How to Grow Your Email List (Series #4)

Sam Vander Wielen: Okay, so for the past month, I’ve taught you how to build your email list, but now comes the part where you actually have to write those emails to your list each week. So you know you want your email list to lead to more sales conversations and referrals. So what exactly needs to go in this email every week in order for that to happen?

Most business owners don’t have a plan or a strategy when it comes to their weekly email list strategy, and that leads to a whole lot of random, sporadic, and then inconsistent emails that result in no revenue or return on all this investment you’ve made. In this episode, I’ll teach you exactly how to structure your emails, how to pick a format that works best for you, and what things you must include in your weekly emails if you want them to get opened, read and clicked on. So let’s jump in.

Hey. Hey, and happy Monday. Thanks so much for listening to On Your Terms®. I’m your host, Sam Vander Wielen. This is on Your Terms®, a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses. ’cause around here, we believe in running really great businesses, but also having even better lives offline. I hope that’s my goal.

So I can’t believe this is the last week of this four part series. This whole month I’ve been yapping at you about how to build an email list and you know, committing to this idea of building an email list and trying to convince you how important it is. And then showing you my easy email list strategy, going kind of straight to the emails, the emails themselves being the value, but also balancing out that approach with the more traditional approach of using freebies and opt-ins to get people on your email list.

Hopefully you’re all caught up. If not, go back and listens to part one, two, and three of this series so far, but I think that today we’re really going to like pull it all together and talk about, okay, I understand it’s important. I understand how to pitch people to get straight onto my email list. I also understand how to use things like freebies. But now what happens when people are actually getting my emails every single week like this is often I find to be a problem in, in the industry. When people talk about email marketing, people are either really good at teaching you how to like create opt-ins or they’ll just give you like templates and stuff on how to write weekly emails and I’m like, that’s great, but then how do you get people onto that email and vice versa? So I was really hoping with this series that I’ve given you a little bit of everything, you’ll have to tell me, by the way, I, I’m gonna tell you right now, like I say to my email list all the time, this is a two-way street here.

Although I’m the one yapping here on the mic, I fully expect you to reach out to me and to tell me, you know, share your thoughts, share your reactions. Tell me if this was good. Tell me if you learned something. Tell me what was like the big takeaway for you, but my dms are open, my inbox is always open. I expect you fully to not just come here and mooch. I I expect you to come and, and participate because, um, that’s really, that’s really what I wanna do and that’s why I created this podcast was yes, to create, you know, a place where I could share this information with you, but really to create more of a community of On Your Terms®, people, the terminators, as I call them in my head.

So with that, let’s hop into today’s episode, talking about building your newsletter. So traditionally there are two options, or kind of like two schools of thought as to how you build a newsletter or how you can structure it. But as you can imagine, I don’t do either of these two, but I think in my responsibility and due diligence, I will tell you what they are.

So the two traditional options are, for one, is like more of just an essay style, like something that would look like you were writing an email to a friend. It would say like, dear first name, there’s just a lot of text, and then a sign off and maybe a link and that’s it. Right? So that’s one way I did that way for a really long time, many years. It’s probably my preferred way, but that, that’s one way.

The second way is, you know, and, and has become more popular in recent years, is to turn it into more of a newsletter style, which is more like a digital magazine. A digital newspaper, like a bunch of different boxes or sections or areas of this email, but that it’s not necessarily just an essay of sorts.

Of course. I, uh, I’m a Scorpio, I kind of pride myself on trying to do things differently, at least, even if I don’t, but I, I take more of a hybrid approach, so I kind of mash this up and I do an essay, so my, my Sam’s Sidebar weekly newsletter, which if you don’t get it, you can sign up for free in using the link in the description.

But that starts out with some sort of essay. It’s always a story based essay, and I’m gonna talk about that in a second. And then that leads into a couple of what I call predictable sections. So maybe one box or section that’s about that week’s podcast episode or a section that’s about links and resources that I know my people will love, something like that.

Then finally there are box, what I would just refer to as boxes. These are things that are more set in stone, like they’re the same every single week. It’s not like with the predictable sections, I consider that to be more like, you know, to expect a list of helpful resources and links every week, but the links and resources themselves change. Whereas with the boxes, the way that I think about that is that those boxes are literally the same every single week. And I’ll share a little bit with you in a few minutes about what that can look like for you. So I just wanna go back for a second and talk a little bit about this essay story-based part of the email. Whether you decide to start an email or write your emails completely as essay and story-based, which is totally okay or you’re going to take some sort of hybrid approach like me, and you’re going to include a part of it in your newsletter.

I think a lot of people think that they’re supposed to do this some way or like that this is an important part of, you know, writing an email and I would say that it is, it is important to have some sort of like essay or story based or personal essay or something like that. If one, you like it, and two, you’re somewhat decent at it and you don’t have to be great at it right now, you’re gonna get better at it. But I think like if this is your forte, I would lean into it because I personally think that like the essay, personal writing part really connects with the audience. And I think people like reading it. This also depends on, of course, who your audience is. Like I know that my audience likes to read, they are people who like the nitty gritty details, so they don’t, they don’t mind it, right?

I also know that they’re busy, so I try to be respectful of their time. But I taught a workshop about email marketing in Austin last week, and one of the people came up afterwards and they said, you know, what if our audience doesn’t want to read a thousand word essay or something like that. And I was like, well, this is where it’s so important for you to know your audience. Like, do your people like to do that? You know, like if you’re writing on Substack, for example. I mean, people are going there to read. So I, I tend to think that, it’s somewhat of a mix, like of a hybrid approach where that’s where I do my best work is writing and probably writing from a storytelling personal based perspective. And I think my people then therefore like also like to read that or look forward to it because that’s my style.

So like you weren’t going to be attracted to my style in the first place. If what you were looking for was like seven second TikTok videos, you know, like, that wasn’t, that wasn’t gonna be me anyway. So I think over time it’s kind of like chiseling away at a stone. Like I think you, you start to kind of mold your audience in the sense that by you sharing your art in this way, by you sharing in the way that you find the most expressive, if that’s writing for you, you’re going to attract, uh, an audience who likes writing and reading that writing, you know? So that’s sort of my thought process behind the essay is that it’s some sort of mix between, I feel like that’s the thing that I’m better at. And then also I think people like it now because I’ve done it for so long.

But in terms of how I go about crafting this, this is something I get asked so often. Well, for one, I actually created a video walkthrough tutorial where I show you how I write my emails in real time and like how I come up with the story and how I craft it and I show you kind of like the like method and the strategy that I go through to take it from a story to something that’s a lesson for my audience. So you should definitely go in the show notes and download this free video walkthrough I’ve created for you on how I tell my stories, but, I like to think commit in one of two ways.

The first way is that I will be out and about, which doesn’t happen often. I don’t leave the house as much as I should, but when I do leave the house, i’m like number one, human observer. So I see everything. I notice everything, and so when I will see something happening in a store or in a park, or when I’m taking a walk, the way that my brain works is that when I see that thing happen, I kind of instantly convert it into like, oh, that’s just like this. Like it’s, it becomes a metaphor. In my brain. And I do think that sometimes people will say to me like, well, I don’t think like that. Or, I, I wish I could think like that. It’s, um, it’s an exercise, so it’s, it’s a, something that you build over time.

I think that the more that you start leaning into storytelling or essay based, like emails or any other kind of writing that you’re thinking of doing, you then start seeing that when you’re out and about. So like I, I think like if you just start getting in the habit of thinking about it, it will become more and more automatic over time. Don’t expect it to be so automatic off the bat, you know? So yeah, this is the kind of, the first way is I’ll, I’ll be out and about. I will see something, I’ll be like, oh, when that lady just did that at the grocery store, that’s just like, I can see how I can make this analogy to what happens in online business. And so I’m gonna use that as my little, like kicking off point.

I mean, typically speaking, I’m looking for something that’s interesting, right? Like it has to have a little bit of a spark of something that’s interesting enough to write about. This is where if you’ve read my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy, I talk a lot in the book about how there you have to be a pretty like interesting person, I think to keep up this kind of business. And I don’t mean that you have to like have a billion hobbies and be like the quirkiest, most eccentric person, but like you have to go out and actually seek things like I, I will purposefully schedule days where I’m like, oh, I’m gonna go to like this museum, or I’m gonna go into the city for a day, or I’m gonna go do something or even just like working from a coffee shop. Literally anything that gets me out of my normal habit and routine, because it typically generates ideas, spurs creativity, lets me see people doing wacky things, you know? Basically, if you spend any time around other humans, you’ll come up with something. But you know, I, I do believe that like, that is part of our job is actually getting out and about having experiences. Take the art class, sign up for a fitness class in person instead of doing your bar routine at home that day. You know, like just something that kind of gets you out of that routine. It’s, it’s really incredible what can happen. And I do consider that to be part of the job. I think we have to be interesting people in order to then have stuff to talk about. And I do think that developing hobbies and all that also helps, but I try to always make this like a low bar. Like, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated, but of course if you like take up a pottery habit or something like this, you’re, you’re gonna have so much talk about whether you talk about business, finance, career, health and wellness, um, mental health. It will give you so many lessons and tips for yourself to go through that you will then be able to share with your audience. So sometimes it’s just a matter of like mixing it up, looking at your life, every once in a while I notice I’m like, Hey, I haven’t left my house in five days. I don’t have anything on the schedule. I haven’t seen a friend in a while. Like, I need to make sure I’m doing those kinds of things, not only for myself and my mental wellbeing, but also because it does help me with my work and my creativity. So sometimes that’s how I approach my story is like seeing something out and about.

The second way I think about writing these stories and starting out my emails is that I already know what lesson I need to teach you that week, or what tip I need to give you or like what the kind of educational topic is going to be. And then I reverse engineer it to think about a story. So it could be a story of something that happened to me as a child. It could be something that happened in high school. It could be what happened when I first started my business, like, or it could be last week at the grocery store, it doesn’t matter.

But the point is, I will just kind of in my mind go back and think, oh yeah, that’s very similar to like what happened this, this story illustrates the point that I’m trying to make. That’s essentially what I’m looking for.

Here’s an example. Of course, this isn’t how they put it, but if I had to summarize how people like what they say when they reach out to me or what’s really behind what people are saying when they reach out to me, it’s that people are putting off, like getting started because they’re waiting for all these other things to happen, right, with their businesses. So they’re, they’re waiting for things to be perfect or they’re trying to do everything themselves, or they’re trying to too much like they’re doing things they don’t have to do quite yet. Et cetera, Right?

So last summer when I was at the farmer’s market, and I wrote about this to my email list, so if you get my emails, you might know the story already. But I was at the farmer’s market and there was this guy who had become kind of like, he’s become really popular in the area for his sourdough bread and for his baked goods, they’re insane.

And he had this crazy line every single week at the farmer’s market and he started telling people that he had bought a space in the downtown to actually open his own bakery. So he’d be available year round and outside of just the farmer’s market. And so people, you know, rightfully so, we’re getting so excited about this ’cause his stuff was so good.

And so they’re like, when’s it coming? When’s it coming? And every week I would stand in line in this long line to get the bread or whatever and you would just see one by one every single person saying, how’s the bakery coming? Is it gonna be open soon? Like when can we expect it? Right? And the closer I got, the closer, I just saw his shoulders slumping towards the table, like so dejected that he had to keep telling everybody that it was taking him a long time because he was trying to do everything himself.

He was like learning how to become a plumber so we could do the plumbing, learning how to do the electric so we could do the electric and all of that. All very noble things like I have so much respect for people who try to do this themselves and like build things from the ground up, and that’s unbelievable. Amazing, right?

From a business perspective though, you’re like, dude, hire a plumber. Like, yes, I know the plumbers cost money, but you’re losing so much money every single week here. You have so much demand. This has gotten like really hot. You could have been up and running by now and it doesn’t have to be perfect.

People would have waited in that line. In his bakery without the most perfect, beautiful aesthetic yet or anything like that, right? So I’m sitting here every week looking at this thing happened in real time, and I’m like, oh, this is exactly what people do with their businesses in the online space too, where it’s not the plumbing, but it’s trying to teach yourself SEO and Pinterest and start an Instagram account and say like, well, once I get my website up and running, then I’ll start talking about what I do and you know, all the obstacles that we all put in place. And so he was doing this in real time, right?

So that’s just an example of like seeing something, what is the lesson, what’s the takeaway? How do your people do this? Like how are they making the same mistake?

Sometimes it’s just helpful to show people like how they’re making a mistake. Or where they’re getting tripped up, a myth that they’re buying into something like that in a, in a just like totally separate example from what you teach because they can see it in someone else, but maybe not themselves. And then once you tell that story, like when I told this story about the baker, everybody wrote back and was like, oh my God. Yeah, I can see how, yeah, it’s not the plumbing for me, but like I can see how I’m doing that. I see my own plumbing, right? I see where I’m trying to learn to become an electrician and a plumber while also like having to be the only baker and like the best baker, and he is like milling his own flour and everything else, which is so admirable, but like you can’t be all of those things and get this thing off the ground, right? So I think that it just helps people to see that example so that they can see that within themselves.

That’s sort of how I go around that essay. Of course, it’s deeper than that and there’s a way that I like make transitions and all these kinds of things. I would love it if you would just give me the opportunity to visually show you, since I created a freebie before you that’s in the show notes, just showing you my email walkthrough of how I write my emails, so go ahead and download that.

Okay, so how do you decide which one of these approaches is the best for you and your email list? Is it the essay style? Is it more the magazine style? Is it the hybrid? Like what I do, I would encourage you to think about what is the goal of your newsletter. There’s sort of two kinds of goals to think about. There’s sort of the, what’s the goal of your newsletter on a more global level, like what is, where does it fit into your overall marketing strategy?

So are we pulling in a lot of people who don’t know you that well, so that this is the place where they need to get to know you? Is this the place where we’re nurturing people who really do know you? Are we creating more of a community feel? I think there’s that whole set of goals, like that’s more the, where does this fit into the ecosystem goal.

On the other hand, there’s the goal of each weekly newsletter, and I, I would say I sort of switch up my goal every single week, but that kind of dictates what the structure is like, or how long the essay is, or what I’m focused on. So every single week when you’re writing your newsletter, you need to first, before you, before you write a word. Think what is the goal of this newsletter? This one right here, of course there are many different goals that you can cycle through, but there are three main ones that you could choose from every single week when you write a weekly newsletter, and that’s buy, engage, or click, right?

So am I writing this email because I am going to write an email and my goal of this email is to get them to buy something at the end of it? Is it because I want them to engage? Do I want them to hit reply and say something? Or leave a comment or something if you’re on substack. Or am I asking them to click on something? Maybe that’s clicking to watch your latest YouTube video or listen to your latest podcast episode, or click on a link so that they segment themselves so you get some tagging and know more about their interests and what they’re there for like, there are so many different goals of every email.

Every once in a while, yes, I have more than one goal. I will sometimes say, hit reply and let me know, you know, X, Y, or Z. And I will also include a link to my podcast episode in the body of that email saying, go listen to this podcast episode. I would say like more of when I started the common thought process was one call to action, like one focus per email. I have personally seen that shift over the years, and people now have more than one. I think if you get more than several, you start to spread yourself thin, and that can be a little bit difficult, but I think even just you spending the time before you start writing to think like, what is the point of this email? Am I asking them to go listen to this podcast episode? Or today am I just really focused on getting responses? ’cause I need, I need them to respond to this and like get some feedback or boost my engagement score with like, you know, the Google Gods or something, or I’m sending out a survey to my email list, and so today the main focus is just getting them to click on that survey and take the survey. That’s it, right?

Like I think it just helps to get you to focus and then tighten up from there, because now that you know your goal, if your goal is to get them to listen to this podcast episode, for example, maybe you think about a story that relates to the topic of your podcast episode, and then the call to action is your podcast episode.

So. It’ll just help you to tighten up exactly what you’re talking about, and this is how we start to build a more strategic approach. I said at the top, like a lot of people go into this like really random and throwing spaghetti at the wall. This is how we don’t do that because we know ahead of time and like this is the goal. Therefore this kind of story makes sense, this length that makes sense. This is where the link needs to go, all that kind of stuff.

Now speaking of links, I thought I would pause for a second to give you a little bit of a hot tip here. When I first started my newsletter, the thought process was to never link to other people’s stuff or to Outward Bound links because you really wanted to keep people in your own ecosystem.

I would say just a couple of years ago, as newsletters became really popular and kind of more of this like magazine style, it almost swung the other way where everybody was linking to tons of other people’s stuff and all these outward bound links, like New York Times articles, and I don’t know if it were me, like maybe it would be articles on the United States Patent and Trademark offices website and stuff like this, like lots of helpful resources, but not my own stuff, not on my own site. Not my own content. Right?

I think that we’ve seen a little bit of a swing back to at least the middle, where you should primarily focus on your own links and not links to a lot of other people’s stuff. I’ve pretty much swung back to like links to my own stuff or links to my own content, unless of course it’s a sponsored link or a friend asked me to promote something of theirs, or if it’s a resource that I think is going to be really helpful to my audience.

So that’s sort of where I draw on the line. Now it’s like it has to be really, really good for you guys. If it’s good for you, then I will include it. ’cause then it’s worth it for you. But I’m not just trying to stuff a bunch of Outward Bound links into my email in order to appear more helpful anymore because all that was doing is like, I just picture like a pool queue, you know, like hitting the pool like balls. And they just go all over the place and, and that’s not what I wanna do when it comes to the people who are on my email list. I want to be a value of course, but I wanna keep them in my ecosystem.

So as you’re thinking about what your structure would be for your email, I would encourage you to think about what does it need to be structured like in order to be valuable but consumable at the same time? Right? We want people to look forward to this, to open it.

We talked in the easy email list strategy part two of this series about how you want it to become like a thing that people look forward to, and so what does that need to look like in order to be consumed that way? Is it bingeable? Is there any way that you can create some sort of bingeable element?

Are you interested in it being forwardable? Right? Like is this the kind of thing that you want people to be sending to other people and saying, Hey, you gotta get this person’s email. So what could that look like within your email structure?

Okay, so to wrap things up today, I thought I would include eight things that I think are absolute essentials that you must include in your weekly emails if you want them to get opened, read, and clicked on, and actually be of value to your people.

The first is a box of what I call your top hits. So if you get Sam’s Sidebar, my weekly newsletter, you know that at the bottom of my essay there is a box that includes a mix of links to free and paid stuff from me. It’s kind of the like, Hey, if you need more than this email, if you wanna take the next step, here are some places to get started.

So maybe if you have a podcast, for example, there’s a link to your podcast or your YouTube channel, I would include one link to your top freebie, whatever best performing freebie you have. If you have a webinar or some sort of free class, of course there would be a link to that. There’s, for me, there’s a link to my book, and then also you could have a link to your actual product itself, if there’s a way for them to get started and start working with you.

I think this is a great way to give people a little bit of an overview of like the next step. Like, oh, I love this email, like I want more. Right? Just keep in mind that if you’re linking to freebies and these people are already on your email list, and then I don’t recommend having them opt into those freebies again. You should just give it to them. And then for everything else, you obviously link out to it like your podcast page or your webinar page or something like that.

The next thing I recommend highlighting in your email every single week is that week’s piece of what I call cornerstone content. So in my ideal world, you would create one cornerstone piece of content each week, like whether that would be your YouTube episode, your podcast episode, a blog post, a substack post, something that’s meatier than social media. But it’s kind of your one big piece of content for the week.

Ideally, there would be a box or some sort of section of your email that would point people to that piece of content, um, so that we could continue to get engagement and eyeballs on that content.

The third thing that should be in your email every single week is some sort of reflection or prompt for engagement, whether that is in your actual essay itself, like I will often end my essay with hit reply and tell me the answer to X, y, or Z. The more, uh, specific that you make it and kind of smaller lift that you make it, the more people will respond. I also, as I did at the top of this episode, I like to call out my audience. Um, this, I mean this is my style and I think it works for my people too, but like I will often say like, Hey guys, this is not a one way street and I expect for you to engage so like, get your, get your typing fingers ready and hit reply, like I’ll make a joke of it that often works and gets people to reply. I will call it out and be like, Hey, I am doing all this work here. Like, I wanna hear back from you. I wanna know if this is helpful. I wanna know if it resonates, like what part of this was most helpful. So you can try that too if, if you feel like that’s more of your personality or just work on improving your engagement language. Like sometimes people will just be like, I love to hear from you. Like, hit reply. No one’s gonna respond to that. But if you write, uh, an email with like five tips or something like that, you can say, hit reply and let me know which one of these you’re going to implement by Friday. Like, I think something super specific, it like that can get a lot of people to respond.

The fourth thing that should be in every email is a link for other people to subscribe to your email in case they got this email from someone else. So let’s say you get my weekly emails, but you forward it to your friend Lauren because you think Lauren’s going to love Sam’s Sidebar, and now Lauren gets your forwarded email but she’s like, how do I sign up for this? Well, there’s a link right in my email that says, did someone forward you this sign up here? So that’s a really important link to have in your email.

Obviously, you know, is gonna share this fifth one, but you have to have an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your email. You have to have your mailing address, any mailing address where you can receive mail for your business. It doesn’t have to be the address that you signed up with your business for, or it doesn’t have to be your home address or anything like that. It can be a PO box, all that kinda stuff. But legally speaking, yes, you do have to have that at the bottom of every email.

The sixth thing that you have to have, and not just have, but have a good one, is a subject line. Okay, so yes, obviously you need to write subject lines. Um, you need to practice, practice, practice subject lines. Subject lines are so hard. I feel like I’ve only kind of gotten in my groove recently, but like last week I wrote a really bad one. So sometimes it just happens. And you, you really have to experiment with them.

Personally, I like playing with using people’s first names in the subject line. I like formulating subject lines as the thing that I know that you really want. So like if I was writing this email, I would maybe put like your first name, like Lauren wants 5,000 new subscribers. Or Lauren just got 10 K subs on our email list, or something like that. Like I would maybe play around with creating a subject line around the thing that I know the outcome, I know you want. I know that my friend Tarzan Kay, uh, incredible copywriter, she often plays with the idea of using question marks. So she likes to make a similar prompt, like a similar type of subject line, but then she’ll throw a question mark at the end of it to create sort of an open loop. So people have all different kinds of things.

You can go the more practical route and just say like. 10 ways to grow your email list, you know, or something like this. It can be more descriptive like a blog post. But I personally tend to find that the more intriguing they are, the more of the open loop curiosity I play into, the more they get opened and engaged with.

The seventh thing. And the thing that I feel like people just never talk about, and, and typically you don’t touch, but so important is the preview text. So, this is the text that people see in that first line of an email before they open it. This can be so important. Now when you write preview texts, you wanna consider what your subject line is and kind of make it the natural follow up to the subject line. So. I like to think like if I was writing that subject line, that was the, like Lauren just got 10 K subs on her email list, maybe I would make the preview text like she did it without using any freebies ’cause then you’d be like, wait, what? How’d she do that, right? Or like, you wouldn’t believe how easy it was. Or like she it’s ’cause she followed the tips inside this email. Like those are just a couple things off the top of my head of how I would sort of make it relate to the subject line and continue that open, curious curiosity loop situation.

The eighth and final thing I would do to make sure my weekly emails are great is get in the habit of reading it aloud. So once you, if I learned anything from writing a full fledged book, it was to stop self editing as I write. So I think the biggest change in my like day-to-day writing habit is that now when I write, I just write like free flow write. Don’t edit as you write. Don’t, don’t like keep stopping and doing all, just write the dang thing. Then I read through and I do edit. I edit, edit. I chop down, I make shorter. I fix obviously mistakes and problems and all of that. But at the final stage, what I do before I hit send on these emails is that I read them aloud. Reading them aloud is a game changer because first of all, in order to write good emails, the emails need to sound like how you would talk and oftentimes when I go to say it aloud, I’m like, that sounds so awkward, or wonky and like, and then I just think of a friend and I’m like, how would I say this to my friend?

And then I just rewrite the sentence that way. That is so helpful to me. This is also really helpful by the way, on the front end, if as you’re writing, if you’re really stuck on something, just close your eyes and say what you’re trying to say out loud and just write it down without, without like questioning it and being like, the grammar police, just write it down.

That is often a really good way to make your emails more readable, more engagement worthy, more interesting, because people don’t wanna read a treatise. They wanna read something like they’re talking to a friend. Every once in a great while, the grammar police will come from me, or I’ll get a nasty email being like, I can’t believe you don’t even understand how to do this with a preposition and blah, blah, blah.

It’s like, yeah, I do that on purpose. I mean, I’m not thinking of it that way, but I am not trying to write perfectly. I’m trying to write as if you and I sat down for coffee and we were talking about business because that’s what I want my newsletter to feel like. I don’t want it to feel like a treatise or I don’t want it to feel like I’m talking down to you, or I’m some like English professor. I’m, I’m trying to make it just be like, this is me. I’m imperfect. I’m, by the way, that’s like such a fabulous lesson for business is that like your shit doesn’t need to be perfect in order for you to do well, and that the more that you continue to focus on that, you’re not going to do well because you’re too hung up on the details.

Like the person who was writing me that email, I bet does not have a super successful business ’cause they’re sitting there worrying about prepositions and not connecting with their audience. And I bet you that their audience doesn’t care about prepositions unless their audience is an audience full of English professors, which in that case, I guess so knock yourself out.

Personally, I found that reading aloud has been like the best thing that’s changed, like the tone of my email. It’s also where when you start to say things out loud, you’re like, oh, I see, I just repeated myself. Or like, that just sounded too long, or it doesn’t sound like me, or whatever. So you’ll be able to make it a lot better that way.

So those are the eight things I would include in every weekly email. But I just wanna say too, before we go and talking about building your email list, is that so much of what we’ve talked about for now, the past month, is about playing and experimenting and just seeing what works for you. As I always say here on the podcast and everywhere else, so much of business is like this weird mix of what works for you like you’re good at writing or you like creating videos, or you love podcasting. Plus what your audience likes and needs, right?

It really does take both, because you’re not going to show up and do the best work that you can and you won’t show up consistently the way that you need to in order for something to actually take off and be successful. And then obviously the audience won’t like it either. So it really has to be this mix. And like my hope for you is that you can let go of some of the rules of some of the shoulds, of some of the, like I heard you have to do it this way and just play and see what works. And, at the same time, you can’t play every single week, right? I don’t recommend having like one structure one week and then another structure and the next week, and then three weeks later you choose a different, because then you’re never going to be able to gather enough data to understand what does work for you, let alone for your audience.

So, I do recommend sticking to something and saying, you know what, for the next three months I’m gonna try this essay style. I’m gonna write it. And you’re gonna get better at it from even just like doing the reps of it, of writing each week, and then start talking to your audience too. Be like, Hey, how’s this working for you? How do you like it? You like this style, whatever. So that’s, that’s kind of what I would recommend is, is picking something that. Fits with both your, you, your personality, what you’re good at, but also what you think would work for your audience. What, again, using the questions in this episode, like what would be most valuable? What’s consumable? Bingeable? Forwardable, for them, right? And mashing those two together, experimenting for a little while and keep track of the data.

People always ask me what data I pay attention to and for me, I mean obviously I look at subscriber counts that I understand on the opt-in side whether things are working. But in terms of the weekly emails, I’m looking at open rate and I’m looking at click through rate. And I would say a more anecdotally, I’m looking at the engagement in my inbox every Tuesday when I send Sam’s Sidebar.

I tend to know if I hit a home run when we get a lot of responses and then pay attention to like, oh, when I write about this topic, this seems to get a lot of engagement. But also like, was engagement my goal? Like that’s, that’s good for me to pay attention to.

So with that, that’s a wrap on our four week how to build an email list series. I’m so curious to hear from you. Like I said earlier, this is a two-way street, so I wanna hear from you whether this series was helpful. Have you seen any substantive changes? I had a couple of people reach out to me privately and say that they’ve already seen some uptick in their email list from some of the strategies that they’ve implemented, even with just like the easy email list strategy.

I’d love to hear from you, uh, more globally. Um, to be honest, if I can, if I can steal you for another minute before you go today. More globally, I would just love to chat with you about kind of the direction of this podcast. So, a while back, maybe in August, I had said, you know, I’m not gonna really be doing legal episodes right now because I have done like, I don’t even know, 175 or something legal episodes on topics that, you know, frankly don’t really change. And so you can listen to so many episodes of this podcast if you need to learn how to start a business, if you need to learn about business insurance, how to pay yourself, like any of that stuff, I’ve got an episode for you.

And if you go to my website, samvanderwielen.com/podcast, there’s actually a search feature within the podcast itself where it’ll pull up an episode where I’ve talked about whatever topic you want. But I talked back then about how my goal right now is not really to do those episodes anymore and I’m not even sure that I always wanna do things like this that are so like straight strategy business.

I think that my goal overall, and I’m just being honest with you ’cause I’m figuring this out in real time. My, I have big, big goals in terms of growing this podcast to be a wider listen to podcast, to be on broader topics beyond just like here’s like this straight up business strategy or this like email list growth hack or whatever.

I wanna have deeper conversations with you about living your life as an entrepreneur, but dealing with things like grief and wanting to be, or being afraid to be seen as you expand your business, managing more of your life offline, being more present. Maybe you wanna remove yourself more from like social media on your phone like I do.

I wanna talk about these bigger topics. And so my goal, or my, my thought is to move this podcast in that direction. I’ve started doing that. I had, a few weeks ago I had an episode called My six weekly anchors that helped me manage my business. That’s kind of the stuff I’m talking about.

That episode did really, really well. I had already had this four part series about your email list scheduled, and so I went ahead with it anyway, but, i’m curious from you, like what’s resonating with you or more of the topics, like the bigger conversations, or do you like, like the straight up strategy, like episodes like this where it’s just like, do this with your email list. I, it’s not that I wouldn’t produce this kind of content, I’m just not sure that it would be here on the podcast. Like one, one idea is that this is a great thing for me to do in Sam’s Sidebar in my weekly newsletter.

I have an idea for a four week series coming up in January and originally I was planning for it to be on the podcast and then I said to the team why don’t we actually do this over on email? We don’t need to do it here, right? So that’s sort of what I’m thinking. I, I love podcasting so much and I love because it gives us an opportunity to connect on a deeper level and I, I started On Your Terms® because I was so frustrated with like the lack of nuance and the ability to go deep on things like social media, because everything has to be so quick, right.

So yeah, all that to say, just giving you some like kind of honest thoughts about, about where, uh, I’m thinking, where I think I’m headed next week is an episode all about how to reflect on the past year in order for you to have an even better year next year. And I don’t mean just in terms of revenue, but more in line with your values more present. Um, hopefully a happier, healthier version of yourself next year based on all the reflection we can do about how things went this year. So that’ll be next week’s episode, but yeah, love to hear from you. My dms, my inbox are open. I appreciate you being here so much and hopefully you know too that for the next couple days only, I have my very first Black Friday sale going on. So go check that out if you’ve ever needed legal templates for me or the Ultimate Bundle®, but it’s been a little too much for you to swing. Now is the time, my friend, so go check it out. Alright, I can’t wait to hear from you. With that, go on and conquer your email list and I will chat with you next Monday.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.