131: Unlocking Email Success: Master the Art of Creating Engaging Nurture Sequences
See the show notes for this Episode here.
This transcript has been automatically generated.
Bonnie Christine [00:00:00]:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. Now I am at home of my podcast equipment. That way, I'm not lugging it around all over the place, and I can record either at my studio or at home. So we have this tiny room. It's literally just the size of a closet, but it has a window in it right off of our garage. And my husband used to take, calls in this room when he was a cycling coach. And so since he hasn't done that in several years, I kind of took over this room as a secondary podcast room. Now I'm telling you this today because just outside the other door is our latest adventure, which is about 25 little baby chickens and ducks.
Bonnie Christine [00:01:05]:
And I suspect that you might be able to hear them today, But if you can, they're just right outside my door, and they're only a few weeks old. We're going to raise them in our backyard and use them in our garden. My children are so excited, but if you hear little chirps and peeps in the background, that's why. Now that's completely off topic, however, because today, we are talking about a nurture sequence. I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains running a multi 7 figure business doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success.
Bonnie Christine [00:02:16]:
I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to The Professional Creative Podcast. Stu, nurture sequences or onboarding sequences is something that I've talked about before. You can go visit episode number 41 where I talk about nurturing your email list for long term success. And I think that you'll especially like that episode because I'm also giving you a free download of 100 different nurture sequence ideas. But the reason that I wanna talk about it today is because it's really top of mind. We just recently completely overhauled our nurture sequence.
Bonnie Christine [00:03:15]:
I had built out a really long nurture sequence in my business a couple of years ago, and it's just kind of been running in the background. And so it's something that I really knew was on the dock for getting updated. And with my new marketing team, we were able to do that just a couple of months ago. And in doing so, we drastically increased our open rates. We also decreased our unsubscribe rates, which is really the goal. Right? So in this episode, I wanna share with you a couple of things that we did differently. And if you're not on my email list and would like to start getting my nurture sequence, you can go sign up for it over atbonniechristine.com. So let's start at the beginning.
Bonnie Christine [00:04:02]:
What is a nurture sequence? Well, this is also sometimes called an onboarding sequence, and it's a series of emails sent over the course of a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months to people who are new to your email list. Now the purpose here is to help people who are new to you and your community to learn about you and everything that you have to offer. It's an opportunity for you to give everyone the same introduction into who you are and what you do and why you do it. So you want to start building connection. You know, one of the most important things to build in any relationship is like no trust. We always talk about like no trust. You wanna like someone, you wanna feel like you know someone, and you wanna feel like you trust someone. And that's the case whether we're meeting and growing a friendship in real life or if it's online.
Bonnie Christine [00:04:58]:
Relationship building is just relationship building. Right? So before we really get started, if you are waiting until you have everything figured out and all your ducks, wink wink in a row to get started, you are missing out. Starting an email list and starting a nurture sequence is one of the things that I wish I would have started earlier in my business. So it's actually fairly simple. In fact, in an upcoming episode, I'm gonna talk to you about how to get a creative business started, and starting your email list is one of those very early first essential steps. So it's one of those things that we often overthink, we overcomplicate, we think it's Bonnie to be, you know, a tech nightmare, but it's really not. I think you can get this up and going in a day, get your nurture sequence up and going, and maybe another day's worth of work and just be done with it. So there's your motivation.
Bonnie Christine [00:05:57]:
Your email list is the key to building your business no matter how small your business might be or how big your business might be. So one of my goals is to always have more email list subscribers than I have followers on social media. So if you've been considering starting an email list, it's time to start working on it and writing your nurture sequence. So one of the biggest questions we get is how many emails should go inside of a nurture sequence? Well, most marketing experts will tell you somewhere between 5 7 emails is the best place to get started. It could be more or less depending on where you are in your journey. It could be, let's say, 3 emails, especially if you're just getting started. Or if you're more advanced and you really wanna put something robust working for you, it could be many more emails. But 5 to 7 is a great place to start.
Bonnie Christine [00:06:56]:
Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers' spam folders. I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit, you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open but also love. They have a drag and drop email editor that makes it easy to design emails that look and feel professional without any coding. Plus, they're powerful automation tools But that's really not all. ConvertKit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and behaviors. So for example, you can imagine that on my email list, I have people who are interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric.
Bonnie Christine [00:08:12]:
And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those 2 different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn subscribers into customers. So you know that we always want you to be growing your email list. And I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within a day of focused effort. It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in in, and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head on over to bonnie christine.comforward/ resources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today. You can go ahead and dive in and get familiar with the program.
Bonnie Christine [00:09:17]:
Their support is amazing, and see what you think. This is truly an email service provider who can grow with you from 1 subscriber to 500,000. So, again, head on over to bonnie christine.comforward/resources and check out ConvertKit today. So now let's talk about what to include. I've already shared with you I've got a free download of 100 nurture sequence ideas for you to really get your ideas flowing. You can find that over at the professional creative.com. So it's just professionalcreative.com, and you can get that in today's show notes. But let's say you're just going to focus on 3 right now.
Bonnie Christine [00:10:02]:
Well, the very first one should be an introduction to yourself. You can give a brief background of who you are, where you're from, why you do what you do, and then share just a little bit of your expertise. You want to start positioning yourself as an authority in your niche or in your industry, but you also don't want it to be braggy. Right? You don't want to be the hero of the story. You want to just subtly position yourself as an industry expert. You wanna be warm, super personable. You wanna talk to your audience like you would talk to a friend. And it can be really helpful if you have done some ICA work, that's ideal customer avatar.
Bonnie Christine [00:10:48]:
If you've done some ICA work, I like to think about this ideal customer as one singular person who I know very well. We're best friends. I call her by name, and I sit down and I write to her. And that can help sometimes. The next thing I love to include in this email is kind of what they can expect from you. So how many times do you think they'll hear from you each week or each month, and what will you be sharing so that they can get a grasp on whether they really want to continue getting emails from you or not? And then share a high level overview of the things that you offer. Remember, this is their first experience into dipping their toe into your world, And the very first email will always be your highest open rate, so you Bonnie use it wisely. Now the next thing that I would suggest that you do is invite them to respond.
Bonnie Christine [00:11:42]:
So maybe you ask them a question or maybe you want to invite them to introduce themselves to you. But whatever it may be, ask them to just hit respond and share the answer with you. This is going to really help you build that relationship. Okay. So that's email number 1. Now let's talk about the second email. This is where I would love to invite you to share a little bit more of your story. You will have a story.
Bonnie Christine [00:12:12]:
Why are you doing what you're doing? Why is it important? How does it relate to the people around you? So it's kind of a bio ish look at who you are and how you'll be guiding them on their journey with you. Let them into your life, into your world. Let them get to know you a little bit, and then you can also ask to get to know them. So again, I love an open ended question, an invitation to respond. Give them a chance to maybe reply and ask a question, and get ready for an inbox party. Now the remaining emails, so 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, can be emails that are really focused on providing high value. So now that they have an introduction into your world and they're beginning to get to know you a little bit, you want to very much focus on serving them. You want to very much provide high value, give them a reason to open your next email.
Bonnie Christine [00:13:11]:
So share your freebies. I'm sure you've got freebies working in your business already. Or you can come up with a freebie. Maybe you give away an iPhone background, or a desktop background, or a free printable, or an art print, or a discount code, or something like a color palette that you're using, something that is a gift to them. And then I love to share tips and tricks, again, focused on that high value. If you have a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel, this is a great place to start introducing the other places that you live and share online. And just keep providing high value in exchange for their time. You know, someone's inbox is I I like to think about it as an intimate place.
Bonnie Christine [00:14:01]:
It's a place where we all spend quite a lot of time. And if I'm allowing you Stu my inbox, I care about you and what you're doing. I look forward to your emails. I want to see them and I can't wait to open the next one. So that's the kind of feeling you want to have. You're not bugging people. Let me be clear. You are not bugging people by sending them high value emails.
Bonnie Christine [00:14:26]:
So if you're struggling with that kind of perception, what I'd love for you to do is think about an email that you have gotten, that you adored, that you found helpful or interesting or valuable, And then base all of your emails around the same concept, the same idea that got you excited to open that email as well. So think of a nurture sequence as kind of getting warmed up to your audience. Think about it as if you were sitting next to someone for the very first time, and you're just getting to know them. You'll be introducing them to what you do, what your offers are, if you have products, all of that is down the line. So those are called broadcasts. They're kind of one off emails that have announcements in them. This nurture sequence is your chance to build trust and a relationship with people without selling to them in any capacity. So Amy friends, go create your nurture sequence.
Bonnie Christine [00:15:26]:
Or if you're like me and you need to maybe just go take a glance at it and refresh it a little bit, go do that as well. Make sure to check the show notes for today's episode at professionalcreative.com to get that list of 100 different ideas for your nurture sequence. So with that, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.
