Jan Koch: You can tag people based on what they do with your email. So when somebody clicks on that consultation call link, you tag them that they are interested in a consultation call, and then what you do is you have an automation that pulls them out of the regular newsletter, adds them into a follow up sequence of emails in case they don't end up booking.

So they go onto this page where you have the calendar form embedded so that they can schedule a call. . If they do amazing, you just keep them running in the, in the newsletter as usual. But if they don't book a call, if life gets in the way, the phone rings and they end up leaving that page without taking the chance to book a call with you, you can follow up with those people specifically with automated email sequences to say, Hey, I've seen that you've been on our call, but you didn't on on the page to book a call.

You didn't have a chance yet to actually finish, finish the process. Here's a link, again, I would love to chat with you, like you bring people back to that call, and this is common practice in e-commerce where they are called abandoned cart campaigns. You put a, you put a product into the shopping cart, and then don't buy it 10 minutes after you left the cart.

You get an email, Hey, you've, you forgot something. Here's 10% off. Why not do that at the stage beforehand when you sell the service that's, let's say 10,000 or 20,000 or a 100. Why not bring people back to that call page where they can book the consultation call so that your sales team can actually get on the phone with them?

Chris O'Hare: Welcome everybody. I'm Chris O'Hare, your Quick Win ceo, and in this show we talk to entrepreneurs and experts on the quickest ways to improve your business and get their three quick win recommendations. And today we're talking to Jan Koch, an all round marketing genius who showed me the power of virtual summits.

But today we'll be diving into how to give your email marketing superpowers, which is, sounds pretty cool to me. Hi Jan. Good to have you here. Firstly, let's to kick this off. Tell me the last thing that you read or watched or did, left an impression on you, and it could be anything. A Netflix series, a book you read, or even, you know, a funny video.

Jan Koch: The last book I read is what I want to share with you, and that is How to Think Like A Roman Emperor by Donald J. Robertson. And I'm a big fan of stoicism and, and how it makes you think and how it helps you as an entrepreneur navigate challenging times and things like that and make hard decisions and not worry about things outside your control and all that stuff.

And how to think like a Roman emperor is a brilliant blueprint, highly recommended. 

Chris O'Hare: Wow. Okay. I mean, stoicism is becoming a big thing ever since Covid, I would say. People are obviously more concentrating on their mental health and, and understanding that that whole side of it, so stoicism is kind of leans into a lot of that, isn't it?

I mean, it, it just keeps you, you, you keep moving forwards. I always see it as a bit like grit, you know, having. What entrepreneurs tend to, well, the most successful ones I've heard, or the older style entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about a lot about grit and how they need grit to keep them going through those tough times, those, those challenging moments.

So yeah, starers always kinds of fits, fits into that bucket for me. I dunno how you feel about that. 

Jan Koch: Yeah, it's same here. And I've been into it probably since 2017 or something like that. And it always resonated with me. Like I, I even had Latin in school was, was the best class that I had. And what the leaders back then in, in ancient Rome did always resonated with me.

Like the, how they built this massive empire and there were all sorts of politics and intrigues and war and. Like way bigger challenges than we have to face right now that they had to navigate. And the, the thought patterns they developed, especially Marcus Aurelius, which is the person portrayed in the book.

Are really helpful to keep your mental health and to stay sane. Like especially as a business owner, as a leader, you get all sorts of stuff thrown at you every day, 24 7. The little dictators we have in our pockets, they bombard us with messages demanding our attention, and you need to know how to navigate that.

Chris O'Hare: Little dictators. There we go. That's something I haven't heard a phone called before, so I love that. That's great. , 

Jan Koch: your apps certainly contribute to that, but in a positive way for the business owner. 

Chris O'Hare: apps never, never do anything bad. Anyway. Don't just email made. Yes, get rid of email down with email, hence while we're talking about how to make your email better today.

So gimme a little bit of a self introduction about why our listeners should listen to you and and, and kind of what, what are the reasons or you're successful today. 

Jan Koch: Absolutely. So you've mentioned that I've shown you the power of ritual summits. I started with those in 2015. I started my business in 2013, so in a decade in entrepreneurship this year and with email.

Email is the backbone of everything I've been doing for that entire decade, like building that email list, nurturing subscribers, turning strangers into customers with email. Is what what I love to do. And summit's built just that. They build email lists of customers. And what I've spent time refining is a process.

Where you can de platform people from social media, from your block onto your email list, because all that is rented space. Like I've had clients that had, let's say, 50,000 followers on their company profile on LinkedIn, and they were super happy with that. But guess what? What happens when LinkedIn changes their algorithm?

What happens when the LinkedIn AI tools checking accounts for their quality decide you suddenly don't meet the standards anymore, or there's a false negative or false positive signal and they shut down your account? I've had seen that more than once, and I've seen that to all sorts of account sizes. I even seen Facebook ad accounts that had a billion dollars of ED spend under their belt getting shut down for no reason.

So why? Why take that risk, take control over the data that you. 

Chris O'Hare: Mm. And Jan, it's so powerful because it's exactly all the messaging that I give when I say why you need your own app, it's to de platform your audience. I love it. And, and the thing is as well with These tech giants is that, I mean, you're looking at Facebook.

Jan Koch: If you built all your audience on Facebook now and now 

Chris O'Hare: the popularity of Facebook is dropping and the ad spend is dropping and, and everyone's moving to other platforms like TikTok, you can have to do all that hard work again. I mean, it's not, obviously not gonna be as hard, but you're gonna have to do that all again.

So why not build them away from your, you know, from those tech giants at the same time and, and you. Make sure that you've got a, a, a plan B yeah. That you can then tap into 

Jan Koch: and, and we have email in our lives, any, everywhere. Like it, it's not disappearing. There are studies that show that every day, 330 billion emails get sent.

Like it's, it's not going anywhere. And. What I love about email is you're building one-to-one relationships at scale, because every single person that subscribes to your list, they want to hear from you. Why? Why would they be on your list? Otherwise, giving somebody your email address is a very personal thing, very big sign of trust.

Just as with installing an app on your phone also is a very big sign of trust. So the more channels you have to communicate with somebody on that elevated level. It's just more opportunity to be in front of them to keep conversations going. Like a regular newsletter, for example, keeps referrals coming in.

If you send an email once a week, you are always present with your subscribers. And then if, if they come across somebody, you could use your services. They're ma, they're more likely to make an introduction. Or if you have a daily newsletter, which I do right now, I, I spend about two hours a week writing and scheduling seven emails.

I am constantly selling. I'm constantly pitching. I'm getting people on the phone to book sales calls with me. I'm getting feedback from my audience what topics resonate with them, what topics don't resonate? I see which marketing angles work. It's a playground to learn about your audience and your bias, and then you can use automations when somebody actually starts a project with you.

I just had a, had a conversation with a friend of mine who sells local calisthenic parks. He's. We're, we are setting up an automation when somebody kicks off the project to have their custom Calin Park built. I think on average he sells them for like 35,000 euros, but they can go up to multiple six figures and projects.

So high touch is very important in his industry, and what we'll do is we'll set up an automated campaign that guides his customers through the process of actually manufacturing the park. The construction phase and then the, the sign off phase when everything is, is getting ready to be used and they can open the park.

And with those touchpoints, you create a lot of intimacy between you and your customers. And they're, they're countless examples how Emec can let you do that. I mean, as, as really good point. It's these welcoming sequences is what they call them, isn't it? Where you, you get them to sign up and then they, they have.

A pre-done list or sequence of emails that get sent out. Yeah. So, okay. I mean, obviously the, the name of this show is Quick Win, c e o, and we want to kind of know what the, the, the, the juicy bits of email marketing is that are gonna give you the most impacts. Just run through like that welcoming sequence.

Run through the, the parts of email marketing that are really, really important. What's gonna, what have you seen? Because you, you read a lot about this on the internet, you know you've got all these marketing influencers all over, you know, Twitter and TikTok and you name it. And they always give you everything, but they don't necessarily tell you what the things that they're gonna work.

Are gonna give you the impact and what you need to just concentrate on. What are those things? The first thing is make sure that you email at least once a week, and I hear people screaming, I don't know what to write about. I'll just write spammy emails. Or they, they won't be valuable enough. I don't know what to write about every single week.

Well, you, you'll have to find a way to do this and there are processes we can talk about later in this conversation if we have time to come up with topics for weekly email or even a daily, because you won't fix a low email open rate and a low click rate by sending fewer emails. There, there's no way you can do this.

You have to send more emails, and the more often I send emails, the higher the click rates go, the higher the open rates go. It's counterintuitive, but that's why I'm now sending a daily newsletter because I see open rates of 50% on a daily newsletter, which is ridiculous. And then, What you do in those email newsletters that also very few people talk about is you obviously have call to actions in there to book a consultation call with you, or to download the this freebie that you have or to click on that block article that you just posted or whatever it is.

You can tag people based on what they do with your email. So when somebody clicks on that consultation call link, you tag them that they are interested in a consultation call, and then what you do is you have an automation that pulls them out of the regular new set, adds them into a sequence of emails in case they don't end up booking.

So they go onto this co. Page where you have the calendar form embedded so that they can schedule a call. If they do amazing, you just keep them running in the, in the new setup as usual. But if they don't book a call, if life gets in the way, the phone rings and they end up leaving that page without taking the chance to book a call with you, you can follow up with those people specifically with automated email sequences to say, Hey, I've seen that you've been on our call, but you didn't on on the page to book a call.

You didn't have a chance. So actually finish, finish the process. Here's a link. Again, I would love to chat with you, like you bring people back to that call, and this is common practice in e-commerce where they are called abandoned card campaigns. You put a, you put a product into the shopping card and then don't buy it 10 minutes after you left the card.

You get an email, Hey, you've, you forgot something, here's 10% off. Why not do that at the stage beforehand when you sell the service that's, let's say 10,000 or 20,000 or a. Why not bring people back to that call page where they can book the consultation course so that your sales team can actually get on the phone with them?

What tools would you use to, to do that? That's a really good one. I've seen this work very well with Convert Kit. I've seen this work very well with Active Campaign. Alternatives would be mail light. Who could do the same thing? Ground Hawk is a WordPress based automation that could do that. MailChimp could probably do that as well.

They have click tracking as well, depending on the plan. What you want to make sure is when you pick a platform that you can actually tag people based on what they do with your emails, and then you can have multiple starting points for your automated email sequences, because it might be that you have different.

Funnels that lead people to that page where they book a consultation call. You could have Facebook ads, LinkedIn as links on your website. They all look to that consultation page call, and at that point you want to be able to pick that person and to send them follow up emails if they don't book. That's it's really interesting cause I haven't actually looked into that myself in terms of using where they are in the process to kind of change that sequence of emails or even to kind of follow up on abandoned.

Car emails. I, I hadn't even thought about that. So it just shows you that when, when you, you have a conversation with someone who's an expert in that area, they, they can show you some of the angles that you just wouldn't necessarily think about. And that's why it's important to have someone like you as a friend, Jan, so I can tap into you

Absolutely. To give you another example that many people don't, don't consider. We all have contact forms on our websites, right? We all want people to email us. Why not attach a automated follow up sequence to that contact form? They send you an email, and if you have a good sales team, you get, they get back to that person within the same.

May, maybe within 48 hours, two working days, they follow up, pick up the phone and call that person. But why not also send them appropriate information via email three days after they send the contact request and saying, Hey, this is our company. There's a short video embedded from the CEO saying, Hey, thanks for your request.

We are looking forward to learning more about how we can serve you. We are. Focus to giving the best experience possible to to our clients. Imagine what that does to the prospect who gets a personalized message from the company's c e o. You do the work once, and then you set it up repeatedly and what you just said about this.

Awareness of where people are in the buying journey. That is what separates an email list with a 10% open rate and zero sales from something that I've built for myself and for clients where you have 50% open rates. On the newsletter I have, I have automations with 80% open rate, and I have maybe a hundred people that have been through those automations, but it's so high because it's the right hundred.

You don't need to send the same email to everybody. That sounds like segmentation. It does. Which is what, what you talk a lot about and how do you deter people don't understand the term. No. And yeah, and I, I guess, and never did I really, I mean, I, I understand it from a, from a coding perspective, but from a marketing perspective.

I didn't know where you were alluding to, and then I, I got one of your emails come through and I read it and I was like, that's really interesting in terms of the buying journey, where they are on the buying journey as well as, The demographics, cuz that's what most people kind of tend to talk about.

People they segment in demographics, they're that kind person and that kinda thing. Do you miss that? What do you misses? And that's where the personalization ends , right? Yeah, that's, well, yeah, that's true. And a lot of people, I would say, even for me, because it's, it's easy to just say, right, I will just do X amount, but what people are missing.

It's, the conversion rate is so much higher because it's personalized. Yeah. It's because it's, they're reading as if the, it's been directed to them, and therefore they feel like the, the email is more important, and I'm assuming that's why your click through right rates and your, your open rates are so, so much higher.

I mean, the average open rate of an email marketing campaign is 4.5% and you are talking forties, fifties, all the way up to. So there's clearly something in that and sorry to interrupt, but I am in the digital marketing space, so I am marketing to people who know all these techniques. If you're marketing to people who don't know that, you would see probably higher results.

That's really interesting. So, Going back to, alright, so you've got, you, you're wanting to segment your audience. How, how, how would you even start to begin to segment that audience? Because clearly that's a, that's part of the secret to getting high open rates. Yeah, that, that's where you actually do the most of the work.

So it's a brilliant question. When you think about the segments that you have, think about what are the reasons somebody would subscribe to your email list? Let's say with, with this guy I I met with before we hopped on this recording, he's now launching a report to tell companies the benefits of healthy employees, and then on the backend of that report, he's trying to sell them on his custom colorist Tenex parks.

Why would somebody from a company subscribe to that report? They actually have pressure from their manager to perform. Maybe they are the c e O of a small company and need to make that decision themselves. Maybe they are just chopping around. Those are already three different pain points, levels of engagements, and three different ways you need to speak to that person in your email.

I'm sorry, not sure what that. Alexa as Alexa. So before this call Yan said Alexa, turn on video mode. And his his whole, all his back lights turned on, the lights turned off and gave this nice mood setting. And I was like, this, this guy knows about automation. Something I, I've been trying to do more with, but series not.

Not letting me either. Dunno if any anyone's tried to do Siri Home Kit, but it's awful. Anyway, carry on. Yeah, yeah. Coming back to that segmentation point, you, you have to understand what the reasons are for people to sign up to your list in the first place. Because if I have a C E O who's looking to improve the health and performance of his employees in the company, I need very different messaging compared to somebody who's working in the HR depart.

Ju just the different positions. Decide how I write the copy in my emails and what call to actions I can use to actually get as many people as possible to book a consultation call so I can sell them on a custom colorist tennis park. That. That's one thing. Pain points and desires. The other thing is how long have they been on the OR email list, and what content did they actually already see?

So if I have a call to action, let's say for my consulting on email strategy. , I don't want to say check out my consulting package five times if somebody already clicked on the link. So I'll use conditional content in my emails and the, these are things that you set up once and then you can copy and paste them into every email that you write and into every newsletter.

So it sounds complicated, but it's work you do once you do it right, and then you can just copy and paste it and don't have to worry about it ever again. So, If somebody already saw your sales page, they saw the form to book a call, they saw context about the the products or services that you offer.

You can actually speak to those three people differently if you understand what segment they're in. Right. And so you're talking about tags and tracking that. How are you tracking that? What's, what's the platform that you're using? Cause obviously you've got Convert Kit and, and the rest of it. How, how are you?

Yeah. How are you tracking it? Yeah, I'm using Convert Kit. Right. I've switched from Active Campaign to Convert Kit diff. Different story bo. Both are decent platforms and with Convert Kit, what you can do is you can have automation rules. So with this engagement tracking, what I do is I have my landing page URLs.

and I can say Inside Convert kit, when a subscriber clicks on that url, do this, that, and the other thing. So I can apply tags, I can remove tags, I can put them into automated sequences, I can remove them from automated sequences. And this is where this entire email marketing strategy gets messy if you are not careful with this.

So what I always do when I work with somebody new, we map. The entire structure and a mind map so that we have a visual flow. Okay. Here are the five starting points where somebody can go into my email newsletter. What types of automations does each one need to go to so that you have a visual representation of how your subscribers can actually go through your sequences that you're building?

That's, well cuz obviously the audience are not gonna understand Some of the technicalities. And so for you to go through that and make it quite easy to, to understand is really important. And it sounds doable. I, I sent you a checklist right after this call that we can share with the listeners so that they could see if they are in the stage to actually use these advanced types of automation or not, because most people are, they just don't know about it.

And the tech, I mean, just what I'm explaining right now is intimidating too. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's there, there's different levels, isn't there? So if you're not doing level one, then obviously, you know, there's no point going to level two because there's a lot of low hanging fruit and quick wins that you can get from level one.

Yeah. Before you, you move on to the technical stuff. But I mean, just sending emails every day obviously is gonna sound like it's gonna be a massive quick win for people, which they don't necessarily do. I mean, this is what I've started doing this year, is I've started sending out Some content on my LinkedIn every day instead of like once a week, which, which is having a massive impact in my impressions.

And it's, it's staying high because it's almost compounding because the algorithm's learning more and more about me on, on LinkedIn. It is. So, and it's, it's a similar process with email and what, what people overcomplicate is I want to send valuable emails. Yeah. What is value in the first place?

Somebody gave you their email address, they want to hear from your company, share personal wins, share what is internally going on, what, what the team is learning, how things are evolving, reference industry news and add your perspective to those share case studies, new product developments. Even entertaining stories, making people smile is a huge value.

Like people remember how you make them feel, not what you necessarily say or write in your emails. And if you have a process for creating this content out of everything that's around you, just being mindful about what's actually going on around you in the office, what conversations are being had, what, what questions come up in the customer onboarding over and over again that you can reference in an email.

What content do you already. that you can repurpose in emails. Those are very low hanging fruits, as you said, to get a new set off the ground and then you add one automation, the next automation, the next automation, and you just grow organically this way. Yeah, that sounds great. And I think, what about the writing process then, in terms of trying to, to drum up a lot of this, this content, because that, I'm almo.

Well, I mean now we've got chat. E p t, we have no excuse, right? , I mean the, the, the, the kind of thing that that does, people, a lot of copywriters thinking are gonna go out of business, but actually a lot of people don't realize is they've got a massive advantage, especially if you're a copywriter because you can write great copy.

And bang it out in half the time. And there's a lot of time before the industry starts moving into that area of ai. Yeah. But tell me the writing process then of how to kind of really drill into that, because I think that's gonna be the most difficult part. It is, and it is difficult because most people don't separate ideation from writing.

It's two very different mindsets. You, for one, you need to be creative, find topics to write about. I usually have 30 minutes a week where I just map out 25 things I feel like I could talk about, can be Twitter threats that I enjoyed can be my own social content that performs well, that I could then expand on in an email.

Can be something I remember from last week that made me feel good. All those things. And then I have my list of 25 topics. I weed out the seven that I want to write about in that email for the for the weeks. And then I have this framework, and I'm looking at my screen right now. So I don't mess this up. I have a very specific structure, how I write sales related emails for personal stories.

I just write how I feel because. Over the past years, I've sent more than 2 million emails. I've, I've, I've got the flow down. But if you need a process, if you need a structure, start with a hook, a sentence or two to draw people in, to get them excited about reading the email. You elaborate the problem, you agitate the problem.

You really put some salt into the wound. Make them feel the pain and the, the relevance of solving what you're talking about. You solve the problem. That's the the common p a s framework that you hear in copywriting all the time. You prove the solution works, you de-risk your solution. Adding customer testimonials, money back guarantees, let's hop on a free consultation call before we pull the trigger, all that stuff.

And then you have the actual call to action at the end of the. That, that's a framework that I've learned from a million dollar copywriter that I've started using myself. That worked quite well for me. The, the real game changer is, as I said, having set block of 30 minutes to come up with ideas and then giving yourself another 30 minutes or an hour, however long you need in the beginning, you'll need more time, and then you'll become more effective writing emails to actually write the.

Yeah, I mean that's why I've, that's why I'm doing it daily now instead of weekly, is because the, I'm building the habit and the muscle of writing. Cuz honestly, I would say it's probably the hardest thing I do is writing. Can you imagine? It is? Yeah. Yeah. And I met my social content in advance as well. I have a 30 minute block for email, 30 minute for social.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and that's what I'm doing as well. Like, I'm, I'm forcing myself to do it within half an hour. And if I can't do it, then I will just publish or I'll, I'll tickle it off and make it look a bit nicer and then publish it anyway. And now I'm trying to fit more in that 30 minutes so I don't have to do the next day

Yeah. So yeah. And the other thing is video. I'm trying to learn how to be more. Condensed in my conversational style when I'm and, and something that I think email is really good. Platform for is video. I've heard a lot of people have been able to embed the video that they'll have a read, but then they'll put a video in there if they want to get more depth from it.

And I think that's, that's quite a powerful feature that I've noticed, especially when you've got the likes of TikTok and which are very video focused. You need some of that. You need something different in your, in your emails. Would you, would you recommend shifting the kind of like media style in your emails?

Or would you just stick with text? I would recommend to test that. Cause E every audience is different and I'm very of anybody who says, you have to absolutely do this because you can't know and I can't know. What I will say is I personally use as few images as possible because, 99% of email clients don't load the images unless your subscriber clicks on.

Okay? It's safe to load these images. Ah, so your, your new set layout looks broken and it's not trustworthy, and it's actually hurting your brand reputation. So that's a big thing. Then you, what you can do inside images is you have these things called old tags. That is a sentence or two that gets loaded if the image doesn't get.

So what I put into this all text, usually on websites, it's meant to describe the image for screen readers so that visually impaired people who use the screen reading software can actually experience images on that website as well, because then the screen reader reads the all text and says there's an image of Yan and Chris during their interview.

If we were to put a screenshot of this up, what I do in image, in in emails instead is say, please turn on your images to. So that, that's an easy win. Yeah. Tell people that's a good one. What to do when it comes to embedding video. I use this occasionally, and I have not seen a massive change in open rates or click rates.

So it's not, it's not hurting, it's not, it's not gaining too much. What Convert Kit does is it pre-run us the video as a gift fire. So there's a little bit of animation going. If, if the email line is set to load this element, there's a little bit of animation going, and when, when you click on that gif, it actually takes you to the link that you've put behind.

YouTube video, video embedded on your website or whatever. That's a great one. Yeah, I mean it sounds like you're really selling Convert Kit is the, the platform that you protect. Many, many others do that too. I just speak about Convert Kit because that's what I've sent 800,000 emails through last year.

Wow, okay. So, so clearly it's obviously a good platform to use and, and it's the one I've actually signed up to, to use. I was very happy. Yeah. Good. Okay, so just to, to kind of wrap up can you summarize your, your top three quick win recommendations that to give you email marketing superpowers.

Send more emails, split test subject lines, so inside it, again, others do this too. You can have two different subject lines for your emails and then you can see which angle resonates best and over time that works. Stick to a schedule, send the same day, the same time, so that you train your subscribers to expect at, at 5:00 PM German time, I send out my email.

So my subscribers expect at 5:00 PM German. There's an email from YN in my inbox. I've been doing this since 2020. If I had to add a fourth one, The tagging and the segmentations are key because you, you get into the habit of writing, but this thing really scales once you have these targeted sales sequences that actually follow up on those missed calls, follow up on abandoned carts and all the other things.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, some 

Chris O'Hare: great quick wins there. So really appreciate that Ya. Thank you. And thank you everybody. I hope you enjoyed that. And until next time, I'm Chris O'Hare, your quick win CEO signing out.

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