oh my goodness, like this could actually work for me, and I've got some ideas going on. I'm really hoping that it's getting your thinking going and helping open this door of seeing that this is a possibility for you, and this could be a game changer for your business too. Yeah. 

So if you have been listening to the series and thinking, okay, I get it now, I know I need an email list, but there are so many details, and I don't know where to get started, and I don't know how to execute this, and I need more step by step. That's exactly why we created the course called Why You Need An Email List, and How To Grow One. It's 101, we walk you through all the things. It's not about doing it perfectly. It's about making it clear, making it consistent, and making it fit your business, so you're not guessing every single week, and we give you all of that information in the course. So if you, we just can't, we can't cover everything in even a full series that we've done on email lists. And so that course is where we put all of the details that we just haven't been able to pack in to walk you through this, because we want email to be possible and accessible to you.

Laurie Graham  20:47 
And, you know I want to add to like, I know we kind of designed this with people at different business phases in mind. But as we were even putting this course together, I was like, going, oh my gosh, I haven't done that. Yeah, gosh, I need to go back and review that. Oh my gosh. I need to update that. Oh my gosh. I haven't been doing that. So if you have an email list that just feels stagnant to you, get this course. Like I'm telling you, my email list is not stagnant, and I've already been making changes based on what we put together, you know? And so I think this whole Smart Soulful Community that we have here. We're learners for life, like that's what we're doing. We're learning. We're making things better all the time. We're tweaking what we have capacity to do along the way. And so we're excited. Becky and I are excited about every single thing we create.

Becky Brown  21:35 
We are and we're excited about everything that you are creating, like we love bringing you along on the ride. So in this last email or in this last podcast episode in our email series, let's just do a quick recap. So today we talked about how email just isn't just for one kind of business. It does not have to look a certain way, and it works best when you shape it around what you're already doing, keeping it simple. 

So the next thing, just like every episode we create, we want you to do, is go get this week's free Action Guide. This week's is called the Make Email Fit Your Business Customizer, so just take a few minutes and actually walk through it. What this could look like for you and your business, with your pace, with your people, and your way of showing up. Just make it fit and it walks you through that step by step. 

Thank you so much for being here with us and walking through us, with us through this whole email series. If this shifted something for you even just a little bit, that's the point. That's why we're here talking about this. So you don't have to figure all of this out at once. You just have to take the next step that makes sense for you and your business. And if you want support as you build this, please come join us in the Soulful Strategy Community. The link is in the show notes. We would love to walk this out with you. Go team.