This is a transcript of episode 2 of season 2 of The Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Please give the episode a listen on Anchor here, or on a platform of your choice.

[00:00] Subha: Another morning and another inbox full of newsletters really clearly fall into three categories now, like, there's, there's one or two.

As soon as they come in, I read them, I must read them, I feel everything about them is compelling enough to make me want to read it. There's the ones that I see it and I delete it. And I'm probably lazy to unsubscribe. And there's a third category, which is, like, in that aspirational one day I will get to you keeps piling on, right, I think of, you know, my own newsletter, and how do I get people to move to that category one? How do you really refine the content to get there?

And one bigger question - is this really an effort that is worth it?

[00:52] Hasita: Yeah, are emails even relevant anymore, we get nurtured to the heavens and back, the moment we share our email address, and absolutely any brand or product at all. But how much are we really being impacted by these emails? And what is the purpose that they serve, right?

Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Today, we discuss email marketing.

You know, that thing that pops up when you don't need it too, especially when you will have 5, 6, 7 mailboxes from different companies with different IDs?

Do you pay attention to them? To be honest, I have muted all my mailboxes, but I do open. I do check. But at my own time, and at my own pace, and marketing email much as I am also understanding of it, I don't know to what extent it influences me on the receiving end of it.

So let's dive into the three kinds of emails which is cold email, nurture email, and then you have the newsletters, which I think most of us want to read as long as they are good and they have good content in them.

And of course, the subscription emails, right. So can I really build a side hustle on SubStack and is that even reality today? Let's dive in.

[02:06] Subha: Happy to, happy to. And, you know, the first bit is interesting, the cold email versus the email drip. How do you make that happen?

[02:14] Hasita: Lots of automation. Honestly, I think that's the appeal of a lot of these things, right?

It's not that you can get results, it's that you can throw a lot of things at the wall and see maybe if something sticks, and that inherently is a problem with cold emailing in general, I find because we rush to automate the process with a list that we bought off of somewhere or a list that was gathered from an event without really personalizing customizing, there's nothing, it's always about the moment you do not have visibility as to who these 1000 people are.

The immediate next tendency is to then go and talk about yourself, right? So hey, I am this brand I do this product, I can help you this way… But the other person doesn't even want to be helped. That's the nuance that sometimes cold emails fail to grasp.

[03:05] Subha: Yeah, so I am quite scared of setting up any drip email campaign. Honestly, I know that for my kind of work, it's actually a good way to kind of remind people, give them next steps, and rope them in. But I just really worry about the drip emails that I do get. I once signed up for some nutritionist’s list and it was relentless. There was like, one after the other. As soon as you finished one, the next one came and then the next one, I could see the sequencing. I mean, all of that was evident, but it just felt like way too much. And then she lost me as a customer.

[03:42] Hasita: Yeah, sometimes I think a lot of brands that work based on fear, based on urgency, there is a certain need that is felt to send too many emails in a certain span of time.

I think between cold emails and drip campaigns, cold emails, or that basically your email address was bought or it was scraped using some tool and therefore you truly do not have any context as to who this person on who the brand is. Drip emails usually begin after you have taken some action which is maybe that you've you know expressed interest or you've signed up for a newsletter or you've said, “Okay, tell me more about this product.”

So there is some action from the customer and and therefore the drip really begins right so it's a way to nurture, if done well, then it's a way to keep the customer engaged until the point when they're ready to buy.

[04:33] Subha: But you know, you're right. I have seen cases where it works like someone's trying to get me onboarded to let's say a coaching, Coach Training kind of program, like a training program for coaches.

And it's very step-by-step, very nicely done, where first there's some kind of free video to watch, then there's a free masterclass to attend. Then there's something else just like they just take you there till the point where you're ready to to sign up. So some are done well, and so I think that what you said is important. Don't rush me to make the decision.

[05:07] Hasita: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I like what you said earlier about not wanting to do it yourself, which is fairly okay. Right? Because it's not so much about whether you've sent an X number of emails in an X period of time. It's also the intentionality behind it. So do I then want to, based on that, decide whether I send five emails, 10 emails, or how long?

How do I then gauge you know, a person's interest is interest. All these things do come into the picture.

Like yesterday, I was reading a post on LinkedIn, I really liked it. And then towards the end, they just put a simple CTA that said, “Follow me if you want to learn more about creating good content”, and immediately I hit the Follow button.

But the fact of the matter is that I will never put a sentence like that on today's day and age in my LinkedIn post. So it's also what the individual comfort and somewhere, I think, when it comes to communications, the receiver does sense that like, I know, it sounds very superstitious.

When you put effort versus when you haven't, I think it's very clear to the person at the receiving end.

[06:06] Subha: And that behaviour’s interesting, right? Like, for example, we are putting out stuff on social media, on LinkedIn, precisely for that reason that we want followers, right? Otherwise, I have no business, there are 10 other things to do. I don't need to go and write that LinkedIn post, or make that Instagram creative and put it up there. The very reason is, I want you to like it, and then keep liking if they keep coming back to me. But the thought of putting that one line that says “Follow me” scares me.

[06:38] Hasita: Yeah, maybe in the future, I just might never say never. But today, it feels like a lot. So likewise, with email campaigns, I think it's important to remember that it's not just something to tick off of a list of things to do, right. It's not a checklist. Okay, this week, I said, I'll send an email campaign, and therefore I will, it's got to be a little more intentional than that.

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