How to personalize your emails with these 2 easy tips

This is episode #16 of The Goodness Squad Podcast. I’m going to be teaching you how to personalize your emails so that your subscribers can get to know, like and trust you.

When people know, like and trust you, they listen to you, they take your advice, they put it into action. Their lives change. Their lives are improved. And when that happens, they’re also more willing to purchase from you, which means your income increases and your life is improved. It’s a win, win.

When I start to talk about email personalization, you might think I mean things like adding their name to your email. So when it goes out, instead of saying, “Hi friend” it says, “Hi Jane” or “Hi Mary.” Or maybe you think adding the date that they signed up, or “You’ve been on my list for a year.” Maybe you think I mean tags, where you tag somebody and say, Oh, they’re interested in email marketing, so then you can send them emails about email marketing.

The problem with email marketing

Those are all fantastic ways to personalize your email. But when you are just starting out, they can feel a bit overwhelming and a bit techie. I have two tips for you that are much, much simpler, but first I want to point out one problem with the emails that we receive from businesses.

They are very different than the emails that you receive from a friend. The emails that you receive from a business can oftentimes feel impersonal, robotic, stiff, professional, aloof, kind of distant. This isn’t what I want for you and your business.

I want you to think about Joseph Smith and his experience in the first vision. God, the Father, called him by his name. I am sure that the conversation they had after that was not impersonal or robotic or stiff, it was not aloof. It was not distant. It wasn’t super professional. Because God really knew Joseph. He cared about him as a real person, a human being with feelings and needs and wants and fears and dreams and goals, and all of that. 

2 Tips for improving your email marketing

#1 – I learned this from Pat Flynn. You’ve heard me mention Pat a few times on this podcast because I really do appreciate his style of marketing, his brand and how he presents himself online. He says if you want your emails to become more personal, try to imagine all your subscribers with you in one room while you’re speaking to them.

So, if you have just four or five subscribers, you can picture them all in your minivan and you’re driving around with them. And you’re talking to them. Real people in a real-life situation. You’ve got something that will help them. If you’ve got a few more than that, 20 or 30, imagine them all in your family room and they’re filling up the couches. Some of them are sitting on the floor. One of them is over on the piano bench. But they are looking at your face and they’re eagerly awaiting what it is you have to teach them that you can improve their lives.

Or maybe you have a few hundred people, 500, 600 or 700 people, and you gather them together in a Stake center, and you’re speaking to them. Maybe you’ve got 10,000 in the Marriott Center.  You’re speaking to this group of people who are real people. You can even go as big as 100,000 people at a football stadium.

Gather them all together in your mind and think of their faces. Think of them as real human beings with needs and wants and fears and desires and goals and struggles and successes. And how can you communicate with them in a way that is real? Because these are real people. 

If they’ve signed up for your email list, they have likely connected with you in some way. If you were to meet them in real life, you’d probably be friends with them. Good friends with them. Those are the type of people you want on your email list because those are the type of people you will enjoy working with. You won’t burn out of working with these types of people, because they are your friends.

So treat them like your friends. Use language that you would use with a friend. You don’t need to use super formal language in your emails. Think about if you were teaching your best friend down the street this topic, whatever that email is about. How would you tell her about it?

Treat her like a friend. You probably would use correct spelling. You’re not going to want to look, I don’t want to say unprofessional because you don’t need to worry about professional, but you still want to have a decent quality email. You don’t want to have horrible spelling that makes you look like you really don’t know what you’re talking about, but maybe your punctuation doesn’t matter so much because you’re just typing it out to a friend and you might stop mid-sentence and switch something up and that’s okay.

In fact, that is good in your emails. A bonus benefit, to that tip of imagining your list in a room, is they won’t feel so small. Sometimes we get caught up in, “Oh, I only have 10 people on my email list,” but if those 10 people will all fit in a minivan then that suddenly seems like it’s a larger group of people.

Or maybe you’ve got 20 or 25. What would it feel like to put those people all in your living room and you have the opportunity to speak to each one of them. So that’s kind of a bonus to this tip.

#2 – Don’t overly design your emails. And this is for the same reason, because do you send your best friend an email that has beautiful pictures that are all perfectly aligned in multiple columns and super fancy designed?

No, because then she would think it’s coming from a business.

And while you are a business, you are a content marketing business, you are somebody who is teaching and people need to be able to get to know, like and trust you as a teacher, as a friend, in order to be able to take your advice, implement it, put it into practice so it changes their lives.

They also need to know, like and trust you before they are going to be willing to purchase from you, which you need in order to be able to keep your business alive and continue serving them and not burn out. I’m going to tell you to go back to episode #12 if you have any concerns about charging for what you are doing.

You should use things like headings and bullets. I use that when I’m sending a rather long email to a friend simply to make it easy for her to kind of digest. Those things are fine, but overly designed columns and tons of pictures are unnecessary. If the picture is necessary for the message that you are sending to your friend, well, then yeah, include a picture, but you don’t need to have them in every single email that you send out.

2 reasons why you shouldn’t overly design your emails

First, it will make it much easier for you to get past the spam filters. Spam is filtering out these types of emails that we get from businesses. If your email doesn’t look like it’s coming from a super fancy business, it’s going to be more likely to pass through that spam filter.

Second, your emails are suddenly going to be a whole lot easier to create. They’re going to take you less time, which is something we all want; to deliver quality content without sacrificing all of our family’s time in order to do that.

In summary:

1. Imagine your email list, all of those real people are, actually in a room with you while you’re writing that email to them and write as you would to a friend.
2. Do not overly design your emails for the same reason. We want these emails to feel like they’re coming from a friend.

If you do this, I know that your email list will come to know, like and trust you, which means they will respond more. They will take your advice. Their lives will improve and you will earn more income because people will trust you enough to purchase from you.

Coming Up

If you have not done so already, make sure you hit subscribe because, in the next episode, I am going to be teaching you about how dehydrated water can help you move the needle in your business. If you’d like more help with your email marketing, I’ve got you covered.

If you’re already a member of The Goodness Squad, go log in to the resource library and download the short e-book that has five tips for your email marketing. If you’re not yet a member, jump on over to TheGoodnessSquad.com/join. Once you sign up, you’ll have access to my entire library of free resources. One of which includes five simple tips for your email marketing. Each tip can be implemented in just a few minutes but will have a significant impact on your business.