Hello friends, we're talking about the seven stages of blogging still and we're in part three of stage four and this is a focus on your email marketing. What I encourage you to do if you're in this stage is to make sure that you build a welcome series for your email subscribers. I am always blown away when I see statistics and evidence of this with our email, with our clients email, that a welcome email is the highest open rate of any of the emails that you will likely send. So the average open rate for a B2C newsletter is about 20%. Hopefully you're doing better than that, but that's the average. And the average open rate for a welcome email is 92%. That's amazing, right? And the click through rate, the average click through rate on a welcome email 27%. Those are huge numbers. Do not expect to see those numbers on the regular. But with your welcome series, it is expected. So what are the steps that we do in this stage with the welcome email? Well, the first one is to build one and make sure you send it and then modify your lead magnet workflow to accommodate it. And here's what I mean. You are likely going to have situations where people sign up for more than one lead magnet. In a perfect world, people would sign up for all the lead magnets because all of your personas would align with their wants and needs. But likely somebody is going to have more than one lead magnet that sparks their interest. So when they sign up for the first lead magnet or the first time they sign up for your newsletter in whatever way that is, you want to make sure you send them that welcome email. But then you want to do a check so that every time someone signs up for one of your lead magnets that you're only sending the welcome series one time. So the way that we accomplish that in our email system is that we have a decision factor that just says, have they received the welcome email in the past? And if they have, then they exit that workflow. And if they haven't, then it goes ahead and sends it to them. So it would be really frustrating for your readers to request multiple lead magnets and get the welcome series multiple times. Also, it kind of gives this impression that your business doesn't understand what's going on in the background. So that's why you want to only do it one time. The other thing is you want to consider how many welcome, how many emails you want in that welcome series. So you can have one, that's fine. And I think most businesses do just have one, but it might make sense for you to have two or three. And if that's the case, then the question you need to ask yourself is, do I go ahead and include these people with my weekly newsletter, or do I wait until they finish the welcome series before I add them to the newsletter? So I would opt on, opt to go the second route. You want to take them through your welcome series. You're thinking of this as like an onboarding series, that you're bringing them on board, you're putting your arm around them and leading them down a path. You don't want to sidetrack them with your newsletter until you've shared all of the information that you need to share with them. But that's not, you don't have to do it that way. You do what's expected or what works best for you. So what are some of the things that you could include in that welcome email? Well, the first one is I think a thank you and setting expectations about moving forward. So for example, you can say, there's two more emails that I'm going to send you with information about X, Y, Z, and then we'll be adding you to our weekly newsletter. For me, it would be, it comes out every Tuesday morning and we hope you enjoy it. It's filled with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So set expectations with them. And this means, friend, that if you tell them that you have a weekly newsletter, you actually have to send a weekly newsletter. So 2024 is a year for you to be consistent. Please, please don't send a welcome series, tell them you're going to have a weekly newsletter and not send them anything for six months. Deal? Okay. Another thing that I think a lot of email coaches say you should add to your welcome series is an introduction to the brand. And while that's not a bad idea, what I want to challenge you to do is achieve that goal in a different way. And that is by focusing on the reader, what their needs, goals, problems, and desires are instead of all about you in your business. So one way that you could introduce your brand to your new subscriber without trying to shine the spotlight on you is to say, how else can we help you? And maybe talk about the suggested articles from the other personas that you share information on. So for example, if they signed up for Persona A, you can say, we're so excited to be able to help you with this information. And that would be all about Persona A. And then you can say, if you have other needs like Persona B, Persona C, Persona D, then here's our most popular articles about that. The other thing you can do if your personas maybe don't overlap. So a friend of mine has these personas where she shares books about her, children's books on her blog. And her personas are like librarian, parent, homeschool teacher. So there's not, you know, a librarian and a parent. Sure, a librarian might be a parent, but it's not likely that those personas are going to overlap maybe as much as the ones do on my hyperlocal travel blog. So what you could do in that case is instead of introducing them to the other personas on your blog, you can share more articles that are specific to that persona. So you can say, you know, I'm really glad that you downloaded, you know, our lead magnet. Maybe that's not the way you're going to say it, but you get the idea. And you can say, here's some other articles that I think would really interest you, or here's other articles that readers like you have found interesting on our blog. So I hope you can see here that that's a lot different than saying, we are a blog, and I am about, and I did this, and I did that. Talking about how you can help them is going to go a lot further than just a lot of I, I, I statements. The other thing you want to do in your welcome series is ask for engagement. Ask for them to interact with you. My favorite way to do that is hit reply and tell me la la la la la. And I usually put a different question with each persona. So, you know, if the, if the lead magnet is about date nights in the southeast, romantic getaways, then I might say, write me back and let me know what your favorite romantic getaway was. Let me know how often you're escaping on romantic getaways, that sort of thing. It really will help your deliverability rate overall, and with that user, if you can get them to engage with you. Okay, and then the last thing that I would encourage you to do, you've got to do it tactfully, you've got to do it tastefully, is to share. If you've got a product, and I guess even if you've got maybe a high, a high paying affiliate, because you don't have a product, then share that product with them. Okay, but this isn't a sales pitch. This is really about the problem solving. So if somebody signed up for my lead magnet about outdoor getaways, then I might say something about, you know, most of our readers really enjoy the Georgia State Parks. They just have trouble figuring out which one to go to first and what to do when they get there. And we've put together a travel guide that, that, that really helps them. And if you're interested in that, you can find it here. So this, you know, it's not a hard pitch, it's just kind of making them aware. But the reason I encourage you to do this is because statistics tell us that the welcome email drives 320% more revenue per email than your other emails. 320% more, isn't that nuts? So don't leave off the opportunity to introduce people to the product that you offer. I would just really challenge you to, to frame it in a way that aligns with their specific problem, and that you're offering a solution. It's not a big sales format, you're not going to put a whole FAQ in there about that and all the benefits and la la la la la, you're not doing that. But you are making them aware of it in, in language they can understand. So also to let you know, if I have any euqe And then the last thing I'd say is, you know, when should you send this? Well, the answer is immediately. And we actually send ours the next day on our blog right now. But we're going to be changing that to a couple hours later, because there's been some evidence that more people are expecting it and more people are expecting it immediately. And I think that's what we're going to be doing is maybe getting more click throughs, more open opens if we send it sooner. So you can expect or I should say 75% of people are expecting a welcome email so they know it's coming. So let's you know, why wait another day, right? And then if that's the only one you're sending, it does make sense to roll them straight away into your newsletter. Okay, the last part of or the last thing to do in part three of stage four is to start thinking about putting a project plan together implementing a next level email approach. And I say, you know, it might take a while for you to execute because these things are longer projects, you know, they're not just putting a welcome email together, which you could probably do in an afternoon. They are things like putting nurture series together for all of your personas. Building a quiz in order to gain more email subscribers. If you're using something like drip or entreport or Clavio, you can also put Browseamana into place. That's what we have and I love it so much. But think about are you trying to make more money from your blog? Are you trying to gain more subscribers still? What's your objective and then think of you know, what's the right next level email approach for me and for my business and then put that plan into place. Okay, now we're done with stage four Wednesday, we'll start stage five. But I want to remind you while you're still working through these stages that you are still writing new content weekly, filling in the gaps of your topic clusters, updating your inventory spreadsheet with new content and the persona it aligns with, continuing to share yours on social media, continuing to pin and repin your content, continuing to send your weekly newsletter, all of those things have to still keep going, updating your content, for example. But this is the new piece that you will roll in. Okay, I will see you on Wednesday. We'll dive into stage five.