How To Best Use Emails For Your Business

Chris: Good Day, It’s Chris Lynton here from Tribefit.co. And today I’ve brought along a super duper expert.  Someone who I’ve worked with for some time, many years now, Scott Bywater. We’ve done some big things in the past together. I’ve worked with him for a number of years in a number of different businesses.  He is an absolute expert at copy writing, email and we have worked together on some massive product launches in the past. 

Scott, I’ll throw it to you but I’m sure if you have any words to talk about yourself and the things you’ve done but today is to really talk about personal training and how to help people get more clients so I know that you’ve got something that you would like to go through today? 

Scott: Yes, so really we are talking specifically from the email marketing side of things and one of the most important things you can do I have found is email follow-up but I know that social media is really hot right now and there is a place for all of it, but I heard someone recently refer to email as the cockroach of the internet. Cockroaches never die, we want to exterminate them but they are not going anywhere and I think it’s the same with email.  You know it’s a stable platform everyone is checking their emails. It’s how we get to people, it’s how we reach people.  So it’s a very powerful medium and it’s a more personal medium and it’s a way that you can get to someone very directly. 

So if you’ve got a personal training business, obviously the first thing you are going to want to try and do is always collect someone’s email address. I’ve been writing in my own business almost an email a day going on close to a decade and it has been a massive source of revenue as a result of having that follow up once people get in touch with me. 

And for a personal training business, I think you want to be doing the same thing because if I’m going to go to a personal trainer if I don’t have a relationship with anyone or have trust with anyone what’s going through my mind as a prospect is why should I trust them?  Why should I do anything? What expertise can they bring to the table?  And this is just what is going through my mind which is probably what is going through thousands of your potential client's minds.  Maybe they are just going to get behind me and give me a rev up and I don’t necessarily need that.  But, I am sure that there is so much knowledge in your head that you actually know as a personal trainer which your clients don’t know you know. And they won’t know that you are any different than any other personal trainer. 

There might be personal trainers that are listening to this that have been in the industry for ten years and have a mammoth amount of knowledge and what I would suggest you to do, and is this is just a thought, is what I call the 8x8 system.  The 8x8 system is just a content system that you can use and it is essentially write down a list of 8 things. So for example, one thing might be exercise, diet, protein and maybe snacks whatever those 8 things are. And then underneath those 8 things write down stuff that you know about that is specific to that point for example high-intensity interval training, or using kettlebells, etc.  So I’m sure most personal trainers would be able to come up with 8 things to list. 

If you can just do that, it will probably take you an hour or two then you’ve got 64 things that you can write emails about and that gets you started then when you sit down to write that email it is very simple first you talk and then you write.  Imagine your client asking you a question about high-intensity interval training and answer them as if you answering them in a real situation and then write down your answer. 

Once you get into the momentum of the facts about your topic you should be able to write them in about 15 to 20 minutes.  It’s not like you need to spend two hours on an email.  The second thing is to think of a time and place.  So for instance, I was in the gym the other day and I was helping a client and she was saying that no matter what I do I can’t lose any weight.  So then, I asked her a few questions and determined the reasons why she may not be losing weight so if you are in the same boat please don’t hesitate to contact me. This is a way to get people interested in your services because you are giving a real example of something that happened and the outcome. 

So you do the 8x8 and then you use one of the topics and then you think of a time and a place as to where that topic could fall into to make it into a conversational style story.  Is that what you are saying?

It’s always nice to have a time and place example story as it gives it personality because it becomes about you.  Otherwise, if you are just putting the facts in the email it sounds scientific and it bores people whereas if it’s your story then it’s unique to you and then people will want to follow you. 

Another thing that is worthwhile doing is Googling Biography Questions and filling out a Biography sheet and then referring to that because that again brings personality into your email and not so it’s just about boring stats and facts. 

I find that with a lot of people that we work with, a lot of people we speak with who have got huge backgrounds, they’ve done so many things and they kind of just forget about it.  And it’s not until you are able to pull it out and think I’ve got nothing to talk about or, I don’t have an exciting life but as you have said it is so easy to come up with reasons, ways and concepts. 

Yes, and you can make an interesting story about really anything.  You can just tell a story and we all love stories.  And if you want any proof for this, you just have to look at reality TV, they’re not doing anything that is usually that exciting, for example, they’re cooking food, which is something that you do every night, yet there are millions of people who watch it every night. 

So what do you do with these emails?  You’ve done that concept, you’ve done all these great emails, what do you actually do with it, what is the actual goal other than obviously trying to pick up more clients, but who do they send it to? 

So obviously you have a collected email list already.  I won’t go into how you go about getting that list together but once you do, you send out that email and there are advanced tactics that you can use where you can do segmenting and you can say “They clicked on that link so they must be interested in this”. But basically, you just send those emails out. 

There are different philosophies about how often but I think you can do it up to daily, but you may be more comfortable with three times a week or weekly.  It doesn’t really matter how often you do it. 

I even find, for everyone out there listening, for most people they are not doing anything so you talk about lead magnets and lead captures and I’ve got to set up this website and learn that system and I’ve got to do this advertising.  If you’ve been a personal trainer for a while, you’ve had many enquiries, you’ve spoken to many people, and it might be a friend of a friend.  You may not have collated it into an email address.  Just go through your Mac Mail or your Gmail…

Break in transmission.

Chris: Sorry about that guys, we were mid-sentence.  The internet just dropped out but we are back online.  I guess what we were talking about was is that people seem to have that “Shiny new toy” syndrome that I think kills people where they think, “I’ve got to do internet marketing, I’ve got to do digital marketing and it’s so complex and I don’t know where to start and it’s all about straight away having to go off and buy a new system or doing Facebook ads.  But if you are looking to get some clients just start somewhere and I always find the quickest and easiest way is to send out emails to your contacts in your Gmail and your Mac mail or go through your phone and if you’ve been doing it for a number of years I’m sure that there will be more than 100 people that have contacted you over the years about your training that you never turned into a client or ones that used to be clients that are no longer training with you and put them into an excel spreadsheet, sign up for a Mail Chimp account (they’re free) and as Scott was saying, do the 8x8, think of a time and place, do the Biography and just start writing and putting content out there. 

And you’ll be very surprised, I’m sure you will pick up some clients with your current contacts that you have.  We did it with a client the other week and they were so surprised when they realised that they had forgotten that they had over 1000 clients in an Excel spreadsheet.  So in terms of that, is that what you were referring to Scott, in terms of just writing an email a day and getting stuff out there and using that sort of content?

Scott: Yes and basically, you’ll find that if you do that sort of thing with people that you’ve met.   Like if you have a list of 500 people who you’ve met once or could be past clients, your existing clients are probably your best email addresses.  Even if they are not current clients, a list of clients that have done business with you or who you have had a free training session with is probably better than a list of 5000 collated through email addresses on Facebook because you’ve got that relationship and they know you. 

You got to think if someone that you know sends you an email you are way more likely to be responsive to it as opposed to if it comes from some Facebook account and you don’t really have a connection with that person. Don’t think of it as being a quantity thing as a quality thing.  I did this launch once and I got more out of 200 people who were paid newsletter subscribers than I did out of 7000 people who were general subscribers. 

Chris: Well one last question while I still have you here with me Scott.  I know the answer to it, but I think it would be really good coming from yourself.  What is your belief in regards to sending weekly or a monthly newsletter and it’s very faceless and it’s got no story to it and it’s for example “Here’s a recipe” or whatever it might be?  I know earlier you were talking about trying to put it to a time and a place or whatever it might be and giving it more of a personal story.  What’s your take on a very faceless, generic email?

Scott: I think the best way to answer this is think about how you see it as a customer when you get an email that comes from X,Y,Z brand and it’s got fancy branding, a recipe and it’s got some type of general text about high interval intensive training and you sort of look and it and you glaze over it. Whereas if it’s from someone with a personality and a connection and that sort of thing. 

The way you want to look at it is like a radio personality.  Like people get cult followings like a John Laws or an Alan Jones or these sort of guys.  And you love them or you hate them, they’ve got this sort of cult following that follows them around everywhere.   And that’s what you really want to aim at doing with your email is developing that sort of relationship rather than some generic ad on TV that just pops up every now and again and you change channels. 

Chris: Even going back to the point you were making about the reality TV shows.  You feel like if you hear someone’s story, what they are doing, their day, whatever it might be you kind of feel like they are a friend rather than a business trying to sell to you.  The age old saying, “People buy from people”.  Selling to your friends is a lot easier than selling to someone you don’t know.  We work with a lot of people in the social media space and the amount of times that they get stopped in the street by someone who they have no clue who they are.  They feel like they know the person and they just have to go up to the person and say “Hello” to them.  I guess we live in that world where everything is starting to move away from the faceless corporation. 

Scott: Yes, it's relationship based.  And obviously you are creating relationships with email on a mass level or on social media but you still get that connection when you share openly rather than corporately and particularly in a field like personal training.  Because personal training is a personal field.  So if they hear your stories and they resonate with your story for example of when you were 15 years old and you got bullied at school and someone who has been through that experience has that connection with you and feels like they can trust you and is more likely to open up to you, so it builds that connection. 

Chris: That’s an awesome point and it kind of brought me back, I remember I would have been about maybe 6 or 7 years ago, we did a campaign that has to do with exposing the vulnerability of the personnel that we were working with.  I know that a lot of people are scared to reveal their secrets, their vulnerabilities and feel like they need to be a robot in their communication or be a sign of truth in everything that they do and people relate to vulnerability, everyone has vulnerabilities, everyone makes mistakes.  And when we worked on that campaign it went really well and it’s kind of second nature, be real, if something happened like you said, if you were bullied at an earlier age and this is how you overcame it, people that had that same issue can relate.

Scott: Yes, and it’s that connection.  The best way to think about it is that human to human interaction and just put it in your emails because ultimately if you tell someone that in a social space they are more likely to connect with you than if you are very guarded and closed.  I think that is what it really boils down to.  It’s like copywriting a salesmanship in print and it’s the same with email and part of that is personality, connection on an emotional level.  So the more emotional and real you can be, the better. 

You can bring in stories about professionalism and you can bring in the proof element to the story by giving examples about someone losing weight.  Look at Jan and the weight she lost and look how happy she is, we talked about what wasn’t working for her, and so you are weaving all of this into the story.

Chris: Now that’s a valid point, the emotional side.  If you are a personal trainer obviously the clients that you are picking up most of them it’s an emotional decision and I guess that is something that needs to resonate and if you are very unemotional and very robotic then I guess you’ll never get down to the real reasons why they want to transform their bodies, their lives, whatever it might be and really find that true source of motivation that is going to get them the results and consistency of coming back and being a client on an ongoing basis. 

Alright, overall just to sum up.  I appreciate your time.  So first, the 8x8, the writing of a daily email, 15 to 20 minutes (shouldn’t take longer than that) every day you’ll get better.  The biography thing you talked about I guess in terms of going out and defining who people are in their stories.  The timing and the place side of writing emails.  The personality and tapping into the emotional side of things in terms of who to send these emails to.

Scott: Yes, and don’t feel intimidated by it. Talk, write.  Everyone can talk.  If one of your clients ask you a question just talk.  Just do that and write it down.  And don’t worry too much about grammar because it is a conversation. 

Chris: Beautiful. Alright, mate, is there anything else, I know we’ve covered a fair bit there and if anyone is listening and watching this video if you just action those things today, you will be very surprised this week, that you will pick up a handful of new clients with nothing else.  If you do that, it is proven, it’s going to happen, it’s just communication with existing leads, clients etc. Is there anything else, Scott that you would like to add in before we finish up today? 

Scott: No, they are really the main things to cover.  I guess the main thing is to just get started.  If you’ve got time after this call, think of a topic, think of a time and place, and just get on your computer and just type away for 20 minutes.  Because each time you do it you are going to get better and better. 

Chris: Beautiful.  Alright Scott, I appreciate your time.  For those of you who want to check out more about Scott, he is obviously a fantastic copywriter.  We’ve worked together for many, many years across many businesses and have done some really big launches, multiple even six and even seven figure campaigns.  Check out some of the blogs, I’m sure you will learn even more about copywriting and improving those skills. 

Scott: Yes, so you can go to either scottbywater.com which has information on that or for email specific there is launchtofunnel.com.  It’s been great Chris, Thanks!

Chris: Beautiful Scott, well it’s pretty dreary weather here in Sydney and you’re down south so hopefully…

Scott: It’s not much better. 

Chris: Alright mate, well I appreciate your time today and no doubt we’ll be in touch soon and speaking soon.  And everybody that took the time to listen to this today hopefully took, some good information from it and as Scott just said then, don’t think about it, just do it, just action it. 

Yeah, it’s been great.  Thanks for having me.