"You have a chance to be that person in the inbox that's like, "Oh, it's Tarzan. I'm so excited, I got an email from her." Because all the other emails are so boring I just go straight to delete. Follow those jewelry brands that aren't doing it very well, you'll be able to see like how you can do it better if you just put a little bit more effort in than the last person. Oh my gosh, what an incredible opportunity."
Welcome to Thrive-by-Design. The podcast for ambitious, independent jewelry brands looking to profit from their products. Get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product-based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing, and scaling your business so you can spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? Alright, let's do this.
Tracy: Welcome to the Thrive by Design podcast, Episode 112. Hey there, Tracy Matthews here, chief visionary officer over at Flourish and Thrive Academy, and I'm excited to have another guest on our show today. But one of the things I have to say that the designers in our Train Your Customer to Buy From You Online intensive have been talking about is how do you get people to open your emails. We have a whole sequence on email marketing an autoresponder set ups or what we like to call nurture sequences on the front of your site so that you can nurture people to the sale, but the important piece of email marketing is to actually get people to open those emails. Now, I have a really great interview today with a copywriter who is super fun and super brilliant, in fact she's got to be cool because her name is Tarzan. Tarzan came on the show today and I've known Tarzan for a little while now.
We were introduced and she ended up doing some work for me, and I loved what she did. I love what she does with her email headlines, and so we're talking a little bit about that today, or email subject lines maybe is a better way to put it, and some little simple tweaks that you can do to improve your open rates and conversions on a surface level. Because as we know with email marketing for e-commerce brands, it's slightly different than traditional marketing where it's all about the words. It's really about a combination of the words and the imagery and how you're getting, compelling people with beautiful images and calls to action inside the email to move to your website, but it starts with that subject line and the preview pretext that are very important at the get go.
Before introduce Tarzan, I am really excited to talk a little bit about an intensive that has been near and dear to my heart. I mentioned it just a minute ago, it is called Train Your Customers to Buy From You Online. The reason why I wanted to bring this intensive to the table was because a lot of people say things like selling jewelry online is hard, and I think that that is a misbelief, because if that were true, brands and people like Chelsea Farmer of Horse Feathers Gifts, Alex Camacho of Acid Queen jewelry and Stephanie Gottlieb from Stephanie Gottlieb he would not be crushing it online like they are. Here's the thing, it's like I feel like so many people think it's hard because they aren't learning how to train people to buy from them. Instead they expect passive traffic to show up, they expect to send like random emails out occasionally, if they ever do, and they expect that just posting on Instagram is going to get them massive results in sales, when that has something to do with it, but it's really more about the strategy and the 360 view of everything that you're doing to train your customers to buy from you online.
So if you want to start making selling online easy, I'd like to encourage you to apply to this amazing intensive. It runs for 12 weeks, it starts on August 13th through November 8th, it is an intensive style workshop, intensive style environment, I should say. Basically what happens is we do a live training once a week, we have a couple of implementation weeks during this period, and then we have a feedback loop at the end of the week. So the purpose of this is that we do the training, we give you some time during the week to implement, and then at the end of the week we look over your work and give you feedback so that you can really dive deep into these strategies and get it going so that your sales are up and running by holiday. In fact, the people who fully implemented in this workshop were getting results immediately. Andrea said that she used to only have two sales a month on her site, she had a multiple revenue stream business, and within the first month she made 13 sales that month, and then the second month had 20 sales and she had only implemented a little bit about what we even shared. She's like, "I'm really excited to see what happens when I really go deep."
This is really about creating a 360 view and getting people used to the idea of buying jewelry from you online. We teach you how to build your audience, we teach you how to create community around your brand, and we're teaching you how to really develop offers that people want to buy. It's going to be amazing and I think that this is a great opportunity to join us, because now that we're getting into the holiday season we want to make sure that you are totally prepared to have the best season ever this year. As we've seen in local news lately, retailers are starting to struggle. I've been hearing from my students that some of the small pop shops that they've been selling to have been closing and that retailers like Barney's just announced that they might consider filing for bankruptcy. I think that's an again for Barney's, because of the struggles they're having with brick and mortar. What this tells me about the state of what's going on in industry is just that the more you can reach your customers directly, the more recession proof your business is. I want to help you protect your business, I want to help you continue to have consistent sales, I want to help you increase your margins and sort of 10 X your efforts, so that the work that you're doing to make sales online actually works and all this effort and energy that you're putting into it is not for not.
So you in? Okay, if that's a heck yes, give me a heck yes, you can even say it. You can head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/TrainMyCustomers, and we'll also have a link in the show notes, and if you apply and you're accepted before July 31st you have an opportunity to get a free website review when you enroll. So we are offering that to you early birders, since we're starting August 13th we still have a little bit of time here, but if you get your application in ASAP as you're listening to this, because we only have a couple days left of this month and you get accepted, you will get a free website review which is a $500 value from either Jess or Erin who are our conversion specialists over at Flourish and Thrive. So very excited about this, and I'd like to invite you to join. You can go to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/TrainMyCustomers or you can head on over to the show notes and we'll have a link right there. Looking forward to supporting you.
Okay, let's dive into today's episode with Tarzan. Tarzan is a launch strategist and a copywriter who specializes in fun to read, more than addictive Game of Thrones launch copy, or Game of Thrones style launch copy, I should say. She also helps freelancers and service providers package up their magic and turn it into products that sell. While Tarzan actually works more in the content creation world, I wanted to bring her on because I do think that in order to get people to open up your emails you need to have good subject lines, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of her tips to improve your email marketing. So let's dive in.
Tracy: I am really excited because I have a guest on the show today, Tarzan Kay. Tarzan, welcome to the show.
Tarzan: Thanks for having me Tracy, I'm excited to be here.
Tracy: Well I love talking about writing and copywriting in general, email newsletters, getting people to buy from your news, not from your newsletters, from your email, your emails that you send out, writing things beyond just newsletters to be able to sell your jewelry. So that's what Tarzan and I are going to talk about today. I first met Tarzan, how did we meet? Was I introduced to you through Selena Sue?
Tarzan: I must've been through Selena, yeah. I don't know, because now I see we're in the spider web of people who know each other.
Tracy: Yeah, now it's like we work with you for some copy that we were doing and I love the way that you wrote and you were really able to capture my voice, and I know that you worked for a lot of different people, now you do you long strategy for courses and products, which is a little bit different than e-commerce, but I love the way that you write, and you're really an expert at email, and so I want to have you on the show to talk a little bit about that. Cool?
Tarzan: Yeah, cool.
Tracy: So tell us a little bit about your background.
Tarzan: Okay, so just in terms of like why I love talking about email and I'll tell you a little bit about my background in a second. I am like, I am not good at social media, I don't have a marketable Instagram, I don't, like all the things I don't do 90% of them, but I do email and I do it really well and it supports my whole business. I'm just like so passionate about this because I feel, I see most people like whatever type of business they're in, they're usually under using email. We work so hard to get these subscribers and set up all the stuff so that we can get them in, and then often it's like this big question mark, like, "Now I have them, so what do I do with them?" I started my business about three and a half years ago, and I would say about six months and I committed my emailing my list regularly. At the time I was doing copy, I wasn't very niche, I was writing copy for websites and like basically whatever anyone wanted me to do. It took a couple years to like niche down to only doing launches and emails and sales pages, but part of the way that I decided to niche down was because I was doing email for myself. Early on I committed to emailing my list biweekly, so every two weeks. Then after doing that for an entire year and not really launching or offering them very much, I was basically just building relationships, after a whole year I finally put out an offer, and it wasn't even like that big a deal, I just had a baby due and I was like I need to hustle some private clients, so I'm just going to make an offer to my list, why not, never tried that before. I made this list and at the time I was working for clients at a day rate, which was like pretty not cheap, I think it was at the time maybe like $2000 day and I said, "You book me for a day, you can get a second day at half price." so it was a great deal, and all these people came out of the woodwork that I guess have been following me, and I booked all these clients and I made a big chunk of money, and then I went and took my maternity leave. But it was just such an eye opener, I was like, "Oh my God, wow, everybody has to know this. All you got to do is communicate with your list a little bit regularly, and then you can make an offer and they'll buy it. Amazing."
Tracy: Exactly, that's so awesome. I know that, you know, obviously products are a little bit different than selling copywriting services, right, but there are some relatable things, because everyone who's got an email last has 99 problems, and a list is one. So how big does your email list have to really be to make it worth it?
Tarzan: That's always the big question, like how subscribers do you have, like how about you, how many do you have, like how many do I need before I can start emailing them. Ultimately like if you're looking for a number, you're looking in the wrong place. Because what's way more important than how many people are in your email list is your relationship with those individuals on your email list. I'm always surprised like I am able, I don't have a large list, like I have maybe 6000 or 7000 people on my list, but for a long time I only had about 1500, I just ramped up my ads so I have more people now, but I've done lots of promotions with like 1500 or fewer people on email list. When I first started out and committed to that biweekly email I had 37 people on my list, but what I found is like my list actually, they are so responsive, I have this great relationship. I am able to get to do so much business with that list, even more than other people that have a much larger list, but they haven't nurtured very well and they don't have a relationship with. So rather than focusing on getting to a certain number, I would say like just start being consistent with them and keep on doing your list building stuff, because that's really important, but just like really focus on nurturing those you have and like cultivating those personal relationships, rather than just like trying to get to a really big number.
Tracy: 100%. I mean I think a lot of the designers in our community would be stoked with 1500 on their lists, like you know many of them are starting with like 40 people or 100, and I think the reason for that is that they get nervous about asking for emails when they're at events, or they just don't know like how to actually build their list. We have a great episode on that, so I'll link that episode in the show notes for list building, because it's a really awesome, awesome episode, and it's actually what we're starting to work on tomorrow in an, as we're recording this, we're starting our 12 week intensive here Flourish and Thrive called Train Your Customers to Buy From You Online. I think it the jewelry world people are just really used to selling in live events or just selling wholesale to stores, and selling online, while some people do it very, very successfully and can easily build six, even seven figure businesses selling jewelry online, it's really a learned skill, and it starts with the email lists. The more you can build your email list on an ongoing basis, even with grassroots efforts starting with your friends and family and then expanding that out into a broader circle and then continuing to ask for referrals, I think that that's the way, a great place to start. Like Tarzan did, you can start running ads to your jewelry or to offer some sort of access to insider page or a quiz, or something like that, to do like really massive list building down the road. Now Tarzan, okay, so we have the list, we're going to start consistently emailing...
Tarzan: Wait, wait, before you even go any further, I just want to like speak to those people that just have a couple hundred people on their list. There is like, I think it's really important when you have a small list like, that actually this can be a huge competitive advantage, because you can do all these cool things when you only have a few hundred people that you can't do when you have tens of thousands. You can send people personalized messages, you can like reach out to them and get to know them. I love to make videos, I use this great tool called BombBomb to make videos, and oftentimes like I'm sending personal emails and reaching out one to one. Imagine if you have only one or two people joining your list per day, you could just be monitoring that and sending, and like reaching out to them as soon as you see someone join your list to say like, "Welcome, it's nice to have you." you mention their name so that they know it's personalized, and just like start a conversation. You can't do that when you have hundreds of people joining your list every day. So if you just have a couple hundred, like celebrate that and just a really dig in, like figure out who are those 100 people and how can you get to know them.
Tracy: Yeah, exactly. I think that is a great strategy. One of my favorite strategies, especially when you have a small list, and I pulled this from the internet marketing world, and it worked so well in my jewelry business, is I just ask is very simple question at the end of any email that I send and it just says like, "Hey, tell me what you're up to." or something like that.
Tarzan: Well another great place to put a question is in the welcome email. If they sign up to your list to get something free, or even if they just sign up to your list and you say, "Hey, here's who I am. Who are you?" ask them a question. When I had in a nurture sequence for a long time, I had a question something like, "What's your biggest struggle right now when it comes to growing your business?" and that always gets really good replies. And not only that, but it helps me get to know the people on my email list.
Tracy: Yeah. I don't know that jewelry designers would ask the same kind of question.
Tarzan: Right.
Tracy: It could be something related to jewelry, like, "What's your biggest frustration when it comes to styling your jewelry?"
Tarzan: Exactly.
Tracy: Jewelry for an outfit, or something like that.
Tarzan: Totally.
Tracy: Cool. So I totally lost my train of thought about what I was going to ask you, let me circle back. I was saying, okay, so the next step is we have this list, we're nurturing them. How do we get people to open our emails?
Tarzan: Oh my gosh, this is definitely the million dollar question, and you want really like start thinking about your subject lines, because ultimately it all goes back to the subject line. And even the "from" name actually, so let's start with the "from" name, and I'm really interested in your particular e-commerce advice here, because I work for a lot of personal brands, but what I will sometimes see people doing is like they'll send out an email and the "from" name is their company, which could be, I don't know how that would work for e-commerce, but I always tell people, like even if you're a company, maybe just say it like Tracy at Flourish and Thrive Academy or like Tracy at Flourish and Thrive Academy. Rather than just saying Flourish and Thrive, just make it a touch more personal. But before I go on to subject lines, what do you think about that?
Tracy: I think we, I mean all the emails for Flourish and Thrive come from me. I think for a jewelry brand it's good, but I think the best thing to do is to test different options, so you can change that your email CRM is you can have it personally coming from, you can have it coming from you at your company, you can have it coming from your company, and then see what gets a better open and response rate, because that will be the indicator, if you can do you like some sort of... I know that there's a lot of to split test in different CRM's, whether you're using Clavio or Omnisend or even Mail Champ, and now Mail Chimp is having issues with Shopify, it's like people are leaving MailChimp like a mass exodus. It's unfortunate because we've been like telling people to use it for many years.
Tarzan: Oh man, oh man. One thing about testing his like when you have a small, a small email list, like let's say it's only a few hundred people, it's hard to get reliable metrics. Like until you have a few thousand people, you might not, like it might be a little bit difficult to tell. So let's say you have like 200 people or less, and I don't think that's enough to test, but definitely know that's something that has to happen as your list grows. The only thing I would say not to do is to use your own name if the brand is your website, or on your website is your brand. So let's say I go to FlourishThriveAcademy.com and that's clearly the brand, and then I sign up to your email list and I get an email from Tracy Matthews, like I'm not necessarily going to be able to make the link. So as a rule, just makes sure, like whatever brand they say and they signed up that email list, it's got to match on the "from" name.
Tracy: That's a good call. Awesome, awesome. Alright.
Tarzan: Subject line. So that subject lines, okay, one just reason in general that people don't send email is because we always, we all think like, "Well I'm not going at writing." So when it comes to subject lines, it is, an all writing in fact, it's just a question of practicing. The more subject lines you write, the better you're going to get. When you first start emailing, like you're not going to be writing great subject lines. There's lots of subject lines swipe files you can probably download and just use some of those as a starter, but just know like you're going to get better at it, and when I'm writing emails I always make myself write four subject lines. If you can challenge yourself to write a couple more, go for it, but at least start with four subject lines. I think you did episode on this with Laura. Is that correct?
Tracy: Yeah, Laura Belgray and I did one together. I think if I remember it, no that's on the list as an Episode 17. I will definitely link that episode here, because Laura talks about some really fun ways to write subject lines for emails to actually get them open, so we can use her formula. But Tarzan, I love your take on it too.
Tarzan: Yeah, so just keep practicing, use a swipe file and notice like what your people like and what they don't like, you got to know you're going to get better on it. If you're doing like a special offer put that in the subject line. I like to use, like I always try and play with the formatting so that my email will stand out. Like sometimes I'll do like all lowercase, like no capitals. I always try not to be like too salesy. Sometimes up put in emoji in there, or sometimes I'll use like a bit of a sneaky subject line, you can't do this too often, but like a sneaky subject line that's re: and then something else that kind of looks like a reply, but you have to be careful, you don't want to be spam. But you just got to know, try things out and see what works. Definitely get on other people's emails, like maybe other jewelry brands that you like, or even just other e-commerce and start like looking, just reading subject lines and emails, in fact, with a critical eye. What you can do, I always recommend people do this, is have an email that's like just to get on people's email list. Because if it's coming to your main inbox, we're always like sort of on and off email lists, and they can really clog up your inbox. If you can just have like a Gmail or something, just create a free email address and then put it into a folder so you can just look at those at any time and they're not going to bulk up your actual personal inbox. If you do that, and let's say you're getting a whole bunch of marketing emails, and then you can go into your inbox and see there's like 30 of them, just look at the subject lines that stand out and you're going to start to get an idea of how to write a good subject line.
Tracy: That's exactly what I teach. I'm like there are so many brands out there who do you epic email marketing and they have huge budgets behind them, the hire expensive copywriters and graphic designers, I'm like, "Follow all these people and get on their email lists, because they know what they're doing and they're making money selling e-commerce." I would think of like the brands that you like. I mean I'm always like attracted to more lux brands, because my jewelry brand is a little bit more lux, but definitely you don't have to necessarily just follow jewelry brands, because I think there's a lot to be learned from people who are selling clothing, people who are selling shoes, people who are selling accessories, multi brand e-commerce sites like Intermix or Shopbob or Net-a-Porter or the Outnet, all these people, they have like really big marketing teams behind them, and because they're always testing what works you can see what they're using email. Any time I do a presentation on this or teach about this, I'm always deriving examples from other types of brands outside of jewelry. Because quite honestly, I think jewelry brands do this the worst, because they don't... I'm on a mission to get them better, Tarzan. And no offence to someone listening, but this is like, I feel like clothing and multi brand e-commerce outlets do this very well because they if they're only selling e-commerce this is what they're doing all day, and you have to get good at it. So if you ever find a jewelry brand that's doing it really well, just study what they're doing. Don't necessarily copy them, but just study what they're doing and try to emulate that for your list.
Tarzan: You just made a really good point there, and I want to bring something up. A lot of people, they don't want to send email because they think that it's really annoying, and the reason is because, yeah, like there are a lot of brands that aren't doing it very well, and they're just being annoying and they're sending stuff that's really not that good. But that is like the greatest opportunity, and that's what I always tell people, they're like, "People are getting so much email already, I don't want to be salesy and send an email." I'm like, "Yeah, you have a chance to be that person in the inbox that's like, 'Ohh, it's Tarzan, I'm so excited I got an email from her.'" because all the other emails are so boring and I just go straight to delete. So that's wonderful, follow those jewelry brands aren't doing it very well too, because you'll be able to see like how you can do it better. If you just put a little bit more effort in than the last person, oh my gosh, what an incredible opportunity.
Tracy: Exactly. I love that. Okay, so how do you prevent email from going into spam?
Tarzan: Okay, so this is where I'm going to defer a little bit to your expertise, because I'm usually working with like very text based email, but one thing that applies to everyone no matter what kind of email list you have, is you have to scrub your list regularly. What that means is like you've got to delete all those people that aren't opening your emails. This depends on like the size of your list, but I run a list scrub once or twice per year, and as my list grows I will start running it more often. Because the more emails that are going to spam and are not getting opened, my email service provider and Google are getting the message like, "This is not quality, this should be going to spam." So every, let's say every six months I send out a sequence. Your email service provider will tell you who is cold on your list. So who has not opened an email in 90 days. If they haven't opened an email in six months, I would straight up delete them. But for the people that haven't opened in the last 90 days, I will send a sequence and try and get them to either like say, "Yes, I want to keep receiving your emails." or, "No, I want to unsubscribe." Ultimately I want them to choose yes, but if I sent those three emails over three weeks and that person still hasn't opened or clicked anything, then I will delete them. Because the more people are opening and engaging with your emails, the better your deliverability is going to be. So that would be the number one way to stay out of spam.
Tracy: Can I ask you something really quickly?
Tarzan: Yeah, go ahead.
Tracy: Why would you delete them, as opposed to you just moving them to a separate list of unengaged?
Tarzan: That would be ideal, and actually when you're starting out you could definitely do that. It depends on email service provider, but in most cases if you're keeping all of those people, you have to pay for those subscribers.
Tracy: Oh, that's right.
Tracy: Yeah. Like you want to kind of scrub so that you're not paying for all these people that you don't have. But that is why you want them to actively unsubscribe if they don't want to stick around, because in that case you still keep all their data. So if they've purchased something from you, like you have all that history, so that's another reason why you send that list scrub sequence so you can get as many people as possible to actively unsubscribe. It's not the most ideal to actually delete them from your system. And probably with email service providers you can download the data and then delete them, but that's my answer.
Tracy: Yeah, exactly. So how often do you think, in your opinion you think people should be emailing a list?
Tarzan: So I'm interested in your opinion on this, but like ultimately it's like what are you realistically going to commit to. So for me when I was starting out and I had 37 people on my email list, I committed to biweekly, and I mean weekly would have been better, but biweekly was what I felt like I could do, so I put it in my calendar, it was like, I don't know, Friday at 1 o'clock or something, like that was my half hour to write my weekly email, or my biweekly email to my list. And then after doing that for a year I was in the habit and I started emailing my list regularly, and now it's a reflex, I don't need to remind myself. I actually have to use the calendar of all the emails going out to my list so I don't like smash them with five things on the same day. So whatever you can realistically do to create a habit. That is the most important thing, and that's actually where people that are like email marketers, or would be email marketers really struggle, is creating that consistency. Like once you can create consistency, oh my God, like I noticed my business totally took off when I consistently started emailing my list on the regular. So I would like aim for biweekly at least, but even if it's once, at least you're doing it.
Tracy: Well I think the other thing too, it's like do you want to make sales online or do you not want to make sales. Email people if you want to make sales. Because if you think about the lifespan of an email in inbox, it's like the second it goes like down the page view, people aren't looking at that. This is why a resend strategy becomes really, really important. You can't just rely on someone. I mean how many times have you not opened an email from someone that you actually wanted to get an email from? It happens all the time unless you have inbox tricks that you know how to like bump all the unread emails to the top or something like that.
Tarzan: Yeah, that resend unopened is like such an easy win, and like most email service providers, it's like a one click thing. You send out the email and the next day you can, or the next day, depending how regularly you're emailing your list, but if you send it on Monday, you can go back in on Thursday and see like whatever people opened it, and then just click resend and it will respond to all the people that didn't open it.
Tracy: Yeah. So we talked about opens, and like I guess the next step what you really want people to do is click through. Now, with e-commerce emails a lot of them are really highly visually driven. My advice is to create graphic images that you can click on that actually take you to where you want them to go, so it's almost like a shop now button is like embed an image, so it's like designed that way. Click through rate is a really important, click throughs are really important part of an effective email marketing strategy. With that being said, do you have any advice on how to get people to actually take the next step once they open the email?
Tarzan: This is really interesting question. I'm not sure how to answer that specific to e-commerce. In my industry, like I always use a lot of story, and anywhere I can sort of tease something where they have to click to figure out the answer, that is always super-duper effective. So let's say you've got like a special promotion coming up, like you could perhaps like tease a couple of the things. Like let's say you have one particular collection and maybe it's some special promotion, maybe just like have an image of like two or three, and then it could be like, "Click here to see what else." Just try and tease it a little bit so there's a reason to click through that's not just "shop now, I have stuff available", "shop now, I have stuff available". Just think, like why would they click through. Like even just giving them a reason, like you know that the old Xerox study. Have you heard that? You know about can I make more copies? So they did this study, and there's someone in line to use the Xerox machine, and the person says, "Excuse me, could I go ahead of you?" like I don't know, 25% of the time the person will say yes. On the other hand, "Excuse me, could I go ahead of you because I'm in a rush?" In that case like 50% of people will say yes. And then the last example like, "Excuse me, could I go ahead of you because I need to make copies?" Same response, funny enough, like still, I don't know what the exact number is, but still it's basically the same percentage of people who will let you cut a line. So the point is not like to give them a really good reason, it's just like to give them some reason. So think about it like, why should you click this thing? Just give them a reason, and it's going to be a million times more effective than just putting it there.
Tracy: Exactly. When they're looking at metrics and looking at the things, you know, the data, the information that you get from emails, like what should they be looking at?
Tarzan: So monitoring your open rate and your click through rate is just going to be super helpful, but since we're talking about metrics, we're human, we want to compare ourselves to everyone else. When it comes to metrics, I think it's really important to compare yourself to yourself. If you're looking, like rather than asking, "Well Tracy, what's your open rate?" Well your open rate is based on like how you nurture your subscribers, also it's based on the number of people on your list. So if you have a huge list, your open rate is going to be a lot lower than someone that has like 100 people on their list. So just like look at your open rate and compare it to yourself. If you had a great open rate like three years ago and now your open rate's not very good, well you probably need to scrub your list, but also, like maybe there's potentially a problem there. So just look at your own metrics, open rate, and your click through rate.
Tracy: Absolutely, that's great advice, that's great advice. So I think sometimes the first thing people want to say is, "Can I just have someone else do this?" What's your take on that?
Tarzan: Well okay, again I want to defer to your opinion on this. In general, I always tell people like this is really an important skill that you should have yourself. Like a great copywriter, as you know, Tracy, is expensive. When you're starting out, like your email is a great place to get to know who is on your list. We talked about asking a question, like you should be the one reading the answers and replying. I think it's really important to do it yourself at least for the first couple, like the first couple years of your business. You can outsource it later when your brand is more developed, but you can't go to a copywriter and expect them to develop your brand voice for you, you have to do that work yourself, and then when you bring on a copywriter later on in your business when all that stuff is developed, they're going to be able to slip in and talk like you do, hopefully. But what I see in my industry is like when people hire copywriter too early, a really common complaint would be like, "I worked with a copywriter, but like it didn't sound like me." They didn't do a great job capturing your voice. And my response is usually like, "What is your voice? How can they jump into your voice and sound like you if you don't even know what you sound like?"
Tracy: Exactly.
Tarzan: I do think like across industries, you do need to figure out your brand voice for yourself, so no, I would not recommend hiring someone until later on in your business when it makes sense.
Tarzan: Okay, that's great feedback. I agree with you, think that, I was just talking with a designer yesterday, she's joining us for our SOS coaching program which is our annual, a yearlong program that we help people with their digital marketing strategy and selling more jewelry online. She has a very established business, this designer, she's been in business for a long time. She's in all the best stores, but she really struggles being consistent with her online, digital email marketing strategy. She's like, "I know I got to do this." and when we were talking about it, I was like, "Well look, you can always have like your marketing person step in." because she has a marketing assist and helps her with other things, to take some of the calls and stuff like that to help you out. She's like, "No, I have to be there because I have to learn this, I have to understand how to do it, so that when I do hire someone in that position more full time or whatever, I can actually explain it and know what I'm supposed to be doing." So this is why I think it's really important as a business owner to understand how the process works, even if you're not always going to be the person doing it, because If you, like Tarzan said, like you said, if you're not clear on what your voice is and you're not like creating a brand, like store, like a brand, an opportunity for your brand to kind of tell stories through that brand voice, then it's going to be really hard for anyone else to ever step into it and be able to speak like you or in the tone of your brand. So this has been awesome. So thank you so much, Tarzan, for being here today.
Tarzan: It was my pleasure, thanks for having me.
Tracy: Where can everyone find you and sign up for your amazing emails?
Tarzan: Yeah, well TarzanKay.com, I have a variety of interesting opt in content, but actually you should just join my email list so you can, as a case study, to see how great email is done.
Tracy: Yeah. I think one thing that I love about getting on copywriters' email lists is that they write great emails, and it's a great opportunity to kind of like be inspired by subject lines and some of the content that they put in the emails, even though they're very different than our industry, it's a great source of inspiration, so definitely do it. Tarzan, thanks for being here.
Tarzan: My pleasure.
Tracy: Thank you so much for listening to the show today, and I'm really excited because I just want to invite you again to join us for a Train Your Customers to Buy From You Online. This is a great opportunity for you to adopt our simple framework to double your sales online in 12 weeks or less, 10 X your lead gen, because this is how you're going to get more sales, is by building your email list and create a long term growth strategy and cycle that keeps your customers coming back for more. That's what we all want. I'm very excited about this. Come join us, head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/TrainMyCustomers to apply today.
This is Tracy Matthews signing off, take care till next time.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It's my mission to help thousands of creative businesses, inside and outside the jewelry space, use their creativity to make money. Make sure that you're subscribed to Thrive-by-Design on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever podcasts are played. We would love to hear what you think, please rate and review the show. If you're inspired, please share this with your friends. Here's to seeing you flourish and thrive.
