Let’s talk about the easiest, most fun way to reach clients, build relationships and make more cashola, shall we?
I often get asked how to build and retain a robust client list. I let people know that there is a secret tool that we all have in our back pockets— a tool that costs nothing to use and very little expertise to learn, but can give you an incredible return on investment and help you build a thriving community.
That tool is email.
I know, I know— email? Email is boring. Email is pushy. And aren’t we all overwhelmed with too many emails nowadays anyway?
Well, email is effective. In fact, for every person on your mailing list, you can generally expect to make an extra $100 a year. That means that a thousand-person mailing list can net you $100,000! Not bad for words on a screen.
I began building my mid-six-figure business back when I had no idea what I was doing. In fact, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know it was supposed to be hard. I started with a mailing list of around two or three hundred people, and wrote poems I thought people might like to hear. One day I sent a poem called “A Prayer for the Capable.” It was an ode to the type of people who show up day after day, the type of people who make the world a better place by helping.
That poem received an avalanche of response. People wrote to me saying they loved it— that they felt seen, or that they saw their loved ones in it. It was a beautiful moment of connection that showed me something I’d been missing— the key to email’s true power.
Email is a bridge-making device. Communication is two-way. It’s like the excitement you might have had as a kid when you got a letter at camp or a postcard from a traveling friend. I wonder what they’re going to say? When you write to your clients’ hearts, you give them that feeling. The key is to write your emails as if you expect everybody to write you back.
When you think of email as a conversation instead of a bombardment, you’re giving your clients a gift. It might be a moment of reflection, a moment of sweetness, a thought-provoking idea. You don’t have to be a great writer, and you don’t have to write a lot. The work lies in attracting people onto your list and feeding them a steady diet of great stuff.
My bio could easily read: “Sam Bennett is an accomplished teacher, bestselling author, career coach, producer, actor, businesswoman, meeting facilitator, improviser, sock-monkey maker, playwright, decoupage artist, popular LinkedIn Learner course creator, chronic over-thinker, amateur systems analyst and professional organizer, and she delights in cheerfully mentoring creatives and frustrate over-achievers on their way to great productivity and success.”
You see, who I am is not singular. The bio above is simply me turning my multiplicity of talents and skills into a statement that ***demonstrates*** that I am a multi-dimensional, Creativity and Productivity Specialist.
So here’s my #1 tip for multi-hyphenate people like you and me: Go with it.
You shine brightly in so many ways. So quit thinking that you need to “narrow down” and “just focus on one thing,” and start thinking about what the cumulative effect of your body of experience and your many skills and talents might mean for you then, please, share with us in the comments.
Confused about personal branding? Not sure how to describe you or your work in a way that doesn’t feel weird?
You’re not alone. Personal branding is complicated for everyone.
The problem in creating a personal brand is that we are on the inside of our own heads, having an interior experience of ourselves. We have never been on the receiving end of our own energy. We have never flirted with us. We have never seen us from the side, or from across the room.
At the same time, everyone else on the planet is having an exterior experience of us. They don’t share our perspective and they can’t hear the voices in our heads : )
So we need to come up with a vocabulary that describes us truthfully. One that captures both our internal experience of ourselves as well as everyone else’s exterior experience of us.
Luckily, we can do that pretty quickly, because you’ve been being you for some time now. We just have to find the right words.
Experiment with this quick 20-minute video. I bet you’ll be delighted with what you discover. Leave a comment and let me know, OK?
Sage is down-to-earth and fun-loving and quite a bit smarter than your average bear. She focuses her work exclusively on women – even her own team is all women – and she truly believes that a feminine approach to leadership and business can not only transform lives, but indeed, the planet.
Sage loves to travel and she loves philanthropy, so she’s structured her business in such a way that she takes several long trips each year. She’s been everywhere from the Amazon to Africa, and I happen to know that she took her entire team to Hawaii this year – isn’t that cool?
As someone who has built a seven-figure business from scratch, Sage really knows her stuff. She’s a great teacher with a strong business philosophy, and she really is working to make the world a better place.
A quiz is a fantastic way to invite people into your list. Not only are quizzes FUN, but they have the added benefit of allowing you to learn a lot about your prospects.
Quizzes also leverage one of the most powerful tools in marketing: intellectual curiosity. When faced with a compelling question like, “What kind of Workshop Leader are YOU?” even grizzled veterans like me want to know the answer!
Finally, quizzes are cool because they invite immediate engagement. The sooner you can get people INTERACTING with your material (clicking, sharing, commenting, rating, sharing….) the better off you are.
Idea You Could Borrow for Yourself
What ONE piece of information would help you communicate more intelligently with your clients? Could you make a quiz designed to elicit that data?
For example, if you’re a health coach, you might want to know more about your clients’ eating habits, so you could create a quiz called, “What’s Your Diet Downfall? Take this quiz to discover the sneaky nutritional habits that are ruining your waistline!”
Or if you were a visual artist, you could create a quiz called, “Does It Have to Match the Couch? Take this quiz to discover how sophisticated an art-buyer you are!”
Even just playing around with this concept can lead to some juicy ideas, yes?
P.P.S. I am proud to be a friend, colleague, student, Big Fan and affiliate for many of the teachers, writers and healers I’m discussing in this email series. I trust that you will trust your intuition, do your own research and only get involved in things that are right for you. Good? Good. Thanks. – S.
Do you know what the single most important thing is in business?
It’s the same “most important” thing in family, in health and in life.
Relationships.
Your success is almost 100% determined by the quality and quantity of your relationships. If you have good relationships, you can overcome any setback, you can conquer any problem and you can grow faster than you ever thought possible.
As we take this 12-part look at the marketing and business strategies that my friends and I are using, we’ve gotten to one of my favorites: simple partnerships.
So let’s look at a favorite method I’ve created for myself around partnerships:
The Smart Strategy
There are three ways I could better use these Expert Calls, making them more to my advantage.
(Can you guess what they are?)
1) BETTER LIST-BUILDING: I could ask my guests to promote the call to their list, too. That way we would BOTH get some list-building benefit.
2) REUSE THE CONTENT: I could re-package the interviews as a series. I could offer them as “Best of…” recordings, or even repackage them as a podcast.
3) TIT-FOR-TAT: I could ask for something in return. I could ask for my experts to do an interview with me to their list at a later time, or to do an affiliate mailing for me.
But as it is, I’d rather leave this particular series “pure” – it makes it more fun for me, and honestly, I don’t need for it to grow my list or make me more money right now. I may rethink this in the future, but for right now, it’s just a joy.
Idea You Could Borrow for Yourself
I can think of a few different ideas you could borrow from this strategy:
1) Give your prospects an opportunity to describe their problems and questions in their own words. That kind of market research is indispensable.
2) Start your own interview series. And don’t be afraid to ask “big names” – you’d be surprised how willing people are to be interviewed, especially when it doesn’t come with the provisos of a summit.
3) Take a look at the caliber of your professional relationships. Are you hanging out with “better tennis players”? If not, make it a top priority to seek out a program, organization or society that contains the kind of people you’d like to emulate.
Let me know what you come up with, OK?
Yours,
Sam
P.S. I am proud to be a friend, colleague, student, Big Fan and affiliate for many of the teachers, writers and healers I’m discussing in this email series. I trust that you will trust your intuition, do your own research and only get involved in things that are right for you. Good? Good. Thanks. – S.
If you’re just joining us, we’re going “backstage” in the world of email and personal development, and taking a look at the business-building methods that some of my best friends and favorite teachers are using, so you can not only benefit from all their fabulous freebies, but you can also start to develop a vision for your own marketing.
I’m going to get underneath the hype and examine each teacher’s:
unique style
smart strategy
ideas you could borrow for yourself
So you can discover what’s going on behind the curtain.
My hope is that this will make you both a smarter consumer and a better entrepreneur.
(Because – like it or not – all creative people are entrepreneurs in one way or another, yes?)
So let’s look a very popular list-building strategy: Summits.
The Manifesting Wealth Retreat
This summit promises that you will, “Discover Your Money Powers, Unlock the Secrets of Living Life on Fire and Design Your Best Year Yet!”
It’s being hosted by Paula Johnson, who’s a very nice Canadian lady with a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology.
One person (in this case, Paula) reaches out to a bunch of experts (me) around a common theme (in this case, money). She interviews each of us, and we all agree to mail our lists promoting the summit.
It’s a great deal for the organizer, because if you have 20 experts, and they each have a mailing list of 10,000 or more, you are now in front of an audience of + 200,000. Even if only 1% of those people opt-in, you have still grown your list by over 2,000 highly-qualified prospects in one swell foop : )
It’s a so-so deal for the experts. We get to promote our message, and usually get to offer a freebie, so some percentage of the larger audience is now opting in to our list. (I usually get 50-100 new readers from a Summit, which isn’t great, but isn’t terrible, either.) Mostly I do it because I like teaching and I like helping other people build their businesses.
It’s an OK deal for the customers, too. They get access to a bunch of free wisdom and groovy freebies, and, especially for beginners, it can be a terrific introduction into the world of personal development.
If the Summit offers an upsell (and this Manifesting Wealth one does – you can get the recordings and some bonus materials for just $47) then the experts usually get an affiliate commission on those sales. To this day, I don’t I’ve ever made over a hundred bucks on any Summit upsell.
So no one is in it for the money – it’s all about the list-building.
I think the bloom is a bit off the rose for summits these days. Audiences are a bit burnt out on them, and especially the ones with 2-3 interviews a day are just too overwhelming to be consumed easily.
Also, they are a TON OF WORK to put together. Organizing the speakers, coordinating the interviews, creating the copy, making sure all the links work and then making sure that all the experts really DO mail…dude, it’s like herding cats. It’s a big, big job.
There are companies that will “produce” your Summit for you, but I can’t say I know much about them.
Bottom line: it’s a tried-and-true method to build up your email list, but it’s also an enormous amount of effort.
Idea You Could Borrow for Yourself
If you’re just starting out, then hosting a summit will give you a big boost, and appearing on summits will help you hone your message, practice your interview style and have something different to offer your list. So I wouldn’t say “don’t do it,” but I would advise you to be very clear about your desired outcomes.
I think there’s a lot of opportunity to take the underlying ideas and collaborative spirit behind the Summit concept and do them in new ways… What do YOU think?
Let me know what you come up with, OK?
Yours,
Sam
P.S. I am proud to be a friend, colleague, student, Big Fan and affiliate for many of the teachers, writers and healers I’m discussing in this email series. I trust that you will trust your intuition, do your own research and only get involved in things that are right for you. Good? Good. Thanks. – S.
