The Steal Club - I stole an email expert

Hey everyone!

This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative entrepreneurs.

We share lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates to grow your audience and business. “Stolen” from the best creators in the industry.

This week's email is a little bit different because...I didn't write it.

​Jason Resnick from Nurturekit and the Evergreen newsletter did.

He's an email marketing and automation expert, especially focused on helping creators unlock the full power of ConvertKit.

For creators, email is becoming an indispensable channel. It's our way of "fighting back" against platform risk.

On social platforms, you do not control your audience. On email, you do.

But there's so much to unpack around email that I thought it would be a great idea to bring a guest expert so we can steal everything he knows.

This is probably going to become a recurring section on The Steal Club as I'm looking to level up the contents we offer. Let me know how that sounds!

No more Alex for now. Let's dive in into How to simplify your email marketing.

Time to read: 2 minutes, 51 seconds

One of the most significant investments, from both a cost and time perspective, you can have for your business is email marketing.

It can be complicated and overwhelming. But today, I’m going to show you how you can simplify your email marketing so that you avoid the overwhelm and know exactly what’s happening to any subscriber at any given time.

Understanding where a subscriber has come from and where they convert are two critical points in their journey with your business.

Unfortunately, most businesses don’t set up their email in a way that gives them this information efficiently.

Once done, it’s done!

Setting up a standard subscriber flow doesn’t have to be complicated, but many don’t because:

• Integrating popups and other opt-ins into the email platform isn’t always the same (i.e., sometimes Zapier, sometimes native, etc.).
• Uncertainty of what is the best practice.
• Fearful that a subscriber will get unwanted emails.

The good news is you’ll be able to find all the answers regarding your email marketing through what I call the Driver Philosophy.

The Driver Philosophy is the best subscriber flow setup. Regardless of what platform you use for email marketing, it’ll work.

Here’s how:

Step 1: All new subscribers come through a form

Many integrations allow you to tie into a form, but that wasn’t always the case.

You want subscribers to come into a form because most platforms allow you to run reports on forms.

When performing analysis on organic campaigns, ads, and new tactics, you’ll want to be able to search based on dates. This happens when you pass all your new subscribers through a form. That is not always the case when you add tags.

Then in most modern email service providers (or ESPs) you can create a rule or automation on the form submission.

Step 2: Use Single Function Automations or Workflows

So many go wrong here, creating massive automations or workflows to hold multiple sequences and all the logic.

This makes learning what’s working and adjusting difficult. In some cases, it’s like turning the Titanic.

It also makes adding new pieces into the mix difficult.

When trying to change massive automations and workflows, subscribers may get pulled and pushed inadvertently into branches that send off unintended emails.

In the Driver Philosophy, every single automation or workflow is a single function and has a start and completion point. These start and completion points are called Driver Tags.

Using Driver Tags to pass a subscriber from one stage to the next makes it easy to change directions and flexible to add new strategies.

With automations and workflows having a single function, your email marketing acts like Lego blocks you can add and remove at will.

In this whiteboard session, I show this in action.

A Driver Tag is a tag applied to a subscriber to kick off or show completion of a stage.

For example, “Start - Welcome” or “Completed - Pitch - Membership.”

“Start - Welcome” can be used anywhere you want to send someone into the Welcome sequence. “Completed - Pitch - Membership” lets you know that the subscriber went through the pitch for the membership.

👆 is example of an actual subscriber. This tag cloud tells the story of that subscriber through their journey with the business.

Step 3: Small, Simple Campaigns

Since email marketing is perceived as complex, when you have several automations that only have a few nodes and branches, it may seem too simple to be true.

That’s when you know you’ve got an excellent foundation for your email marketing.

You can get answers to the following questions with ease.

• “Where did this subscriber come from?”
• “What email converted them into buying?
• “Can we send those who didn’t buy an email to find out why?”
• “How many subscribers buy again from us?”

The Driver Philosophy is a defined flow for your subscribers that allows for a focused strategy to drive sales on evergreen.

By putting an evergreen sequence into your email marketing, you can drive subscribers to a sales sequence based on their actions of clicking on links in your emails or visiting specific pages on your website.

If you’d like more information on how to do that, sign up for Evergreen, the newsletter for creators to 2X their business using email marketing.

That's a wrap!

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See you soon!

Alex Llull Thief Master The Steal Club Share this newsletter | Say 👋 on Twitter | Sponsor this newsletter

PS: Before you leave, I want to let you know that I'm running a live workshop on October 11 called "Making time for content". ​

It's a 60 to 90min workshop where you'll go from "having to find the time" for content creation to building a creative schedule that works and saves you time.

I'll share my content creation system, content batching best practices, tools and automations...all designed so you leave with a time-saving content system.

This is a beta program so, for now, I've limited it to 25 spots. Check it out!​