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The same goes for your onboarding process for new subscribers, opening new gateways, and creating a signature Tiny Taste lead magnet that will attract your target market. You can always add more lead magnets down the road to build on your success, but even with just one lead magnet in place, you’ll be converting more of your readers into subscribers.

In other words, we’ve focused on building smart systems so that no matter what life throws at you, your business will keep moving forward.

Because the truth is that many of us encounter periods in our lives when our time to work on our business may be limited. Maybe your spouse just started a new demanding job, and that leaves less time for you to work on your business. Maybe you’re expecting a new little one to join your family. Or you might just need a break from the weekly grind of running a business.

And so in this bonus optional lesson, we’ll explore additional opportunities for you to fine-tune your email system upfront, which will free up your time while also delivering maximum results for your business over the long-term.

Table of Contents

• But First, a Warning
• Let Your Brain Chew on This
• The Truth About Email Frequency
• How to Know What’s Working…And What’s Not
• The Fresh Resend
• The Never-Ending Story
• Choose Your Own Adventure
• The Do-Over
• Your Next Step

But First, a Warning…

If you haven’t already implemented the core strategies covered earlier in this module, you’re not quite ready for this bonus lesson. Because without that underlying framework in place, this lesson would be just plain overwhelming.

So if that’s you, head over to your calendar or planner right now and set a reminder for yourself to revisit this lesson later on. We still have a month left in this program, so you might decide to set a reminder for 3-6 months from now, to give yourself time to implement all the core strategies from earlier in this module. And then stop reading this lesson for now. When you’re ready down the road, you can always come back to this lesson.

Let Your Brain Chew on This

If you’re still reading, that means you already have the basic framework in place for an effective email strategy—a lead magnet plus on-brand messaging in your gateways, a rock-solid onboarding process, and a plan for how you’ll craft future emails to your list.

But the options for exactly how you expand from this point are pretty much endless.

Inside this lesson, I’ll share a few of the most effective “set it and forget it” techniques for automating your email strategy, but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything we cover here. You’ll need to make a CEO decision about what will be the best fit for you and your business.

To be clear, this lesson is intended as a reference guide, not a step-by-step tutorial. So when you get to the end of this lesson, you might think to yourself, “I’m not ready for this yet,” and that’s perfectly fine. When you are ready, you can refer back to this anytime.

Even if you do feel ready, you do not need to implement these techniques right now. In fact, some of these techniques might take weeks or even months to fully implement. Starting a project like that right now would make it incredibly difficult for you to finish this program, if not impossible. And we still have important ground to cover in the next two modules!

As you move through this lesson, I recommend jotting down some notes about which technique you plan to try out after this program is over and you can focus more fully on doing this work.

By the way, did you notice how I said to jot down notes about what you’ll try out? I said it that way because there is no “wrong” or “right” answer—only what you do and what you learn from it. Pretend you’re a scientist and watch what happens when you try these techniques. If they don’t work out how you’d hoped, learn from that and pivot from there.

The Truth About Email Frequency

You might remember from the lesson about the Brand Ambassador Boot Camp technique that it’s important to email your list at least weekly so your subscribers don’t forget about you.

That’s because your readers are getting dozens if not hundreds of emails every single day. They have a lot going on in their lives, and remembering every single mailing list they’ve ever subscribed to isn’t at the top of their priority list. So if you’re emailing every other week or monthly or even less frequently, subscribers may get your latest email and scratch their heads a bit wondering who you are and why you’re emailing them. They might even click the “report spam” button because they don’t remember who you are and think their email address got sold to you without their permission.

Sending a weekly email is a sweet spot to prevent all that from happening. But in some cases, emailing more frequently than once a week can pay off for your brand.

Emailing your list is a bit like entering a raffle. Every email you send is like getting another raffle ticket—another chance to win the attention of your subscribers. If you get one raffle ticket every week, that’s great. But sometimes when you send that one weekly email, some of your subscribers might be having a particularly busy day and not even see your message, let alone have time to read it. They might be traveling or out sick. Or maybe the subject line just didn’t grab them, so they deleted the message without reading it. And sometimes, your message might get caught in an overzealous spam filter and never even make it to some inboxes.

As just one example, let’s imagine…

• You email your list of 10,000 subscribers once a week every Monday. With an average open rate of 25 percent, that means 2,500 readers are opening those emails every week.
• Suppose you add a second email every Thursday. Your open rate for that second email is still 25 percent.
• Now here’s the interesting part: 2,000 of the readers who opened the Monday email also open the Thursday email, but the other 500 who opened Thursday’s email are additional readers who never opened your Monday email. The reasons could vary: Maybe Mondays are their busiest days of the week. Or it could be that they work a night shift, and they’re asleep every Monday morning when your message goes out. Or maybe they get a case of the Mondays every week and just don’t feel like dealing with more email messages than is absolutely, positively necessary.
• Whatever the reason, you’ve now increased the total number of engaged subscribers on your list from 2,500 to 3,000. That’s a 20 percent increase! In other words, 20 percent more of your subscribers are seeing your messages and remembering that you’re an authority worth following and listening to.

This is why emailing your list more frequently than once a week can pay off. It gives you more chances to get in front of your super fans’ eyeballs—more raffle tickets.

However, this becomes a balancing act because emailing too often can turn off some super fans and cause them to unsubscribe—not to mention the amount of work that would go into sending high-quality updates to your list daily! Just thinking of emailing my list daily makes me want to crawl back into bed with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

So I’m definitely NOT suggesting you email your list daily. That can lead to the quality of the content decreasing just to keep up with that frequency. You’ve already learned about why it’s so important that we train subscribers to open and click. Ho-hum, rushed email content would do the opposite and train subscribers that opening your messages is NOT worth it.

But what I am saying is this: Consider how you might create smart email systems upfront so that your emails show up in front of a larger percentage of your subscribers every week.

How to Know What’s Working…And What’s Not

After you try out any new email strategy, always be listening. Watch how your audience responds. Sure, you might get more unsubscribes from people who weren’t actually all that serious about following you in the first place. But those people weren’t likely to become your brand ambassadors or paying customers anyway. So watching your unsubscribe rate doesn’t actually tell you a whole lot.

Instead, watch these key performance indicators for your email list:

• Open rate: Many bloggers find that when they start emailing their list more frequently—as long as those emails are still on-brand and valuable for the reader—their average open rate goes up.
• Percentage of engaged subscribers: In the example earlier in this lesson, the percentage of engaged subscribers increased from 25 to 30 percent. That’s the effect you’re going for! How you check this metric will depend on your email marketing tool, but many email tools these days offer some sort of template automation or another way of automatically calculating how many of your subscribers have opened and/or clicked an email in a certain period of time. If you’re not sure how to find this, you’ll need to check the documentation for your specific tool or ask their tech support line.
• Orders: If you already have a product, keep an eye on how many orders you get a month. Many bloggers find that the more often they email their list, the more orders they get. That’s because more emails means more opportunities to remind your subscribers about how your product can help them achieve or do or be whatever it is that they want to achieve or do or be. But if you don’t have a product yet, that’s okay! We’ll talk about products more inside a later module.

Now that you see how emailing your list more frequently than once a week can deliver more results for your business, let’s talk about how you can try it out…without adding a bunch of churn to your weekly to-do list.

In the next few sections, I’ll step you through four separate email strategies for emailing your list more often. Remember that you do NOT have to implement all these strategies. Pull up a chair and jot down some notes about what you want to try out with your email list. Then after you mull it over, you can add one of these strategies to your planner or calendar to try out after you graduate from Blog Smarter.

The Fresh Resend

You might have heard about the idea of doing “resends” to your list. A “resend” means resending an email to your list, just to the people who didn’t open it before. Some email marketing tools even have a feature that will make it easy to resend a previous email, so resends are getting more common.

Resends can be a powerful tool to maximize engagement from your list, but because of the way the feature is implemented in email tools, it’s easy to misstep and drive your engagement in the wrong direction.

Let me explain: By default, many email tools will create the resend using the same subject line as the last message you already sent. That looks repetitive to your subscribers, so they’re more likely to get annoyed and feel like you’re spamming them. On top of that, if the content of the email is the same as the previous version word for word, many mailbox providers like Gmail will “thread” that new message together with the previous message, calling attention to the fact that you’ve sent the same message twice. So again, subscribers will get annoyed and feel like you’re spamming them.

To avoid this, take The Fresh Resend approach.

Recently, I read a retelling of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The retelling is set in contemporary times and completely reimagined. Even the title is night-and-day different: A Curse So Dark And Lonely. Would I have felt compelled to pick up that book if it had been titled the same-old, same-old “Beauty and the Beast” and was a word-for-word carbon copy of a previous story I’d already read? Not likely.

With The Fresh Resend technique, your goal is to channel that fairy tale retelling energy and put something fresh and new in front of your subscribers to entice them to open it. In other words, when you set out to resend a previous message to your list, don’t just recycle the same message as is.

Here are a few tips for trying out this technique:

• Re-imagine your title: Resend the message with a different subject line. Not just slightly reworded but a whole fresh new subject line! Typically, if an email you sent to your list had a lower than typical open rate, a fresh new subject line is just what the doctor ordered. But you’re trying to capture the attention of subscribers who weren’t compelled to open it last time, so get creative and be as clear as possible about what they’ll get for opening that message.
• Re-tell your story: Edit the email copy itself to make tweaks here and there so Gmail and other mailbox providers don’t “thread” it together with the previous message you sent. For example, I personally aim to make at least one small edit in each paragraph of my email when doing a resend. We’re not talking a whole rewrite here. When I do this kind of pre-resend edit, it takes me about 15-20 minutes. You might swap out a word for a synonym in one paragraph, replace a couple words in another paragraph with a contraction, and so on.
• Re-tell the right story: Have you ever seen a Disney retelling of the Grimm fairy tale about Hans the Hedgehog? Nope. And you won’t because in more than 200 years, that story has never truly connected with audiences. When deciding on which message to resend, prioritize resending the message that drove the best results for your business, whether product sales, page views, or some other business goal. For example, let’s just say for the sake of easy math that you have 1,000 subscribers. With email #1, 200 opened and 50 clicked, so that message drove 25 percent of people who actually read it to click through (50/200 = 0.25). But with email #2, let’s say 140 opened and 40 clicked, so that message drove clicks from 29 percent of people who read it (40/140 = 0.29). That means email #2 has the better email copy, so it could benefit from a resend with a fresh subject line to get it in front of more people. Or if you’re in the middle of a product launch, you might pick your email that drove the most sales out of total opens and then resend that to the people who haven’t opened it yet.
• Leave some space: You don’t see Disney out there releasing a new retelling of Beauty and the Beast every season. For resends, it tends to work well when done just once a week for your best email from that week—meaning the email that drove the best results for your business. Also, aim to wait at least a couple days if not 3-4 days before doing a resend to avoid looking overly repetitive to subscribers.

If you have 30 minutes or so to spare in your weekly schedule, adding a resend with The Fresh Resend technique can be an excellent way to increase the percentage of engaged subscribers on your list.

The Never-Ending Story

Earlier in this module, we talked about how your first welcome email to a new subscriber needs to build your authority and confirm to that new super fan that following you will absolutely be worth it.

You can build on this initial success by continuing to deliver a strong brand experience with The Never-Ending Story technique.

First, if you’ve heard of a “welcome sequence” or a “nurture sequence,” that’s the underlying concept for this strategy. After that first welcome email, you’ll set up your email system to automatically send a whole series of emails to that new subscriber on a specific schedule determined ahead of time by you. And in those emails, you’ll take the reader by the virtual hand and lead them through the very best resources you can offer that will help them with their problem or their goal.

Welcome sequences are highly effective because at the point that the reader first joins your list, that’s when they tend to be the most excited about what you have to offer. If you can strengthen that connection at the start of your relationship with that subscriber, that will influence their interactions with your brand later on.

And when you’re extra helpful in this way, your new subscriber will feel cared for, which builds that reader-blogger relationship that’s so important for your strong brand.

Plus, a welcome sequence is a set of emails you have to write only ONCE, but that sequence will continue going out to every new subscriber from here on out, giving them a guided tour of the best you have to offer.

But here’s the problem with welcome sequences: The options are endless.

Many bloggers know they “should” create a welcome sequence. But the thought of writing this one series of emails that will perfectly connect with people and get them excited about your content or your products can be overwhelming. The decision overload of figuring out how many emails to write, what to put in them, when to send them, and all the other details can keep you from ever starting in the first place. And these emails will be going out to your new subscribers forever and ever. So no pressure, right?

Before we talk specifics, remember: There is no “wrong” or “right” answer—only what you do and what you learn from it. You’re like a scientist who’s trying something out and watching what happens. If what you try the first time doesn’t work out exactly how you’d hoped, that’s okay. You can learn from that and tweak or pivot as you need to.

Your welcome sequence doesn’t have to be perfect. Any welcome sequence is better than NO welcome sequence.

Even if all you did was repurpose three previous emails from your archive and rework those into your welcome sequence, that would be a win for your brand. Actually, even if all you did was repurpose ONE email, that would still be a win. Because when you send ANY email that helps your subscribers with their problem or goal, you’re building your authority, earning credibility, and nurturing your relationship with your readers. And that’s how you build a strong brand.

How to Make It “Never-Ending”

The length of a welcome sequence can vary. Some bloggers have successful welcome sequences with three emails, whereas other bloggers have several weeks’ worth of emails in their welcome sequence. Some even have months of emails!

The goal with The Never-Ending Story technique is to start a welcome sequence of on-brand emails and keep adding to it over time, knitting together more and more helpful resources for your people. Because after you have an automated welcome sequence with several weeks of your most effective emails, even if you get busy and can’t email your list one week, you can rest assured knowing that your new subscribers are still being cared for in the most critical phase of your budding relationship with them.

For example, suppose you start by writing three emails for your welcome sequence. After that, you’ll keep an eye on which of your regular weekly email updates resonate most with your list—maybe you have an email that drives a lot more traffic to your site than typical or an email that does an awesome job of getting people to buy your product. When you hit the mark with one of those weekly emails, you’ll repurpose that message into a new email at the end of your welcome sequence or wherever it makes sense to add it.

Next, I’ll step through how you can get started with your own welcome sequence using The Never-Ending Story technique. But this isn’t the only way you can keep your new subscribers engaged during that critical early phase, so before you make a decision about what you’ll do with your welcome sequence, hang tight for the bonus technique we’ll cover after this section.

• Stick to the basics: There is no magic formula for how to write the perfect welcome sequence that works with every target market. In fact, hunting for some perfect formula that doesn’t exist—and then trying to shoehorn your own sequence into someone else’s template of what each email “should” say—can distract you from the nuts and bolts of what’s most effective: writing a piece of copy that will help your target market with their problem or goal. If you’re stuck on what to include in each email for your sequence, follow the 7-step Brand Ambassador Boot Camp technique. For example, decide on ONE main Call to Action so you’re not overwhelming the reader by asking them to do several things at once. If you’re not sure what that Call to Action should be, ask yourself: What is the BEST next step your reader can take to achieve their goals, to do what they want to do, or feel how they want to feel? Draft a simple email that makes it absolutely clear what small step they can take right now, whether it’s reading a blog post, downloading a lead magnet, buying a product you recommend, or checking out other resources you know will help. If you need a refresher on the steps to follow with the Brand Ambassador Boot Camp technique, refer back to that lesson in this module.
• Lean on your brand framework: Any time it makes sense to work your Anchor Belief, Brand Promise, or bits and pieces of your Signature Story into your welcome sequence, go for it. That reinforces your strong brand messaging with your new subscribers, which is important if they’re to become your brand ambassadors.
• Mine for gold: To get started, repurpose the best emails from your email list archive. If you previously sent an email to your list that got a higher-than-typical open rate, that might be a good candidate to add into your Never-Ending Story sequence. Same goes for any emails that drove more clicks than typical. For example, suppose you have two emails in your archive. Email #1 was opened by 1,000 subscribers and got 100 clicks (10%), but email #2 was opened by 500 subscribers and got 75 clicks (15%). Email #2 drove more clicks out of the total people who opened it, so it could be a good candidate for your email sequence, especially if you can rework the subject line to improve its open rate too. As another example, if you have a product, any email that drives more sales than typical would be a fantastic candidate for repurposing into your welcome sequence.
• Watch for bright spots: From now on, any time you have a regular email to your list that performs heads and shoulders above other emails you’ve sent before, consider adding that message to the end of your welcome sequence so that new subscribers in the future will benefit from seeing that same message, even though they weren’t on your list at the time you first sent it.
• Drop hints: Your goal with any email you send your list is to train your readers to open and click. And so inside your welcome sequence emails, go ahead and drop hints to get them excited about what’s coming next. You can drop a hint as a quick “p.s.” at the end of the message, or you can work a hint into the body of the message where it makes sense. Hints about what’s to come will get your readers excited about how you can help them with that problem or goal in their life that brought them to your site in the first place.
• Make each message stand-alone: Every reader won’t open and read every email in your welcome sequence, and that’s okay. That’s not the goal. Remember that each email you send is like another raffle ticket. You’re giving yourself more chances to engage more of your subscribers, but 100 percent engagement is impossible. As you draft the emails for your welcome sequence, you can’t assume readers have already read a previous email. Draft each individual email so that it delivers value on its own.
• Pick a schedule: When will you be sending the emails in your welcome sequence? Once every 2-3 days? Once a week? You’ll just need to make a decision and move forward on this because again, there is no magic formula. For example, if you have a product that’s perfect for your target market, you might want to send the first few emails sooner rather than later because those new subscribers will be most excited about how you can help them right after they subscribe, so that’s a great time to let them know about your product. On the other hand, if your goal is instead to drive those readers to your best on-brand content on your site, it might make sense to space out those first few emails a bit more. With all that said, it tends to work well to send emails more frequently right after someone joins your list. For example, on day 1 you’ll send email #1, which is the welcome email you already set up earlier in this module. On day 2, you might send email #2. Then you could start spacing things out: Wait two days and on day 4, send email #3. Wait three days and on day 7, send email #4. Wait five days and on day 12, send email #5. And then if you still have messages in your sequence, you could move to a weekly frequency, which would be a good time to start including those subscribers on your regular weekly emails as well so you’re giving yourself two raffle tickets every week for those newer subscribers. Which brings us to…
• Look at the whole story: Decide whether these new subscribers will also get your regular weekly email updates while they’re still in the welcome sequence. Some bloggers prefer to exclude these new subscribers from regular email updates, while other bloggers send their weekly email updates to everyone in addition to any sequence they might be in the middle of. There is no “right” or “wrong” answer, so you’ll need to make a CEO decision and watch what happens. For example, if your welcome sequence is set up to email your new subscribers every other day for the first ten days, also sending a regular weekly email update during that timeframe might be overkill because the new subscriber could potentially be receiving two emails from you in one day! But when your welcome sequence shifts into a less frequent pacing, that might be a good time to start including those subscribers on the regular weekly email updates too. In your email marketing tool, you can typically achieve this behavior with a tagging feature. In other words, when a subscriber joins your list, your welcome sequence automation would tag them with a special tag like “Exclude From Weekly Emails.” For future weekly emails you send, you would then send it to your list MINUS the people who have that tag. Then as they move through that welcome automation, you could remove the tag at any point where it makes sense, and they would start receiving future weekly emails at that point. Or as another option, if you always send your weekly emails on the same day, some email tools will let you configure your welcome sequence so that no emails aside from the first welcome email go out on the day of your weekly emails.

Choose Your Own Adventure

For the next “set it and forget it” technique, we need to dig into email open rate research.

But first: Try not to get caught up in how your open rate compares to the open rates of other businesses. That’s not likely to help you drive more results for your business. What’s more effective is to look at your own open rate and try to always be outdoing yourself.

Now let’s talk specifics. In the world of email marketing, email newsletters tend to have the lowest open rate. Every industry and every target market is unique, but just looking at newsletters across the board, the average open rate is generally around 20 percent. To be clear, that average covers a wide range of marketing styles because it includes everything from businesses like Old Navy that flood their customers constantly with the same offers over and over—to strong brands that deliver value on their Brand Promise with every message they send. Still, it’s helpful to look at the average as a benchmark so we can compare it to other types of emails.

Because there’s another type of email you can send your list that has an average open rate around 50 percent—two and a half times better than a regular weekly email update.

What’s 2.5x Better Than an Email Newsletter?

That magical email type is a transactional email. If you’ve ever gotten an automatic email after you placed an order online, that’s a transactional email. A reader or customer takes an action, and the business follows up with an automated email in response to that action. Examples of transactional emails include purchase receipts, shipping notifications, password reset emails, abandoned shopping cart reminders, double opt-in confirmation requests, and that first welcome email a subscriber gets when they join your list.

In all those cases, the reader takes a specific action, and they receive an email in response to that action they took. In other words, you as the business are meeting the reader in that moment where they asked for help or when they reached out to you. Some in the world of email marketing even call this type of email a “triggered” email to reinforce that it’s the reader who’s kicking things off—like knocking over the first in a long line of dominos.

And that’s exactly why transactional emails have an average open rate that’s 2.5 times higher than the typical email newsletter or promotion. Transactional emails align with the reader’s timeline and goals, not the business’s timeline that often seems arbitrary to the reader.

While The Never-Ending Story technique can be an excellent way to keep your new subscribers engaged, you can take your email engagement to the next level by letting your new subscriber jump into the driver’s seat and pick what they’re most interested in. In Blog Smarter, we call this the Choose Your Own Adventure technique. And the reason it’s so powerful is that it combines the high engagement potential of transactional emails with email automation so that you’re cultivating a whole crew of ultra-devoted super fans from the very first day they join your list.

This approach does take more effort to create upfront, so if a 3-email welcome sequence is all you can swing in the near future, that’s still a big win for your business. Over time as you feel ready to take on another project to increase your email engagement even more, you can switch over to the Choose Your Own Adventure technique, using those welcome sequence emails you already have as a springboard for any additional content you’ll need to create. We can’t cover every single detail here, but this should give you a starting point so you can flex your CEO muscles to make this happen for your business.

Here are a few tips for setting up a Choose Your Own Adventure system:

• Visit your Treasure Trove: First, you’ll need to figure out a handful of specific problems your readers are having that you could help them with. In your Treasure Trove, look for trends and themes of what people are telling you, especially in their Golden Question responses. For example, how to handle temper tantrums is a common theme in the Golden Question responses from my parenting site’s audience, as is how to control your own temper as a parent. Those are separate, specific problems I could help my audience with. Three is a great number to aim for when you’re first getting this started, then you can add to it over time.
• Plan a few adventures: For each common problem you discover in your research, sketch out a plan for an email sequence to deliver a quick win for your people on that topic. Each of these email sequences will be like a mini-email course for the reader. In each sequence, you might have 3 to 5 emails so that you have enough space to deliver some value but it doesn’t drag on so long that you lose the reader’s interest. As we talked about with The Never-Ending Story technique, the options are endless for what exactly goes in each of these emails. Often, you can repurpose material you already have in your email newsletter archive, existing welcome sequence, or in blog posts to create these mini-email courses. But here’s just one example of what you could do:
  • Email #1: Paint a mental picture of the problem so the reader feels known, heard, and understood. Then tackle the most common self-limiting belief your audience tends to have related to that problem. You might share a bit of your own story and how you overcame that belief, share a story from another reader, or present an analogy or example that will give them a mindset shift. Whatever it is, show them that success is possible. By the way, if you can work your brand elements into any of these emails, go for it!
  • Email #2: Share a quick win. You can give readers a bite-sized lesson within the email itself (as long as it’s quick!), or you could let them know about a lead magnet that you know will help them, then give them a handy link where they can download it. (Always train them to open and click!)
  • Email #3: Share another quick win or wrap up by reinforcing the major points you covered in the earlier emails.
  • Email #4: Frame this one as a “bonus” and invite the reader to kick off another adventure by presenting them with a list of other mini-email courses you offer. When they click a link, that starts a new adventure on their timeline.
  • As an alternative, if you have a product related to that problem, you would sprinkle in mentions of the product in the sequence emails and include a more targeted pitch at the end of the sequence. You might even want an extra email or two that’s specifically focused on the product with testimonials from your customers and other details about the product and how it can help your subscribers.
• Invite new subscribers: If you haven’t worked with automation logic in your email marketing tool before, you might want to review their documentation before attempting this step. After you have your mini-email courses ready to go, you can rework the #2 email in your main welcome sequence to invite subscribers to choose between those 3-4 options. If you want to keep the rest of The Never-Ending Story sequence, you can set those up to start only if new subscribers don’t pick a Choose Your Own Adventure option within a certain time period of receiving the invitation email from you. Again, the options are endless here, so try not to get too tangled up in the details and let that keep you from moving forward. Something is better than nothing, so just get started and you can always fine-tune later!
• Track your grads: Use tagging or another feature in your email marketing tool to keep track of which subscribers have “graduated” from which mini-email courses. Then you can periodically send one-off invitations to your whole list to invite them to start certain mini-email courses, and you can easily exclude the subscribers who’ve already completed that course. If you want to get extra fancy, you can even automate this, setting up your email tool so that it sends out an additional invitation as a reminder a certain period of time after they received the first invitation.
• Show a progress bar: As with The Never-Ending Story technique, it helps to drop hints about what’s to come and get your readers excited about how you can help them with that problem or goal in their life that brought them to your site in the first place. But because the sequences for the Choose Your Own Adventure technique are finite and not open-ended, you can do your readers another favor by putting the number of the message in the subject line, like “Day #1 of 3: How to tame any temper tantrum in 10 minutes or less” or “[2 of 3] Here’s your temper tantrum cheat sheet!”

Whew! Does your brain feel full yet? The Choose Your Own Adventure technique is definitely the most involved technique in this lesson.

Remember that you do NOT have to do this. If you’re thinking to yourself “no way, no how,” that’s perfectly okay. Give yourself permission to just mull all this over. And take your time! There’s no need to rush. You already have the essential components of your email system in place because of everything we’ve covered already in this module. After you think on this for a bit, you can add one of these strategies to your planner or calendar to try out after you finish this program.

With that said, next we’ll cover one final email engagement strategy that you’ll want to consider for the future.

The Do-Over

You don’t want just anybody on your list.

It doesn’t do you any good to be paying your email tool for subscribers who never open your emails. In fact, having those unengaged subscribers on your list is a signal to mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo that people are generally less interested in emails from your email address. And because those programs use engagement statistics to determine which emails get sent to the spam folder, keeping unengaged subscribers on your list means that even your emails to your most engaged subscribers could land in spam too. Yikes!

To maximize results for your business, you need to keep your list lean and mean. If someone hasn’t opened your emails for six months, it’s highly unlikely they’ll just start opening them again all of a sudden. In that situation, make it your goal to “bless and release” those subscribers. They’re no longer delivering results for your business, so be grateful for the page views they’ve given you up to this point and give them the gift of having fewer emails to sort through by removing them from your list.

With that said, I can tell you from experience that hitting the “delete” button on 20,000 unengaged subscribers HURTS. It hurts real bad. Bloggers tend to not want to do that because we worked so hard to grow our lists in the first place, so therefore we typically procrastinate cleaning our list. And those unengaged subscribers sit there, growing in number over time and dragging down our overall email deliverability rate more and more.

So instead of having to manually clean your own list like this, rely on The Do-Over technique and set up an automation that’s running all the time without you having to lift a finger.

Here are a few details you’ll want to consider when setting up your own Do-Over automation:

• Separate the dormant subscribers: Knowing who is engaged versus unengaged is an essential first step. Most email marketing tools have a template automation for tagging or otherwise segmenting your unengaged subscribers. You might need to set this up once the first time, but after that it will do the tagging or segmenting for you. If you’re not sure how to do this, check the documentation for your email tool or contact their tech support team.
• Try again: Before you unsubscribe a reader who’s stopped opening your emails, try one last time to engage them. Even if you just recover a small percentage of those subscribers, it can still be a valuable use of your time because research has shown that turning an inactive subscriber into a customer is 5 times cheaper than getting a brand new customer. To get a subscriber’s attention back, you’ll want to create a special automated email sequence with a handful of emails and lead them through your best resources. In the marketing world, this technique is called a “re-engagement” campaign. Some techniques that can work well inside this sequence include offering your very best lead magnet, sending a Choose Your Own Adventure invitation, sharing a fantastic testimonial to remind them how your brand can help them, and re-asking the Golden Question. Some bloggers have even had luck with hosting a small monthly giveaway or offering a discount off a product as one last attempt to engage their dormant subscribers before unsubscribing them.
• Try a few times: You’ll need more than one email in your Do-Over sequence. One study by an email marketing firm showed that only 14 percent of cold subscribers opened a re-engagement email when it was the only one sent. But when multiple emails were sent, that number climbed to 45 percent.
• Make it easy to say goodbye: In every one of your re-engagement emails, always include a prominent, handy unsubscribe link so that if someone is no longer interested in your emails, they can easily unsubscribe. The last thing you want is to frustrate them and make them click the “report spam” button.
• Remind them: Odds are these dormant subscribers haven’t even seen your emails in a while, so at least for your first re-engagement message, start by reminding them that they joined your community a while back. If you can easily work it in, go ahead and restate your Brand Promise as a quick reminder of why they might have joined.
• Time it well: If you wait several months after a subscriber goes dormant before you try to re-engage them, it will be harder to win them back. And yet if you try to “re-engage” someone who’s stopped opening emails for a couple weeks because of a vacation or a busy time at work, that can feel a bit over the top to that subscriber—kind of like when a mom whose kid is in college gives them a guilt trip for not visiting every weekend. “You don’t open, you don’t click!” You’ll have to decide what makes sense for your business, but re-engagement sequences tend to do well when they kick off somewhere between 30 and 90 days after the subscriber goes dormant.
• Switch it up: Your typical email updates to those dormant subscribers might not even be landing in their inbox. Gmail could be sorting them into the Promotions tab, some mailbox providers could be sticking them in spam, or they might have set up some automatic sorting so that all their newsletter subscriptions go directly into a folder without even stopping in their inbox. To avoid this, switch up the format of your re-engagement emails. For example, if you typically include a header image in your emails, leave it out of your re-engagement emails. If your usual email format uses a fancy layout, try sending a text-only campaign. Or if you typically send sentence-style subject lines, switch it up with a short and punchy subject line. Sometimes just switching up the format of the email is enough to get that message to land back in that subscriber’s inbox.
• Bless and release: If a subscriber doesn’t open or click any of the emails in your Do-Over sequence, maybe their life situation changed, and they no longer struggle with the problem that brought them to your site in the first place. Or maybe they lost their job where they had that email inbox, and they can no longer check that inbox. Or maybe that inbox got attacked by spam bots, and it’s basically unusable now. You did your best to reconnect with them, so if they don’t react in any way, go ahead and unsubscribe them after a certain period of time. You can set up your automation or sequence to do this for you. It’s up to you how long you wait, but give it at least a little bit in case you caught them at a busy time. In your sequence or automation, you can put a “wait” step where you wait a certain period of time like two weeks or a month before unsubscribing that person so you’re giving them a chance to see your re-engagement messages. Also, it’s worth noting that a significant percentage of subscribers might not open one of your re-engagement messages, but simply seeing those re-engagement subject lines in their inbox can be a catalyst to get them to open your regular weekly updates from that point forward. For example, one study found that of the dormant subscribers who got re-engagement messages and then started opening regular email updates from a business after that, 21 percent of them hadn’t even opened the re-engagement messages. So in that final waiting period, go ahead and keep sending your regular email updates to those dormant subscribers.

Your Next Step

We covered a lot of ground in this lesson, and your head might be swimming a bit. That’s okay!

The time to consider implementing the strategies in this lesson is after you graduate from Blog Smarter, and only after you’ve fully implemented everything we covered in the core lessons of this module. And even then, you don’t have to do every strategy in this lesson. You’ll need to make a CEO decision about which strategies will be the best fit for you and your business.

Right now, jot down a few notes about which technique you plan to try out after this program is over, and stick a reminder in your to-do list or calendar for a couple months from now so you can revisit the idea at that point.

And remember: Every single time you send ANY email that helps your subscribers with their problem or goal, that’s a win. Because you’re building your authority, earning credibility, and nurturing your relationship with your readers—and that’s how you build a strong brand. Even if all you do is a Fresh Resend once in a while, that’s a win. Even if all you do is add ONE extra email to your welcome sequence, that’s a win. Celebrate each and every step that builds your brand!

Steps to success…