In this episode, guest Kimberly Weitkamp discusses how to create an email list you can make more offers to and subscribers who will click… with an email welcome series that works.
In this episode, guest Kimberly Weitkamp discusses how to create an email list you can make more offers to and subscribers who will click… with an email welcome series that works.
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Sign up for Kim Weitkamp’s “Get It Done” Email Welcome Series Workshop – https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/welcome
Connect with Kimberly:
Kim’s Website, Audience Converter -
http://audienceconverter.com/
Kim’s Podcast –
https://theaudienceconverter.com/podcast-2/
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Is Your Course Idea Any Good? Get the FREE training at https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/idea
Get Julie’s help with your course with the 24 Hour Course Creator program -
https://24HourCourseCreator.com
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Did you know, there is a really easy and simple way to help you create an email list that you can make offers to one that people actually click on and do what you ask for them. And today we're going to talk all about how you set this up. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses.
And now here's your host, Julie Hood. Welcome everybody to the course creators HQ podcast. I am so excited today because we have one of my very favorite guests on Kimberly Weitkamp from audience converter is here and she is going to be telling us some of those things that I know you have, like hanging out in the back of your mind. And you're like,
yeah, I got to get to that. I got to get to that. And she is going to tell us first why we need to, and then exactly how to do it. And what we're going to be talking about is doing your email welcome sequence. So, but before that, I want to tell you a little bit about her. She's does all kinds of really cool stuff around strategizing and marketing and doing better with your conversions.
So she has a podcast called the audience converter podcast, and she helps, you know, all of us coaches, creators course, creators entrepreneurs, figure out how to take our strangers that we're coming across and turn them into loyal fans. So I'm so thrilled that she could be here with me today. We just met this year and realized that we only live a few miles apart,
which is kind of amazing in the online space. So welcome Kimberly. I'm so glad you could be with me today. Thank you so much, Julie. It's wonderful to be here. I'm super excited to talk to you and I would, you know, it's great, right? We're so close together. And yet we still can't actually meet in person.
So I know, we've never met. Like until this year I had not met anyone else who was even in my state, in the online world and now like five people who are within 30 minute drive. Isn't That cool. So we're, we are going to get together when all of this craziness is over, we're going to, we're going to all get together and actually meet in person,
but We're going to make it happen. Yes. So can you start us off? We want to talk about welcome emails and a welcome series. So can you tell us like what it is and why do we need it? What makes it so important? Absolutely. So a welcome series is simply the first like five to seven emails that somebody is going to get from you when they join your email list as a subscriber.
And the reason why you want to use one is because it helps build that know like and trust factor. And it also helps to build engagement and showcase your expertise in value really early on in the relationship. So many of us have this idea of, oh, I just need to get more people onto my, I need to get more people into my list and you get more people onto your list,
but then you don't have any kind of structured way to interact with those new people. So maybe I have seen like one ad from you, or maybe I've seen one social post. Somebody told me about you and you've got like this guide to picking your course topic or something. So I was like, okay, that sounds cool, nifty. So I'll download it.
And then if you don't have a welcome series in place, what happens is people start to send out blasts or just general emails. So I don't know who you are. I don't really know much about your product. All I know is that you had a cool sounding gift and I wanted it. And then the next thing I get is cart closing, cartclosing.
We have 24 hours until you're, you know, of course, creators HQ is closing down and that's a really awkward situation. Or, you know, if you're in the middle of the promo or, you know, if you're going to, if you're in the middle of sending three emails about this awesome time, you had it a live event and I'm getting email number three.
And I'm like, what is she talking about? Cause it's not like I can go check my inbox. So when you create a welcome series and when you use them properly, it helps avoid those situations. But it also has a lot of other purposes for it. So it builds the know like, and trust factor it. If you will train your audience on what to expect from you,
and then it helps you build and meet expectations. I love that. And you caught me. My welcome series is not very good. I think it only has one email in it, which is not enough I'm sure. So can you help us out in what we should be thinking about putting into it, like beyond my one email? Absolutely. So there's something that comes before a welcome series,
which we're not talking about too much today, and that is your gift, right? You give somebody a gift and then you need a couple of emails to remind them that, Hey, you asked for this gift, why don't you go use it? And then you dump them into your welcome series. So basically any way someone joins your list, no matter what the gift was.
So if you've got seven different lead magnets to get people onto your list, the welcome series will work for anyone who joins from those because it comes after the emails that they get about using your gift. And then with the welcome series, the point of it, the purpose is to let people know, you get to know you a little bit, get to know about your business,
what you do, what you offer, why you're different, why on earth, I want to hang around in here, more for you. So some things to include a, just a couple of ideas are, you know, talking about your story, how you got to be doing what you're doing, more resources. So if I saw that you had a free gift and then you show,
you know, you, you guide me to another gift or another episode, like a, your podcast would be a great resource. It kind of helps build your expertise and credibility and showcases that you're not a one trick pony. You have other resources and offerings to give people if you've got any kind of community or if you've got any place you want people to follow you.
Like if you go live every week on Instagram, if you have a podcast, if you've got a Facebook group, you can direct them to those places where you get more interaction. And you know, it's just another touch point for people. There's so many different things that you can do in your welcome series. But the main purpose, the main goal is to let people know a little bit more about you and then lead them to a very specific action.
Ooh, specific actions. So talk about that because I think I'm going to like that. You think you're gonna like it. She's not sure ladies. She thinks she's going to like it. So this specific can change depending on what your goals are, but that is based off of what do you want out of people who join your list, right? Are you looking for a certain number of people to book a free strategy call every month?
Are you looking to have a certain number of paid people into your DIY course every month? Are you looking to a book, page strategy calls within a certain timeframe of people joining your list? What you do is you define the goal for yourself, but it's not related to open rates or click through rates or how many people I have on my list, because those are all what I call vanity metrics.
At the end of the day, they don't matter. What matters is, do you convert your subscribers? You know, did you reach those goals that you set? So I always recommend to people that they set their goals first and they can then kind of forget about all the vanity metrics because they know what success looks like for them. I love that.
So would you recommend of course creators? Okay. So I'm giving out a freebie. People are signing up for my list. I'm telling them a little bit about me. I can give them some more, you know, come listen to the podcast, come join me on Facebook. That sort of thing. Should I in my welcome series, be talking about my course or trying to introduce it to them or even sell it to them.
Do you, what do you recommend there? So again, that kind of depends on both price point and audience. Like if most people are ready to, you know, if most people are ready to work with you after a couple of emails or if all they need is the basics and they understand what you offer. Absolutely. You can, you can,
you know, promote your course directly. Especially if it's under $500, know a couple of touch points. Maybe they don't need a lot of extra time with you before realizing if what you have is what they want. You know, if you're trying to enroll people into a 10K a year mastermind or something, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that from your welcome series.
I, but it just really depends. You can always drop hints, right? You can always make a short comment or something about this is something I dive deeper into in module two of my course, so that lets people know, you've got a course, you're not necessarily asking them to join right then, but it is an opportunity for you to say, I have paid products for you to learn about,
or there are other ways for you to work with me other than just getting free stuff in your inbox. Yes. Yes. So what else would you say is really, really important that you must include in those first couple emails that I, I would say links, links are incredibly important. I don't care where they leave. Okay. They can meet your Instagram.
They can lead to your Facebook group. They can lead to a blog posts. They can lead to a press release, whatever it is. But by including links early on in the interaction with people, your guiding your audience to expect that you will ask them to do something when consuming your content. So, you know, from message number one, it's,
it would be a very different experience. If, for example, I joined someone's list and let's say some people offer a gift of a five day email sequence, right? It's a five day challenge or to five day. I don't know what else to call it, but it's a five day series of information. Right. And it's delivered by an email.
So you just get an email once a day for five days. Well, if you don't have any links in there, then if they're on your list for five days and then suddenly on day six, you're going to ask them to do something. Their thoughts are going to be, oh, where's this leading. I'm not sure about this. I don't know if I really want to go through to this next thing,
because they don't know what to expect on the other side or even worse. If you don't ask your audience to do anything for like three and a half months. And then suddenly you're like, Hey, here's an offer, click on the link. You're going to be like, oh, this is weird. This is not what I was expecting because it's not been your interaction so far.
So from the beginning you want to include links. I love that. That is so smart. And I know like I do a ton of that and, and my subscribers will tell you, every email has a link for them to go click things. And you know, sometimes they're free stuff. Sometimes it's podcast episodes. Sometimes it's promotions that I'm doing,
but I'm so glad you said that because I've been on lists where people don't do that. Like they don't give you anything to click on. And then suddenly, like you said, they want you to click and you're like, wait, you want me to go click to do what so right. That's that's fantastic. Okay. So do you have a length that you recommend people do?
Like how long it should be or does it just depend The type of link to include? No. I mean, I'm sorry. The length of the series, the email series. The length of the series. Yeah. So I recommend about five emails or so. I mean, you can go longer, you can go shorter. I know people who have like a 12 email welcome series,
right. But the purpose and the goals of those are a little bit different. But at the end of the day, you're wanting to have permission to contact people pretty frequently because welcome series are not necessarily going to be the same frequency as your normal emails. So for example, welcome series, it's your first chance, right? It's your one chance to make a first impression and a familiarity is the best way to go forward.
So if you only send them once a week is going to take five weeks and that's, that's a little bit too long. So I recommend like daily or every other day, but that doesn't mean you have to be emailing your list that frequently. But the welcome series does go out that fast because you want to build that trust fast. You want to get people to know you really quickly.
And five emails I feel is a really good frequency because it's enough time for you to include a lot of the stuff that we've talked about, but it's not overwhelming. Yeah. That's fantastic. I love how you're recommending that. We do that. And then I guess we also need to kind of figure out our email newsletter software to make sure they're getting the welcome series and they're not getting our regular stuff.
Is that another piece of the puzzle too? Absolutely. When they are in your welcome series, they get nothing else. That's part of the purpose of your welcome series, because you don't want to have that awkward situation of somebody who's never heard from you before suddenly getting the cart close email from a lunch that you've been doing for three and a half weeks.
It's a little weird. Yeah, definitely. You'll and you know, each, each software is different. So I'm by no means going to tell you exactly how to do it, but you know, you want to know where people are in the customer journey. So you want to know, are they currently receiving a welcome sequence for me, maybe you're about to promote something.
And it's actually ideal for people who are in the welcome sequence or they're, they're about to finish the welcome sequence. And it's a great thing to put them into first, right? So you want to be able to kind of track where people are and what they're doing. And when you have that welcome sequence, separate from broadcast, you can also see how effective it is.
Is my open rate high or low on that sequence? Does that translate to a higher or lower open throughout my other emails, which can translate to more people saying that it offers more people hearing about my community, more people knowing about what is out there from me. I like that. So we should probably explain for people the difference between a welcome series and my regular broadcasts and how those work,
because they do work a little differently. Right? Absolutely. So broadcasts in general are your general time-sensitive emails often. So like if you're doing a JV promo, for example, right, you're going to promote somebody else's gift or program, or course, you're going to send that out to a lot of people on your list. You might decide, oh,
I want to send it only to particular people, but it's gonna have a, it's not evergreen. Right? You can't just always be sending that out because usually there's a for it. Whereas with a welcome series, it's automated. So as soon as they take a specific action, like joining your list or getting a particular gift, then they get put immediately into the welcome series.
And it's evergreen, right? There's nothing in it that in theory, there's nothing in your sequence that would need to be date based because you never know when people are going to join, one person could join in February. The next person can join in November. And another person could join like during an election cycle, which might make whatever you're sending out different.
So you don't want information and content in your welcome series. That is date-based right. Broadcasts are, you know, oh, I'm going to send an email today. Great. I send it on a Tuesday. It gets sent out and it gets sent out to whoever I choose is going to receive it. And then it doesn't get sent again. Right.
It just kind of sits there. Okay. That's, that's pretty key, I think, to making this all work. So thank you for explaining that for us. And I know that you are also going to do a special workshop to help people. You had mentioned to help people with their welcome sequence and their welcome series. So tell us about that.
And what's it involve Absolutely. So I am hosting a right, your welcome series, workshop, get it done. Style workshop. It's not just a training. It's not me talking at you for 90 minutes, like webinars style. It's an actual, get it done, style workshop. So we're going to go deeper into a welcome series, how to use it,
how to structure it, the, the background information, if you will, of what you need to include in that, we'll go over what needs to be in the welcome series in more depth. And you will have time to actually write your emails. So you're going to have time during the workshop. It's three hours long. It's offered live, right?
It's not as impactful if you just watch a recording. So it's offered live and you'll have breaks to actually write the emails after we dive deep into what to include in them. And then we'll also have time for live feedback and Q and a time. And, you know, you'll get peer review feedback as well. So, you know, if you are creating content or copy for somebody,
that's a particular type of community and somebody else is on the workshop with you, you get that, you get the feedback. That's not just from a marketing or a copywriter perspective, but from your ideal client types as well. So, you know, we always get a fun mix of people who offer a bunch of different types of stuff on the workshop,
and it's a three hours, right? So it's a lot of time, but the difference is unlike a lot of trainings where you learn all the things you have to do, and then you're like, okay, now I have to go do it. I have to figure out the time to do that. You are making an appointment with yourself this three hours.
I'm not only going to learn all about this, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to write it. I'm going to outline and have details about exactly what I'm including. I love that you set it up that way, because I know, I don't know how many courses I've taken and I, the content, you know, I love what the instructors teaching and,
you know, we all really, really need to have these good, welcome sequences, but then I don't get the second piece of it always scheduled of the actual working on it. And I want to tell everybody too, you will love doing this with Kim because she gives you really phenomenal feedback. She, we are in a mastermind together and she gave us feedback on all of the landing pages and stuff that we were doing.
And it was really, really specific and really, really good at making the flow work of what we were doing. So I don't know if you try to do that, but I like how you, you show us how to make things, keep going and keep people's attention is that part of the training too, is, is like the flow of how this will all fit together.
Absolutely. I include a copy of copywriting hacks on how to make emails that people want to keep reading and keep opening and how to structure them and all that kind of fun stuff. All right. So everybody needs this. I know every single one of the course creators that I know if they don't have one, yet they need to jump into this. And I want you guys to know the link to get signed up is course creators,
hq.com/welcome that's course creators, hq.com/welcome. And I forgot to ask you this, Kimberly, is this going to be an evergreen version at some point? Or is it just the live workshop? So they need to show up for this workshop, or how are you planning to do that going forward? So going forward, I plan to offer this live a couple more times,
and then there will be a version of it that's DIY, but for now I plan to keep offering it as a live workshop every couple of months, just because I have a lot of fun with it. It's, it's very entertaining for me. I love talking email, ask anybody. I can talk for email for a very long time. You know,
you get that question. Like if you had to give a presentation in the next five minutes without preparation, what would you talk about? I would talk about email marketing and welcome series of in particular. But yeah, so right now it's going to be a live workshop, but in the future, there are plans to make it into an evergreen and you know,
it'll be there, it'll be available and They don't get your feedback though, with the evergreen. So that's why you want to jump in to this one right now. And before we go, maybe you can tell everybody what is the biggest mistake that you see people making with their email welcome sequences? What, what do you see the most often? So we can make sure at least that we're not doing that.
So the biggest mistake I see is people don't use one. They don't have one. And then after that, I would say the biggest mistake is not knowing where you want people to go afterwards. A lot of people have this idea. Oh yeah. Okay. I need to, I understand I get it. I need to email my people often. I need to,
you know, I need to kind of build that rapport first, but then they don't have an end game in mind. Right. They don't know where people are going next. So it's really hard to guide people from strangers to loyal fans. If you don't know what your success metric looks like, I'm, I'm glad you mentioned that. And just so we can recap for everyone,
and hopefully this will stick. You are telling us that the things we should be including are talking about our story, right. And then sharing resources and more gifts for the audience. So I know I was on an email deliverability workshop the other day, and they were talking about, you want to get people to open and click early on. So I would think that would be fantastic to put in your welcome series,
right? These extra gifts that you were saying. And then if you've got a community that was another thing you mentioned sending people to the Facebook group or your Facebook pages. And then the big one, I believe was having a very specific link action that you want them to do. Is that right? That is correct. Great summary, Julie. Thank you.
Alright, Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you jumping into the podcast this week. And I hope everybody jumps in for the welcome series workshop with Kim. You will love working with her and I will put the link in the show notes so that you can also get ahold of this, but it's coursecreatorshq.com/welcome. And thanks Kim, have a great week. You too
thank you, Julie. So I hope you enjoyed that interview with Kimberly Weitkamp. As much as I enjoyed chatting with her and that the mini training gave you some ideas of what you should be putting into your email welcome sequence. So I highly recommend jumping into her workshop it's this week. So make sure you go visit coursecreatorshq.com/welcome, and the notes and links to more information about Kimberly.
If you want to find out more are coursecreatorshq.com/18 that's course creators hq.com/eighteen. So thanks so much for subscribing. Thanks for reviewing. And I appreciate you have a fantastic, and I will talk to you next time.