You know you need to be sending regular emails to your list, but do you get stuck with what you should be putting in them? Don't let that hold you back rom nuturing your list and keeping them engaged. I'm giving you an easy formula for you to use when you sit down to write those weekly emails.

What you'll learn:

→ why sending weekly emails is important.
→ what to include in those emails.
→ why its important to always include a call-to-action
→ ways to utilize the P.S.

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[1:36] Sending weekly Emails Use weekly emails to send out more direct and personal information. These emails should come from a person, not a generic email address, and should tell a personal story to connect with the audience.
[7:00] Call to Action Have a specific piece of information for the audience to check out. Direct them to this information and use a specific ask to get them to connect with this information.
[8:55] Utilize the P.S. Reiterate the most important information from this weekly email. Get your audience to check your website, engage, and get more information.

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] So let's talk about what goes into the email that you send out every single week. Maybe you're not sending an email every week. But hopefully you're getting to that. at a very minimum, I hope you're sending out a newsletter to your list every month. And no, this isn't like the laundry list newsletter that you might be used to sending out. But I want to go through, kind of, what are the key elements to include in your newsletter so that you can put them together quickly and easily, be more consistent and get it done. That's what we're going to talk about in this episode. My name is Sami Bedell-Mulhern, and I am the host of the digital marketing therapy podcast. Thank you for joining me. And I am just excited to talk some specific strategies when it comes to email marketing, excuse the background. But before we get into those strategies, this episode is brought to you by our patrons, head on over to thefirstclick.net/patreon to learn about all the best benefits and how we can help you take action from these episodes so that you can get the dang thing done, see better results, and reach your fundraising goals. Let's get into the episode. 

[INTRO] You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. And each week, I bring you tips from myself and other experts, as well as hot seats with small business owners and entrepreneurs to demystify digital marketing, and get you on your way to generating more leads and growing your business.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Okay, so I love email marketing so much, because it really gives us an opportunity to stay top of mind and stay present with our nonprofit donors, our volunteers, all of the people that we serve in our organization. And we tend to think of it as overwhelming when we think we're going to send an email every week. But I would love for you to send an email out to your list every week, and I'm going to give you the information to go every week to make it easy. Now you might be a one person shop, you might have a team of people. Either way, this is the same formula that's going to work for any organization of any size, we want to get away from that giant newsletter thread that we send out that has all of the things here's all the events that are going on, here's what we did this week, here's how you can volunteer, here's where you can donate, hey, we need these in kind products as well, we want to step back from that and get away from that. And really just use our broadcasts or email broadcasts. So things that are going out to our whole list as a way to stay top of mind to continue to share our mission and to be a little bit more personal and connect with our audience. So there's a few easy things that you can do in order to make this happen. The first thing in general is to make sure this email is coming from a person. Don't have it come from an organization. And if you need to make an alias email that goes to someone else, but still comes from your CEO or your development director or your program director, whatever, that's totally fine. We want to make sure that these emails are coming from a person that the two is coming from John Doe. And the email is John at John Doe company.com, or .org Have them come from a person. Don't have it come from your organization name or customer service or donor services, we want these to be personal. Number one is going to increase the chance that your email gets opened. But it also just builds that relationship and makes people feel like, okay, they care about me, like they're sending me this email. And this might be more important than the generic money to the campaign or any emails that they might be used to getting. Now, when it comes to the email, we have a few steps that we like to include and all the emails that we get out. So if you listen to this podcast, then you might be on my email list. And if you're on my email list, then you get an email from me every week talking about the episode that's coming up. And I try to follow this formula as much as humanly possible. So the first thing is a little bit of a personal story. And sometimes it feels like this might be a little bit of a reach. Like when you read it, you don't really know where it's going. But because you know what this email is going to be about. You can talk about a personal story. So this episode is about email marketing. So I might say something like, you know, when I was first getting started with email marketing, it was really hard for me to figure out what I wanted to say, what I was going to share, how I wanted to go about, you know, getting this information out to my subscribers. Now what you're doing with this is you're really connecting with them. You're showing that your pain points are the same as their pain points. It might be something like let's say one week you're sending out an email. That's just a story about this amazing pup that was just adopted, maybe he was there for a long time, and he finally got adopted. And there's this whole lovely story about the family. So you might start out by saying, I remember when I adopted my first dog, it was overwhelming to try to figure out how to go about the process, or it was hard for me to figure out what animal was going to be the right fit for me, there was so many questions, I didn't know what to do. So you're sharing, you're connecting, and you're letting people know that you're just like them. And even though you're running this organization, you've been through what they're going through, or what they've experienced in the case of pet adoption. So then the next piece is going to then go into more of like leading up to the call to action. So it's going to talk about the story. So if we were going to talk about this family adoption, it might be, you know, it broke my heart every day to come in and see Bruno, sitting in his kennel for 200 days, we knew he needed the right home, blah, blah, along came this family, and they were the perfect fit because of blah, blah, blah. Thanks to all of your help on social media, you were able to help us place this dog and find that the rightful forever home for Bruno. So you're sharing that information. If it's a podcast or a blog post that you're sending people to it might look something like, these were the steps that I took in order to solve the problem. So the problem in my story was I wasn't sure how to get started with email marketing. But I learned along the way that this was something that was going to be impactful for my business. And so I did this, and I'm talking about it in my podcast. So here's some of the things that I'm sharing with you that you're going to learn. And I might bullet out a few of the things that are going to be included in there so they can kind of get an idea. Or you can kind of get an idea of what you're going to learn by listening to this episode. 

And the next piece is the call to action. So if we go back to the podcast episode, or a blog post, that's easy. Read more of the story here, check out our show notes for the podcast here. Listen to the episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Like that's a really easy one. If it's something that's, you know, like this the adoption story, it might be a check out our list of adoptable pets right now, who could you share these pets with, so they can find their forever homes just like Bruno did. Or maybe you have one specific ask that is, you know, we get 10 animals in a week. And the food cost for that is XYZ, if you could buy a bag of food for a dog, that'd be great. We don't always want them to be tied to financial things. But you know, every once in a while, that's a great thing. And that, my friends, is the beauty of sending a weekly email. Because when you're sending a story every week, when you're sending information every week, when you're interacting with your audience every week, then every third or fourth email can have an ask. And it's much more regular, as opposed to every single email that they're getting from you is an ask. And so that's it, a little bit of a personal story, sharing some knowledge, sharing some information, guiding them to the place that you want them to go to take that next step. These don't have to be crazy, long emails, they don't have to be, you know, taking hours to write. It's really just about taking stories, and things that are happening with your organization, great things that you're doing that you want to share with your email list, because your email list has already engaged with you in some way, shape, or form. And they want to have continued knowledge of what it is that you're doing. So that they can continue to know okay, I'm giving them money. I'm giving them time. They're doing good things with it. Okay. 

So the last piece that I want to mention is the P S. And so we are scrollers. We have a lot of information that's coming at us all the time, our inboxes are full. So a lot of times we'll scroll to see the headlines of the message, and then we'll land on the PS. So again, not something you have to use every single episode or every single email that you send out. But for really important ones. It's great to add a PS in there, and what does that look like? So the PS is a great way to reiterate the most important part of your email. So I might say for this episode and a PS, PS, if you want the easy formula for how to write those perfect newsletter emails every week. Listen to this episode now. I might even say something about the fact that it's a shorter, short and sweet right, my solo episodes are a lot shorter. So I might call up the timeline or how long it takes to listen so people know this is a quick one. If it's a pet adoption, you might say, hey, learn more about how we got Bruno adopted after 200 days inside our facility. The perfect forever family home that he has found. Right? Get them to go to your website, get them to engage and get more information. So just a short sentence, something that gets them to pique their interest, either go back up and read the email, or just go ahead and take that call to action that you've got. So the biggest thing I want to say is remember that one email, one message, we want to keep it simple, we want to keep it easy for them to take action. And we don't want to confuse people with too many things. That's also why sending emails out on a weekly basis is great. It gives you lots of time to communicate with people about what they need to know that your organization is doing. So that's my easy formula. And I can guarantee you, you can write these emails in 15 minutes. So I don't want that to be an excuse for why you're not doing it. So go ahead and start sending those weekly emails. I want to hear how it's going so that I can celebrate with you and cheer you on. And thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you'll subscribe wherever you listen. Check out the video options so you can see my beautiful face at thefirstclick.net/YouTube and I will see you all in the next one.