The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
Mastering Email Marketing: From Welcome Sequences to Audience Adaptation with Melanie Batistelli and Branda Villacob
Unlock the secrets to skyrocket your email marketing success with insights from email marketing mavens Melanie Batistelli and Branda Villacob. Discover how to craft a welcome sequence that not only converts subscribers into loyal followers but also drives significant sales. With tips on creating sequences of at least four emails, Melanie and Branda guide you through the metrics that matter and how to make data-driven adjustments to keep your strategy on point.
Dive into the nitty-gritty of engagement rates in your welcome sequences. We break down what open rates and click rates mean for your campaign and why comparing these metrics against your own historical data is more insightful than industry standards. Learn the importance of regular monitoring and tweaking, especially if you're running ads, to maintain consistent engagement. Melanie and Branda also share how to identify and address drops in engagement, ensuring your welcome sequence remains compelling and effective.
Finally, adapt your email marketing strategies to resonate with different audiences and changing economic conditions. From the power of storytelling to the effectiveness of a direct approach, discover what messaging works best for different segments. Understand how economic downturns and seasonal fluctuations can influence consumer behavior and necessitate changes in your approach. Melanie and Branda emphasize continuous experimentation and adaptation, sharing practical examples and inviting listeners to their podcast, Chaos to Conversions, and their upcoming sessions at the Teacher Seller Summit. This episode is packed with actionable strategies to elevate your email marketing game.
Get Your Tickets to Teacher Seller's Summit!
https://rebrandedteacher.kartra.com/page/hM1199
Branda and Melanie's Podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0K7iecvTpCNf3QEVyVOC4D
Branda's Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/therelevantcollective/
Branda's Website:
https://www.therelevantcollective.com/
Melanie's Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/duxburydigital/
Melanie's Website:
https://duxburydigital.co/about
Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on Teachers, pay Teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Speaker 1:Today we have a rare treat we actually have two experts on the podcast. Melanie Battistelli and Brandon Villacob are here talking about how to monitor your email sales funnel and make adjustments as needed. So if you have an email marketing sales funnel that's designed to kind of warm people up on your email list, get them to make a purchase, and it's not doing exactly what you want it to do, or maybe you're not even paying attention to it, maybe it's just kind of a set it forget it type of thing for you, melody, and are going to be talking about how to check your data for those funnels, when you should be checking your data, how often you should be checking your data, what specific things you're looking for in terms of how to know whether or not specific emails within that funnel are working for you and then what kind of adjustments to make based on the data. This episode is jam-packed with incredible information and conversations. Let's go ahead and let's meet Branda and Melanie.
Speaker 1:Hey ladies, how are you? Hey, good Lauren, how are you doing today? Good, it's such a treat Like I normally don't get to talk to more than one person at once on the podcast, so this is a real special treat to have both of you guys here and I'm excited to talk all things email marketing, welcome sequences with you guys. But first I would love for you guys to just introduce yourself. You've both been on the podcast before but for anyone who may not know you, I'd love for y'all to take a second maybe, start with Melanie and just introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So, hi everyone, I'm Melanie Battistelli. My business name is Duxbury Digital, so that's where you might have seen me around before. I have been working with primarily TPT sellers since 2021 behind the scenes in managing their teams and their launches Love it and Branda.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm Branda. I'm a copywriter and content strategist, also known as the Relevant Collective on Instagram and pretty much everywhere else. I've worked with like 50 plus I say like former teachers or teachers turned business owners, helping them with content creation and copywriting across launches, blogging, email marketing and more.
Speaker 1:Love it. I feel like we're really blessed to have you both here today and get a lot of your expertise, because we get a lot of questions about welcome sequences, Like how do I know first of all, like what to put in my welcome sequence, which I'm sure I think one of you is going to be covering at TSS We'll talk about your TSS sessions here in just a little bit and then also how do I know if I did a good job on it? Like how little bit? And then also how do I know if I did a good job on it, Like how do I know if it's actually working for me? Can we take a second real quick, and just talk about what a welcome sequence is and what the overall objective would be for a standard welcome sequence?
Speaker 2:Go for it, branda, that's all you girl.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so a welcome sequence is basically a series of emails that someone gets whenever they subscribe to your email list. And sure, welcome sequences are optional technically, but if you ask me from a copywriting standpoint, I'd say they're really essential, because the whole purpose of an email sequence is not only to welcome the people that are coming in, like yeah, it's great for them to say hi and deliver your freebie. That's obviously important, but the really essential part is actually converting them to really warm, engaged subscribers. The data has shown people who've studied different welcome sequences and the performance that people who have welcome sequences are more likely to sell to their email list and make sales from their subscribers and they're more likely to have an engaged list. So it's just really important for the health of your email list.
Speaker 1:And when we're talking about this, I know that at TSS this will be talked about a whole lot more, so I don't want to just dwell on this for a lengthy period of time. But about how many emails are we talking about? Are we talking about, like, two emails, four emails, 10 emails, like? Give us a number. That's a good place to kind of start.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good question. I think, if you're doing it yourself, like it's better to have something rather than nothing. When I'm personally writing emails for people or what I recommend is a minimum of four and I have a freebie actually that I go through like all the different four emails that I recommend in a welcome series, you know, when I'm also working with someone who might also be pitching something in their email, especially if it's a higher offer like a membership or something like that, then we might do more, like six to seven emails, because we're really trying to warm them up and then obviously hopefully convert them to being a buyer within that series.
Speaker 1:And when I did some small group email coaching this last year it was during the summertime, so teachers are not a lot of teachers are buying and some of the disappointment that I had with a few people they were like, oh my gosh, I was expecting that I was going to see all of these bundle sales right, Like I was going to make so much money straight away from this welcome sequence that it was just going to be this really high converting sequence for me.
Speaker 1:And I know that a lot of times that's the case and sometimes it's just not the purpose of your welcome sequence. But when we're looking at this and we're looking back at maybe a welcome sequence that we're like it just didn't do what I was hoping that it would do. What are some of the things that we're looking for to say like, okay, why isn't my welcome sequence encouraging people to say, reply back to me and build my sender reputation and warm them up? Why aren't they clicking? Why aren't they purchasing? What are some things that we're kind of looking at, data wise, to maybe see why we're not getting the results that we were hoping to get?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm sure Melanie can speak a lot to the data side in a moment, but I think one thing that's also important to say about welcome sequences is, obviously the hope is to convert to buyers, but I always tell my clients sometimes that's a long term thing.
Speaker 3:I feel like marketing is long term. A lot of what we're doing in the welcome sequence, too, is just brand awareness, making people aware of what we're selling, and so that doesn't mean that they're going to buy right then and there and think about like our own habits. It's very rare right that whenever we sign up for a freebie we're getting an email series of like oh yeah, we're buying it from every single person. I probably rarely buy stuff in an email sequence, but I'm learning about someone's membership or offer or product and then I might have that in my mind, maybe I go research it, maybe I'm following them on social media, I see it some more and then later down the road I buy. Buying cycles tend to usually be longer than just a welcome sequence, but, melanie, I'm sure you can kind of speak to the different data we're looking forward to see about conversion within that sequence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's the dream, right, that people buy immediately, like as soon as they get into your welcome sequence. But, like Branda just said, I mean that's not often the case. So what I like to do is I mean, there's a couple of things that you can do. Is you want to pay specific attention to the data of your like individual emails? Because if there's some place where, like, you're getting a lot of unsubscribes or you know the click rate had been between like one and 3%, but then this one email and there's a clear call to action and your click rates like a 0.2, well then you probably like want to revisit that particular email.
Speaker 2:And that's something that I think and it's hard, and I'm fully guilty of it, and I'm sure you both are too in your business where you get something done and then you're just like, oh, thank God, it's done. And then you like never go back and look at how anything's doing ever again. And this is something that I've also started doing with all three of my like retainer clients have courses and or memberships, and all of them have some sort of evergreen component now as well. So you can also look at some emails that you might have used from a live launch and tweak those if they did really well and like pull them into a welcome sequence. But just like really paying attention to what is performing well and like if there's a certain place it feels like you're losing a lot of people, just like actually taking 10 minutes a week to look and making that part of your routine. I think is really important.
Speaker 1:I love that, so we're taking that time to look. You mentioned looking at click rates, probably open rate and looking for emails. What numbers are we specifically looking for? Is there a goal within an average percentage of unsubscribes or an average click rate or an average open rate? Is there something in particular that we're looking for there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for a typical we don't have like hard numbers, especially because it really depends on the industry. Like the teacher industry is going to be different than if you go and like just search it online. You're going to find things that are more like maybe you know B2B businesses or stuff like that. So but in general I like to think of, like you want your welcome sequence probably be like two to three times what you'd see in a normal email to your audience. So if you're normally getting, you know, 30% open rates probably most of us are higher than that nowadays because open rates are kind of inflated so it's probably like 50%. If you're normally getting a 3% click rate on your emails, then hopefully what you're seeing inside your welcome sequence is about three times that. So I like to see my click rates probably in like this you know 20% or in teens, depending on the type of email the first email that's going to your audience where the freebie is going out, hopefully you're getting like a pretty close to 100% open and I would say at least like a 50% click is pretty common on that first one because you're giving them something that they asked for and then from there it's going to kind of dwindle down a little bit.
Speaker 3:I would say if you're getting below 60 to 70% opens on your welcome sequences, that's kind of time to start evaluating because that is getting a little bit low for a welcome sequence.
Speaker 3:And if it's definitely dipping below that 10% mark for a click rate, again depending on what's in the email, if you're getting to the emails where you're starting to pitch something, sure you're going to see lower clicks on that because not every person is interested in buying. But if it's freebies that you're handing out, if you're sending them to a resource, hopefully you're seeing pretty good clicks and I kind of again talk about this in a freebie that I have. But as you're going down the and I talked about this in my presentation at TSS but as you're going down in the welcome sequence, you're going to see it start to dwindle. But when you see a big drop off, maybe you go from a 70% open one email to the next one is a 50% or 40%. That should be an indicator to you. Okay, something's kind of wonky here. Or again, like Melanie mentioned, if one email suddenly you're getting a ton of people unsubscribing when they go through that email in the sequence, that should be a red flag.
Speaker 1:So basically, what I'm hearing you say is that when we're looking at our welcome sequence as a whole, there's an industry standard that we should be making sure that at least our first couple of emails are kind of lining out with. But then from there we're looking for discrepancies within that funnel itself, because that's telling us, like we're looking at, we're comparing our audience behavior to our audience behavior to determine whether or not, like we use the industry standard to see, like okay, is my funnel as a whole working? Maybe did I choose the correct lead magnet. Is it working? Are people actually opening my emails that first email and clicking on that first email, but then Past that point? I'm kind of comparing the previous emails or the surrounding emails within that sequence to see are they engaging with any particular email in a way that's different than others, right Than the other emails?
Speaker 3:Exactly. I think in marketing a lot we get caught up on, like the overarching data points that people talk about, but a lot of times it really is personalized because we could say all day long, oh, the average, you know open rate for an email is 25 to 35%, but you may be someone who's getting something much higher than that every single week. So if you see a difference in your list, if that doesn't reflect what you normally experience, then obviously you know something to look at there. But definitely compare it a little more personally. But also keep in mind the normal standards. If you're seeing a 30% open on your welcome sequences, that's definitely not normal. That's definitely not a standard and definitely something to look into. I don't know if, melanie, you have any other comments on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I just feel like that's something that we probably both get asked a lot, because people love a concrete example right, they want to know.
Speaker 3:But like.
Speaker 2:But how many like? What's the percentage? What should it be? So, as many times as we can name a number, like one of my clients, I mean, a good conversion rate on a sales page, for example, is 5%. But one of my clients her audience is super engaged and all of her launches usually convert much closer to 20%. So she gets sad when it drops to like 15%. But, like most people would be peeing their pants excited for a 15%, you know conversion on a course sales page. So, just to echo, like what Branda said, compare yourself to you, which is why it's so important to keep data, if not weekly, monthly because if you're just looking at all of the, you know industry standards and what other people are doing it's not really going to tell you about your own business. It'll tell you about other people's businesses, which is valuable but not actually helpful in the long run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think what you said there about like keeping tabs on it regularly which is where I know I struggle is keeping the tabs on it regularly because I'm like, well, I look at it, but then do I actually have time to fix it?
Speaker 1:So I kind of go through this struggle in my head, but it's so worth it, especially if you're someone who's running ads, because I feel like if you're running ads, there are times when Facebook or wherever you're running at, they're getting it right and they're bringing your people in, and then at a certain point sometimes you kind of have to do a little tweaking because your open rates start to drop and some of those things start to happen. Let's say that you're looking at that welcome sequence and you're noticing that, as a whole, these people that you have coming in from a source whether that's Facebook ads or Pinterest or a blog post or wherever you start to notice that that welcome funnel is not performing as well as your general emails would right. So you've got like a 60% open rate and the people on this welcome sequence are averaging like 50%. What are some things that I need to look at then? Like what do I need to do?
Speaker 1:Is it going back to the very beginning and seeing what's my freebie, what's my opt-in. How are they getting here? Is it really tightening up that sequence and making sure that they're not going on your generic list if they're not opening? What are some things that I need to start looking at if I'm seeing that my welcome sequence is maybe not performing up to the standard of my general emails that are going out to my list?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm a big fan of segmenting. I know Branda is too, so I'm sure she can talk about this a little bit more. But I participated in a bundle back in. It was outside the teacher space, but back in November, december and I got a lot of people added to my list. So, like you were saying, it kind of diluted what was previously some pretty engaged subscribers, although it did grow my email list by almost five times. So that was great.
Speaker 2:I basically now segment those people out of the emails that I usually send and maybe I'll send them some different ones. You know that aren't like specific for teacher sellers and that does make more work for me, but I have seen better results for both of my like quote email lists. I mean some things like Brandon and I's you know podcast apply to all online businesses. So like everyone will get those emails. But like when I sent the email last week for the teacher seller summit, like I didn't send that email to people who are not teaching because that doesn't make sense and then I would lose those people.
Speaker 2:So I think it's just making sure that you know kind of who's who on your list and a really easy way to do that is to ask and conduct like just a smidgen of market research by asking you know, if you're in the teacher space, like what grades are they teaching? Do you have a lot of specialists on your list or parents who maybe you didn't know? Were there One of Brandon and I's mutual clients actually? And of course you know if you have TPT and a TPT store you can create UTM codes to better understand, like where people are coming from.
Speaker 2:But I mean, a favorite way that's really easy that I like to do is also just duplicate a form or duplicate a landing page so you can see at a really easy glance like who's coming from blogs, who's coming from well I guess Pinterest doesn't have forms but like who's coming from what blog. You can create a separate landing page for a podcast, like a separate URL. Just duplicate something, the whole welcome sequence. I do that for ads for one of my clients. She's only running ads to two opt-ins right now but we duplicated everything, the whole welcome sequence, the whole sales page, so she can see exactly how much literal money she is making from people who came through the ads funnel and buying right away.
Speaker 1:Love that. Let's move into practicals now. Let's say I've identified okay, this particular email has a lower open rate than the rest of them. What are some things that I can do to get that open rate up?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't think it has to be really complicated, which is the good news. So sometimes it can be something as simple as changing the subject line, playing around with things. I think the big philosophy and mindset to have about email is that it's all about experimentation and it can sometimes be the simplest thing. Sometimes it is like literally removing an emoji or putting an emoji into your subject line. It can also be about your preview text. So, for example, I think in the past I would kind of do more like subject lines that were kind of more like funny and cutesy, and then I noticed lately that the emails that were getting open more the more direct ones. Here's your freebie, let's talk about this, right? So sometimes you can just change, like how you're addressing that preview text. What are you saying in there? Open for your guide to this? So playing around with that, seeing what works, and then kind of going like past just the open, the click rate as well, thinking about how many times are you putting your links in there? Do you have really clear call to actions? Are you utilizing buttons? If you notice that maybe there's just one email, you've played around with it, you've done the, you know. Change the preview text. You've tried to, you know, change your calls to action. You've done all the things right, you've changed the copy and it's just not quite performing how you want to.
Speaker 3:That's probably when it's an indication that maybe time to just rewrite it, ditch it, put something new in there, if you're trying the small things but there really are so many tiny things and little adjustments you can make to try to see if that will improve the overall performance of your email. Like I had a client that for a while we were doing a lot of storytelling. That's kind of a lot of how I write my emails is really nurturing with a story and then leading into like kind of why they're here, and that works really great for some audiences. But for her audience it was just a no go. Like we just saw that whenever we jumped straight into it we just straight to the message. That performed way better for her. Cool, we wouldn't have known that if we didn't experiment with it, if we didn't try out new things. So again, sometimes it's not necessarily rewriting the whole thing, but it might be adjusting how you're writing it or where the messaging comes into play or how quickly you're jumping into the call to action, things like that.
Speaker 1:And I've experienced that too where something that would typically perform well, like, say, you know, post the I'm not gonna say economy crash, but you know, like before, when the economy was in a little bit of a better state than it is right now.
Speaker 1:I had an email that was in one of my sales funnels that was about cost comparison, like hey, this is better. I think the subject line was initially like better than a cup of coffee, right, where the whole theme of it was this is what you get, like this is how much this costs and this is how much you normally spend on regular things, like two lattes, right? Or this cost is, you know, a pair of jeans on sale at Target or whatever. And it kind of had those cost comparisons and the first time that we ran it it did really well. And then, as the economy started to go down, it started to perform like less and less. It started like its performance started to go down and I think it was for my audience they didn't really want to think about the money Like. They didn't really want to think about other things that they could purchase with that, because those were already decisions that they were on a regular basis having to say, like I don't think I can afford that cup of coffee, I don't think I can afford that impulse purchase over here, and so they wanted to think more about money in terms of how it was going to save them time or how it was going to make them more money, right, and so having to ditch that whole email and start over from scratch?
Speaker 1:I think it's kind of a hard process because sometimes you look at it and you go well, it was just working. I guess that goes back to what Melanie was talking about with constantly keeping an eye on how something is performing, because if not like, something that was working really well for you may not resonate with your audience right now. Do y'all see a fluctuation in time of year as, particularly in the teacher space, where you know at this certain time of year a teacher might want that story that you were talking about before and then, at a different time in the year, they may not want it and they may want it to be more direct. Do y'all see any kind of fluctuation with that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, again, it's going to depend on the person in the audience. But definitely certain times of year, for example, like Christmas time or back to school season or coming back from Christmas, things like that where, like, it's definitely more emotional marketing because we're like getting in the heads of teacher, like we know how stressed you are, we know how overwhelmed you are, like you go to class and your kids are chatty and they won't settle down and you're like going crazy, right. So there is a little bit more emotion in the selling there, whereas maybe, like you know, in a random Tuesday in March you know that maybe not be there as much. Maybe then we're talking more about the practicality of something, the results. Hey, you're getting to test prep season. Let's talk about the results that this product can get you for your class.
Speaker 3:So, really thinking about the mindset of you know where your audience is at right there and again, that's going to fluctuate on the type of products that you sell, the niche, the grade level, all those different things. But in general makes marketing good and goes back to Melanie's like market research thing isn't really knowing your audience and really getting inside their head, because we can guess all day on what people are feeling or what they're going to be attuned to. But a lot of times we really don't know unless we just ask or we experiment and play around with things. And I think that's really awesome that you saw in that email like that shift and change. So I think people really miss subtle things like that. They're like, oh, no one cares about this product anymore, like no one's buying it, it's just not a good product anymore. But it's maybe not the product. It might be how you're messaging it, it might be how you're selling it and you might need to shift with the season or with the economy or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1:I love that. So we've talked about the importance of monitoring your emails and making sure that the welcome sequence that you have, that you're keeping an eye on the open rates, or click rates, you're keeping an eye on that data and really monitoring that data to make sure that everything's performing the way that you want it to. So we've talked about the importance of monitoring your welcome sequence to make sure that it's performing the way that you want it to perform, to make sure that you're getting the results that you want and that nothing is changing with your audience. We've talked about little things that not only how to interpret that data and what to be looking for, but little tweaks and changes that you can make along the way. What else do we need to know about welcome sequences that you guys are going to teach us at TSS? Melanie, you want to start us off?
Speaker 2:at TSS. I'll be talking not only about like data for your emails, but also for strategies to keep track of your data on a weekly basis and how you can really add that to your CEO schedule and how it like doesn't have to be hard or overwhelming. So we'll look at that. Because I was also just thinking this morning, brandon, with our mutual client, there's been a lot of cold subscribers lately and we had sent them through a couple of re-engagement sequences and then I feel like more and more keep popping up. So last week I was like I'm just deleting them all, they're not exiting. So we deleted almost 2000 people and their open and click rates jumped up by like 15% and like a whole percentage and a half this week when we look back. So I wrote a little note in like the KPI tracker.
Speaker 2:I have like deleted like 1800 cold subscribers because if you're not paying attention or you're not keeping notes for yourself, you might go back and think like well, what the heck did I do?
Speaker 2:Was that like a really good email or like do we come out with a new product or like what happened there? But because I wrote myself a note that really is going to hopefully show an increase in open and click rates, like as we progress through May into June. So, anyway, I'll be talking about strategies to make things like that much easier for you, so you don't have to look back when you're planning for the next year and be like, oh, what did I do there? I can't remember if anything worked. You'll have a record to actually look at and be like, oh, that email performed really well or that landing page was doing great. Maybe I should introduce something like a tripwire to it, because a lot of people are opting in and I could make even extra money there. So, just making decisions based on data and what you're actually keeping track of, and not just what you think you should be doing.
Speaker 1:Love that, Branda. What are we going to be learning from you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm going to be continuing some of this talk about welcome sequences, particularly the idea of like am I giving too much away in my welcome sequence, which is a question I get from people all the time they're like I don't know if I put too much in my freebie or if my welcome sequence includes too much free information, how am I going to convert them to buyers?
Speaker 3:And so there's a lot of gray area there and I'm going to kind of help you tackle that gray area, give you some questions to think about, to decide if, for your particular audience, it's the right amount of information or maybe you've gone a little bit overboard.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I love that. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you both at TSS. In the meantime, where can listeners connect with you guys if they want to learn more? Yeah?
Speaker 3:well, we have a podcast together called Chaos to Conversions. That's probably one of the best ways to hear from us nowadays, and we also hang out on social media a lot. I'm at the Relevant Collective and Melanie is at Duxbury Digital.
Speaker 1:I love it, and we'll have links to all of that down inside of the show notes. Thank you, guys, so much for being here this morning and for sharing your knowledge, your wisdom, your expertise with us. So grateful to have you both back on the podcast, and having you back together is even better. Thank you for having us. Thank you, thanks so much for being here. You guys, if you enjoyed this episode, you can find links inside of the description on how you can connect with Branda and Melanie and work with them. You could also find a link to their podcast on the side of the description as well. And, of course, as always, you don't want to miss their TSS session.
Speaker 1:Teacher Seller Summit kicks off on June 27th. You guys do not want to miss this. If you are looking to grow your teacher entrepreneur business whether on TPT, off TPT, whatever I'm telling you, tss is for you. You're going to be able to meet and make connections with other teacher authors and teacher business owners in this space. You're also going to have access to over 40 incredible sessions watching on video on the platform and you can also listen on the go via our private podcast. There's going to be so many networking and learning opportunities with live panels with experts, roundtable discussions, co-working sessions. So many different things you don't want to miss TSS. You can find the link to grab your ticket down inside of the description. Do not miss it. All right, I'm going to see you guys right back here next week.