Turning Listeners into Customers Using Email Marketing | Liz Wilcox

Are you struggling to convert your podcast listeners into paying customers? Conventional wisdom says it's challenging. But it doesn't have to be! In this episode, Liz Wilcox explains how she turned podcast listeners into email subscribers and then converted 100% of them into sales! Get ready to learn the 3 email secrets that you can apply to your own podcast strategy to skyrocket your sales!

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/281

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Personal Experience
02:23 The Email Staircase
03:19 The Power of Owning Your Email List
04:18 High ROI and Real Connections with Email Marketing
05:15 Gaining Followers and Nurturing Them as Friends
09:04 Converting Friends into Customers: The Importance of Selling and Knowing Your Subscribers
12:26 Summary and Conclusion

Takeaways

• Email marketing allows you to own your audience and have a high return on investment.
• The 'email staircase' involves turning followers into friends and then into customers.
• To gain followers, you need to get visible and actively promote your content.
• To turn followers into friends, show your investment in their journey, be relatable, and stay top of mind.
• To convert friends into customers, you need to sell and stop guessing by getting to know your subscribers.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/281

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Personal Experience
• 2:23 The Email Staircase
• 3:19 The Power of Owning Your Email List
• 4:18 High ROI and Real Connections with Email Marketing
• 5:15 Gaining Followers and Nurturing Them as Friends
• 9:04 Converting Friends into Customers: The Importance of Selling and Knowing Your Subscribers
• 12:26 Summary and Conclusion

Transcript

0:01

You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple. Can I tell you about the absolute, like craziest story I have about my entrepreneurship journey? Okay, so it was back in 2019 and I finally decided to do the thing, right? Create an online course and launch it. Sure, I had launched some smaller products before I hosted a couple of digital summits. but I never actually created a digital course. So I did the thing, every marketing guru and their mother tells you, I created the course. Now, I did the typical waitlist thing. Hey, if you're interested, click here, join the waitlist. I had 141 people on my waitlist. When I finally launched it, again, I did the very typical Monday through Friday, open, close, cart, and by the end of my cart close day, I had made, you guessed it, 141 sales. Or maybe you didn't guess it because I don't know, I'm not very good at math, but that math is pretty simple. That's 100 % conversion rate. Now, how the heck did I do that? Well, what's up? My name is Liz Wilcox and I actually teach people email marketing. That digital course, nothing to do with marketing at all. It was an RV maintenance course and that was what I did at the time. I was an RV travel blogger. I was traveling the country with my family and I realized through a few years of email marketing that my customer's number one issue was the maintenance of their RV, the maintenance of their vehicle. So I created that course, I created the wait list and I was able to convert like that. So how the heck did I do that? As you can imagine, I was pretty floored. I couldn't believe that every person that indicated interest actually purchased my product. So I started doing some digging into my own business. What was working compared to what the experts say? Hey, you might convert one to 3 % of your list. Maybe 10%, you know, if you're doing a live launch, some event with your launch. I didn't do an event with my launch. It was just a typical, you know, five days, eight emails type of sequence. And I realized that I was doing something that other people weren't. And I now call it the email staircase. The email staircase goes like this. Follower, friend, customer, right? So you get some followers, whether it's through an event like this or a podcast, maybe it's on social media. And once you get your followers, you get them on your email list. And when they're on your email list, you can turn them into a friend. And when you have a list full of friends, you can have a list full of customers. Because like I did with my RV maintenance course, I knew what they wanted and I created the solution to what they needed. So. Let's back up a little bit though. I want to give you some quick reminders about email marketing in case you're not already sold on it. Number one, you own your email list. That's why I went heavy into email and that's why I suggest you do too. You know, raise your hand if you were alive in 2022 and you remember a billionaire buying a social media platform. And then in 2023, you know, that social media platform being totally different. If you had built your entire entire community, your entire audience, your entire following on that social media platform, you might be wondering where your people are now. So again, you own your email list. That's why it's so important to pay attention to it and to nurture it. And because you own your email list, it's actually consent based, which gives you an incredibly high return on investment. They say for every dollar you spend with email marketing, you can actually get up to $40 in return. I actually did the math for every dollar I spent in 2023 on my email list. I made $166 in return. That's a big deal. And because email is consent -based, because I opt in to hear from you, it gives that high ROI. People are already invested and interested in what you have to say. And those people make for great connections. This is the third, I want you to know about email marketing. Remember, we own it, we can have a high ROI, and we can make real connections. And this is really where the email staircase comes into play. Because you're making real connections with your audience, you're really getting to know them so that you can craft your offers, your messaging, your positioning, so that people know, yes, this is what I need. I didn't just have a hundred percent conversion rate because everybody loves me, right? I had that hundred percent conversion rate because I was following the email staircase, because I was taking those followers, I was putting them on an email list, I was getting to know them as friends, and then I was able to convert them as customers because I knew what they wanted. Okay, moving on. Remember, the email staircase, follower, friend, customer. Let's talk about follower first really quick. And you know, you can go to Google and you can figure out all sorts of ways to get followers, right? The main thing I want you to know about gaining a following is that you have to get visible, right? You can't just hope and pray and wish that people will find your content. You have to get visible. The same way I'm, you know, recording this, I'm talking to you, I'm practicing, I edited it so it's all nice and pretty and sounds good, right? That took effort. Getting visible requires some effort on your part, but it's totally worth it. And once you get that following, you can get them on your email list. Now let's talk about once they're on your email list. Once they're on your email list, you can turn them into a friend. Now I don't mean your friend, you know, your best friend that you tell all your dirty secrets to and this, that, and the other, right? A friend in this context just does three things. Number one, You show how you are invested in them, invested in the solution to their issues, right? You want to help them overcome obstacles, and here's how you're invested. This can be a couple different things. It can be, hey, I just listened to this pod talks where I learned how to write better emails. From here on out, da da da da da, right? That shows you're invested. Sure, it might be this behind the scenes, maybe you're B2C and you think, oh my, consumers, my customers, they don't wanna know about that, but they do. People will not invest in you if they don't first know that you are invested in them. So sharing in your emails how you're invested, whether it's buying a new camera, a new microphone, reading a book, writing a blog post, that helps them show that you are invested in their journey too. Number two, relate to them. And no, I didn't say, you know, be interesting. Being interesting is really, really hard, right? Chances are you're probably not a professional storyteller, but you have to be relatable. For example, in my business, I share how I love the nineties. You know, I've got Nsync, M &M, Seinfeld in the background of all my videos. You know, I talk about them a lot in my content. It's relatable for my ideal audience. I like to work with millennials, Gen Xers. They remember the days of the boy band, right? That makes me relatable. Also, relatability can simply be, I took my dog for a walk before I wrote this email. My refrigerator broke and I'm feeling stressed, but I wanted to send you over this content. It can be short, it can be sweet, just make it relatable. And the third thing to become a friend in someone's inbox. is to just stay top of mind. And this is the part of the story where people start to cringe like, oh, I don't have timelines. I gotta do this. I gotta do that. I gotta do the other. But honestly, when you do those first two things, right, when you show you're invested, when you share in a relatable way, staying top of mind actually becomes much simpler. Because you're invested, because you're relatable, people think of you for that solution they're looking for first. Now, when it comes to converting people, converting those friends into customers, I want you to know a couple things. Number one, you gotta sell. And I say this with love and I know selling, again, it can feel really cringy, but you gotta sell. One time I was walking off an elevator and I heard this guy on his phone and he sounded really upset and he kept saying, how was I supposed to know? She never told me. She never told me, I don't know if she doesn't tell me. And isn't that the same with our customers? Oftentimes we think, oh, why isn't this converting? Why aren't people booking my one -on-ones? Why aren't they joining my program? Well, are you telling them? Don't be that guy standing in front of the elevator. Don't be that lady that he's upset over. Tell your customers, tell your potentials that you have something to sell. And the second thing I want you to know is to stop guessing. Oftentimes we create products, we create services and offers, and we just guess at what people want. You know, we throw spaghetti noodles at the wall to see what sticks. But you'll note in that story I told you at the beginning about having the 100 % conversion rate, I didn't guess at what people wanted. Remember, I told you I had been emailing my list for a few years. I had been talking to them a lot. I didn't guess. I knew with 100 % certainty that these people needed a solution to a specific issue. That issue was knowing how to fix their RV for themselves. People very verbatim would say, Liz, I wish I knew how to fix this myself. Guess what the name of my course was? It was called Fix It Yourself. I didn't guess. I knew what they wanted. And that brings me to my third point about creating customers. You've got to get to know your subscribers on your email list. So take the time, invest in them. Remember, that's how we become friends, right? We show how we're invested. So invest in them and you will get to know them better. Try to get replies to your emails. And don't ask big open -ended questions when you're getting replies. ask very short, specific yes or no questions. Like for example, if you were emailing me or you join my email list, I might say, do you currently write a weekly newsletter? That's a very simple yes or no question that you can say, yeah, I do, or no, I've tried in the past but I failed, right? It's a very simple, you know, front of brain type of question. So get to know your subscribers. so you can stop guessing so that selling becomes really easy. Okay, I wanna end on one note that I think summarizes the mindset and the lens in which you should write all your emails. People buy from people they trust. When you follow the email staircase, follower, friend, customer, you're building a lot of trust. You are opening yourself up so that people get to know you. and you get to know your people. And that is the key to success with email marketing. I'm Liz Wilcox. This has been the Email Staircase. And I can't wait to see what happens with email marketing and you. For more episodes, please visit podmatch.com forward slash episodes. Thank you so much for listening.