Oops I've built my email list but never sent a newsletter!

Today we'll cover the best email to send your list when you've never sent one before or if it's been a while!

Transcript

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Hello, gorgeous recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 68 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I am going to talk about what is your ideal email to send to your list when you haven't sent them one at all or for a while. You can head over to clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 68 for the show notes as well as any links that I talk about in the episode. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, we talk about this question a lot on in Batch It Crazy, which is my beautiful online monthly membership for creating consistent content, where people have started to build an email list for their newsletter, but they've never sent them a newsletter. So they've invited them back to their place for a party, and then they've turned the lights out and gone to bed. So we um we do talk about this a lot. The other thing that happens is obviously we send newsletters kind of wishy-washy a bit over here, and then we leave them for a few months, and then we go and send another one, and we apologize profusely for not having sent them an email, and then we send them another one, but then they disappear again, and so on and so forth. So in today's episode, I really want to address what you should ideally put in your first newsletter or in your first newsletter for a while. So let's get started. Now, before I get started with the steps on what actually goes into this, I really want to preface it by saying, number one, the biggest tip is to stop agonizing over it. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just want to send them something. Okay. So this same thing goes when people say, What should my first blog be? or what should my first podcast be? Because we hang so much weight and so much importance on the first one. We're actually, in real is in um realistically, it's the one that's going to go to the bottom of the pile fastest and it's going to be superseded and improved upon every time you do the next one. So every newsletter you send is probably going to be better than the last one. It certainly will be more purposeful and all of that sort of thing, and that is completely fine. So, number one, don't agonize over how to make it the perfect one. We are talking business, the recovering perfectionist way now. And I'm very, very passionate about getting you to just get something out rather than agonizing and having this conversation again in three months' time. Cool. I'm just gonna put my little asterisks on the end of that little spiel there. All right, so when we get into the next part of the steps, um, excuse me, that I um suggest you get really clear on, which makes it a lot easier to get these things out, whether it's a newsletter or a blog, but today we're specifically talking about newsletters for your lovely list, is number one, to be really clear on the purpose. And this is the purpose for you as well as for the end reason reader. So jotting down whether it's in a journal or having a chat with your biz bestie or whatever you, whatever your process is, and just getting clear on like why are we sending this newsletter? Because I don't want you to be sending a newsletter because someone on a podcast once told you you have to send newsletters. There's no good energy around that sort of thing, and there is no good energy around doing anything in your business just because someone said it was the thing that you had to do, right? I want you to be really, really clear on what the purpose is. And there's a lot of different purposes, and it's different for every single person in their business, and that has knock-on effects to the content you're going to put in there, the frequency you're going to put out there, and what promises you're going to make to your audience when you do start sending out your newsletter. So some of the purposes for you might be that you want to practice your message. It might be that you want to nurture your clients or your audience and have them feel a certain way or have them with you on a certain journey or transformation that they're going through. For you, it might also be that you want to sell things or you want to uh you want to promote something different like a podcast or your blog or you might want to grow traffic to your website, all of that sort of thing. So getting really clear on like what is the whole point rather than just, oh, this girl called Claire on a podcast said you've got to send newsletters. That's not good enough, right? It's a very, very quick way to get resentful and bored of doing newsletters. So I want you to get really clear on why it's important to you and to your business to do regular newsletters. The second part of that is getting clear on what is the purpose for them. So your end reader who are subscribing and who are hopefully opening and reading your newsletter, however often you send it, whether it's weekly, fortnightly, monthly, whatever, but what's the purpose for them? What do they want to get at? What do they like getting from you? Do they like to be inspired? Do they like to be educated? Do they like to be entertained? These are really, really important questions, right? So if you're doing it purely from an education perspective because that's what they want, then that will influence what content goes in there. If you know that they are doing it because they're entertained by you and they think you're fun and they like your energy, then you absolutely make sure that some of that flavor and personality goes into all of your newsletters. If they're doing it because they love the inspiration, then that will influence what sort of imagery perhaps that you use and the colours and the style and again what sort of content goes in there. So what's the purpose of it for them, right? Be really, really clear on these things. So that's step number one is to be clear on the purpose for you as well as for your reader. The second thing to get clear on is the basic structure. So this doesn't have to look exactly the same every time you send a newsletter out, but the more consistent it is, the more uh trust you will gain and grow with your audience, which is obviously very important in the no-like trust world of online business. If I can predict what you're going to do, I'm going to be more trusting. If it looks different every week and I'm kind of like some weeks I'm getting this vibe and some weeks I'm getting that vibe, it starts to feel a bit like, oh, I'm not sure what I'm going to get next week, and you're more likely to have unsubscribes. So with a basic structure, this can look however you want. And I've seen really great newsletters that have structure with maybe four or five sections, some that don't have sections, and it's much more of a personal thing. Um, and some um some newsletter kind of systems that are maybe have two emails a week or two emails a month, one that is a certain kind of structure, and the other one might be a wrap-up of content, or it might be a wrap-up of workshops where the other ones are much more uh content-heavy and that sort of thing. So I know what to expect, I know what's in each one of them. Um, it makes it easier for you to create, but it also makes it more easy and predictable for your audience to digest. So some of those are not negotiable, in my opinion, for most people, parts of your structure include content. So you usually want to amplify your message, which might be sending them a link to a blog that you've written that you've published onto your Facebook page, sorry, onto your website. It might be a Facebook Live or a really great post you did on your Facebook page. It might be an interview that you're on with someone else's podcast or something like that that you'd like to invite them to watch, whatever. So it's really about inviting them into different areas of your online world so that they can feel like they've gotten the value. So they don't have to follow you around, they don't have to go and find what you've been doing lately. It's delivered straight to them so that they can navigate around your online world and get the best parts of what you have to offer. The other thing is, as I mentioned before, the personal flavor and making sure that you've definitely got your voice and your brand and your touchy-feely bits and pieces, like all of those sort of things that make you you and make your brand your brand. That's why they're there in the first place. So we don't want to just hear recycled stuff that we've heard from every other person. We want your version of it. We want your flavor and we want your voice and that sort of thing. The other part of it that usually there's a pretty heavy element in most newsletters is having a promo or a call to action. Now, this doesn't always have to be selling something or signing up for a freebie, even, but getting your audience used to taking some sort of action is a really important part of a newsletter. Often something that frustrates people, even sometimes we don't even know it frustrates us, is that we connect with someone and they tell us about this thing or they allude to something that is available or going to be available, and then they don't tell us where to find it or what we can do with that or what they want us to do or what the next step is. And so we either have to go and get frustrated going and searching for it, or we just put it in the too hard basket and don't do it anyway. So you're not doing anyone any favors, yourself or your audience, by not telling them what you want them to do next. They may do what you want them to do, they may not. That's cool, but if you haven't given them the option, the answer is always going to be no, right? So some sort of call to action included in your newsletter is really, really important. The next tip that I have in making it easier for you to send out the first one is actually having a few up your sleeve that have already been batched. You know I'm a batching fan, hence batch it crazy, etc. Um, but having a few up your sleeve mean that you send out the first one and you don't have to have that, I don't know if people like it and I have to do it all over again, and that feels really heavy. Whereas if you actually sit down and you batch up, say, two to four of the next ones and have, you know, your structure in each of them, you've got your content in each of them, you've got your flavor in each of them, and you've got your call to action in each of them, then it's just boom, boom, boom, and you don't actually have to worry so much about it in the future. Send the first one off, schedule the second one, schedule the third one, schedule the fourth one, and then you can come back and do that process again in another month or another eight weeks, depending on what your frequency is. Um, that tends to feel much less overwhelming than getting all stressed out about what we're going to send in the first one, sending the first one, and then we get that kind of despair, like, oh my gosh, what if no one reads it? And then we kind of scare ourselves off doing the second one. So you can preempt that and actually get the second and third, and maybe even the fourth one ready to go before you've even sent the first one. All right, so they are my top tips. So, number one, overarching everything. Stop agonizing and just send something. It doesn't have to be the best newsletter you'll ever send. It's going straight to the bottom of the pile because you've got your three other ones that are coming after, and many, many more after that as well. The other steps are to get clear on your purpose for you and your business as well as for your audience so that we can marry those up and make sure that there's a really beautiful blend of those two things. We also want a really clear and consistent structure so that we can build that trust factor with our audience. It also makes it much easier for us, and we don't sit there staring at this blank cursor of doom every week with what we're going to put in the newsletter because we have our uh our structure of what we're going to put into each newsletter and we're just filling in the spots. And then lastly, is to batch some of these things so that it doesn't feel like a big chore every week or every two weeks. You've actually just got them sitting there ready to go, and you've spent a couple of hours in a very focused manner creating the next lot of things to send out to your audience. So I hope that's been super helpful. As I said, you can get these show notes at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 68. I always love hearing your feedback, and if you have any questions, so you can either email me at hello at clairey.co or you can comment on the podcast itself on the website. Look forward to hearing from you, and I'll speak to you again in the next episode. Bye everyone.