What to Look for in an Email Service

When it comes to an email marketing service for authors, there are SO MANY choices out there! In this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena discuss what an ideal email service should provide for you out of the box….and if it doesn’t, keep moving!

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Links:

• Mailerlite: https://writing.fyi/mailerlite
• ConvertKit: https://writing.fyi/convertkit
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• Write with us! Join Chris, Gena, and Rene each Wednesday at noon Central and let’s get our writing DONE! https://www.writingmoments.com

Episode 57 TranscriptioN:

[00:00:17].250] - Chris
Hello and welcome to the Writing Momentum podcast. I'm Christopher Maselli and I'm here with my wife, Gena. How's it going today, Gena?

[00:00:23].850] - Gena
Pretty good, we're doing good. We're coming to the end of our week and so we've been working all week to make sure we could sit down and have this time together and work on and bring some fresh knowledge to people. Hopefully.

[00:00:37].590] - Chris
We've been talking about email services. Last week we talked about some of the email services that are out there. If you're wondering what might be the best one for you as an author, you can listen to that episode. And that was a good one. Now this one, we are going to go a little bit deeper and say, what should you look for when you look for an email service? Because there are a lot of options out there, right? And they all seem to look about the same, but when you look under the hood, you realize, oh, these are all a little bit different. Some of them offer one functionality and another one offers another. And there are certain key functionalities that you want to make sure that you have, because if you don't have those, it's not worth going for them. Now, there are some functionalities that almost every email service has. For instance, almost every email service is able to give you some sort of analytics. They're able to tell you how many people open your emails, how many people click through your emails. So that's not usually something you have to really look for.

[00:01:36].110] - Chris
I would imagine almost everyone would have that. But the other things we're going to talk about today are absolutely crucial, aren't they?

[00:01:42].410] - Gena
They are, and I want to point back to something that we talked about last week and that is why you need an email service. We talked about this in our podcast last week, but I want to touch on it again because I think that there are going to be some solopreneurs out there who are just getting started and who are wondering, I have Gmail, I have Hotmail, I have Icloud, I have these other servers or other services. Why do I need a special email service for my business? I don't have a lot of people on my list. Maybe I'm just getting started. So really, does it matter and how would you answer that question?

[00:02:18].960] - Chris
I would say that you don't want to be emailing massive amount of people through your personal email, right. It's just a recipe for disaster. You can't keep track of it. Plus people can't unsubscribe, which is something legally that you need to be able to offer. But more than that, there's a lot of things that you can do with a service, such as not only collect names, but you can see how many people open your emails. You can allow people to unsubscribe. You can see how many people click through to whatever you want them to click through. And those are the kind of things you need to be able to do as an author. Because remember, as an author, you are a business. It's sometimes hard for us to remember that, but that's absolutely true. And so you need to make sure you have those business functionalities that you need in order to be successful.

[00:03:05].200] - Gena
And I also want to point out that Chris and I have learned the hard way through our business and through home improvement projects that have gone awry, that a lot of times, growth or a quality end product depends on having the right to an email service that specializes in business products is what you need as a business. Need a company that is working for you as a business, that understands your needs as a business, and that can provide those and help you get where you want to go.

[00:03:42].150] - Chris
If you remember last week, we talked about how these email services are not that expensive. Most of them are. They're almost all under $30 a month, which is less than one dollars a day. Most of them are under $10 a month. And if you have a list of less than 1000 people, they're free. So there's not much risk here. These are the kind of things you can ease into. And the reason they offer them for free is because they know people don't change email providers all that often because it's difficult to do. So they want to allow you to try the service, get used to using it, and then they know you'll stay. So let's start to look at some of the different items that you need to be sure your email service provider has before you ever even sign up. If they don't have these things, I wouldn't even look any further. So the first thing is what, Gena?

[00:04:31].040] - Gena
It is a strong deliverability. Now, what we mean by that is that remember I said you want a service that really understands you as a business. And your service provider, your email service provider, they are working to make sure that the emails that they send out go into your inbox. Go into the inbox of your readers and your people, as opposed to going into the junk folder, the spam folder, the promotions folder or tab. They want to make sure that they are getting it to the inbox. And believe it or not, these different service providers, different ones have different deliverability rates. Yes, different ones have higher bounce rates, have higher spam rates where they're labeled spam when they come in. So we want to make sure, you want to make sure that whichever provider you use has a high deliverability rate.

[00:05:28].620] - Chris
That's right. Some of the best deliverability rates today are from MailerLite ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign, those are considered at the very top. And so that's why we often recommend those because we know they're very solid, very good. There are some others that aren't so bad, like MailChimp, but they've had problems with spammers in the past and so it's hurt their rating a little bit.

[00:05:52].450] - Gena
Okay, what's the second one?

[00:05:54].230] - Chris
So the second thing you need to be sure you have is the ability to schedule your emails. You want to make sure you don't have to be there at your computer and hitting send when you want those emails to go out. You should be able to write three, four, five, ten emails in advance if you want. Schedule them all out on the calendar so when you want them to drop and then just sit back and relax and let them go out when it's time. Now I am actually surprised that all email providers don't have this as just a standard something, because it's not that difficult to do in terms of programming, right, and you're essentially just saying send at this date and time, and so almost all of them offer it, but to my surprise, not all of them do. That was one of the things we found out that MailChimp changed when they changed some of their plans, that they made it to where you had to go to a pro plan to actually have scheduling with a date and a time. And so that's just silly to me. Make sure your provider allows you to schedule your email so that they open it up at the optimal time, so that you're able to make things go out in succession whenever you want to, and then you're good to go.

[00:07:07].240] - Gena
Yes, and I prefer to be able to even choose right down to the minute of when it goes. I don't necessarily want an email to go at straight up 09:00. I want to be able to say send it at 9:04, send it at 8:55. I want to be able to have that kind of customability. Is that a word? Sure, customization, maybe that's the better word. I want to be able to have that control as the person pushing the button and buying the product. And it really gets me when to get that functionality that I am not only required to go up to a paid level, but I have to go up to a second paid level. It becomes like a nickel and dime thing of, oh, you want to be able to say exactly when you send it, then that's going to be another $10 a month. That's silliness.

[00:07:58].990] - Chris
All right, what's the next one?

[00:08:00].750] - Gena
Alright, so you want to make sure that your email provider has automation, that you can set up a welcome series, an engagement series, a reactivation series, and you know what, we'll talk about that in a future episode. But you want to have these series of emails that go out so that when a new person comes on your list, these automatically are sent to them. So that means within, somebody signs up for your newsletter, they're so excited, oh, we read your book, it's the best thing. I love what you have to say, tell me more. And you want to be able to have an automatic email that goes right back out to them that says I'm so glad you're here. This is who I am, this is what I'm about, this is what you can expect from me and I'm so glad you're here. And so that's your welcome series. And like I said, we'll get into some of what these different series are. But these are not just a one and done email. These are a series of emails. We're introducing yourself to someone and you're letting them know this is who I am, this is what my message is, these are what my stories are about, those kind of things.

[00:09:11].920] - Gena
And so you want to have that kind of functionality in your email service.

[00:09:15].890] - Chris
Yeah, it's really surprising how many authors do not have a welcome series. They may have a sign up for my newsletter on their web page, which is not what we recommend. And we have some other thoughts on that. We can talk about that later too. But if you do have a sign up for my newsletter and then they sign up and they get a thank you, you're signed up and then as radio silent until your next newsletter comes out, that's no good. No one is going to be as excited to hear from you as they are the moment they say I want to hear from you. So they should receive a rapid succession of two to three email messages. That lets them know a little bit more about who you are. That builds that connection right when they're interested in it. And that's what's called a welcome series. So all that said, you can't build a welcome series if you don't have automations with your email service. So make sure your email service allows for automation. Now most providers require that you sign up for some sort of paid plan to get automations. So just be careful.

[00:10:22].140] - Chris
Look for that. I know that MailerLite does not they allow you to have automations even if you have less, as long as you have less than 1000 people on your list, you have more than 1000 people, then you have to pay. So theirs is based more on numbers than it is functionality like that, even though some things are still behind a paywall. So anyway, look for automation. Those are super important. Another thing that's very important is that the editor that you create your emails in should be easy to use. Now we really like text based emails, okay? That's just emails that are nothing but text. Maybe once in a while, a little picture in there or something like that. We don't get too fancy on our emails. If you subscribe to our email list, you know that we don't and we do recommend as we talk about emails here, sign up for our email list at Writing Momentum just so you can see how we deliver emails. You can always unsubscribe later and we don't spam or anything, but it's a good way to learn what another author does. But anyway, we like text emails.

[00:11:22].230] - Chris
But some authors like to get really fancy, right? They like to have a lot of images and a lot of ways to put things in columns, in their emails, that sort of thing. They want their emails to look different on a mobile device from a computer. If you want to do those kind of things, if you want to have more of a storefront look to your emails, that's perfectly fine. If that's what you want, if that's what your audience wants, then you need to make sure you have an editor that's drag and drop, easy to use. You don't want to be messing around with HTML code and all of that, right? Life is too short, right? So you want to make sure it is easy to use. And this is where I recommend that you try out different email services before you decide to go all in on one. Because even though an email service may say they have a good editor, you may get in there and discover it's not half as good as another one that you try out. So try out a couple and see what you think.

[00:12:14].200] - Gena
Absolutely. And I love that suggestion Chris give about getting several of these because like he said, they do offer free. They offer that free level so that even if you don't have a lot of people on your list, that's great, you can try them out for free and you can learn as you go and build as you go. Don't think that it has to stay like that, but go ahead and try and sign up for these different ones. Chris said we recommend MailerLite and check out the comments below. We'll put the link down there, but check it out. There's MailerLite, there's ConvertKit, there's ActiveCampaign. There's these different ones. Try them out and just see what you think of the functionality and is it easy. And let me tell you, if you're not a techie person, that is really important because Chris said life is too short to be sitting there trying to figure out how to create how to code for HTML and life's too short. Okay, let's go to our last one. This one I think is really important and this is customer service. You want a service provider that has a strong customer service.

[00:13:23].200] - Gena
You want to know that I really like the little chats that you can ask for. Click the little button that says chat, I got a problem. And just in case you do have a problem, because if you do this long enough, statistically you're probably going to come up to something that doesn't work right or there's some kind of upgrade that they're going to make that you don't understand, or there's going to be some kind of thing you need help with. And I think it's really important to be able to have access to someone who's going to respond to you in a timely manner. And for an email marketer, which is what you would be doing, you're doing email marketing. That means somebody who's pretty quick on the response. I'm not saying they'll respond to you in a week. I'm saying I'm going to respond to you in at least within a couple of hours that I'm going to get back to you and answer your question or direct you in the right direction.

[00:14:11].670] - Chris
Yeah, and just to set your expectations, I think I would expect most email providers to write back within 24 hours. And that's largely because many of them have teams on the other side of the world and so they will respond while we're sleeping here in the United States. Or if you live on the other side of the world, then it might be more real time. However, usually the more you pay, the more you're bumped up into a higher level of customer service. So if you pay for a higher level of the program app, you might be able to get customer service that responds within a couple of hours or even immediately. Right, but if the service doesn't respond for a week, that's a huge red flag. You should never have to wait for a week. But outside of that, the other thing I look for is you want online training videos. You want really good knowledge bases so that you can find the answer to whatever you need. And if you don't have those, then make sure they at least have a very active community on Facebook, on YouTube, people who post videos. And if you find that kind of thing, at least you can always find the answer you need.

[00:15:22].710] - Chris
All right, that's pretty good. We covered, what, 1,2,3,4,5 things that you need to look for. So let's just go through those ones again.

[00:15:30].350] - Gena
Okay, so the first one is a strong deliverability rate. You want to know that your emails are going to the right place. You want scheduling. You want to be able to schedule your emails. You want to be able to decide when they arrive in your reader's inbox. You want automation so that you can get those welcome, reactivation and engagement series up and going. You want an easy editor. You want it to be easy to use. You don't want to have to become a software programmer in order to make it work. And you want strong customer service. So be on the lookout for those things. Like Chris recommended, sign up for a few of them. Sign up for the free accounts on several of them and just poke around, see what they've got, see if they've got the videos that you like, see if they've got a customer service and just see how long it takes the people to respond. And see if you like the editor and see what kind of automation they have. Just check it out and see at what level do you have to pay to get some of these things.

[00:16:30].510] - Chris
So we will put some of our favorite email providers in the show notes, and I'll even put them in the order of which we like them. So you can try some out or sign up for some play with it a little bit. There has never been a better time, though, to subscribe to this podcast because we're going to be talking about emails all month long. So if you don't want to miss one of these episodes, I encourage you to subscribe today. That all that does is so that when we come out with a new episode, you're alerted to it so that you can be sure that you don't miss that and you get this full series. Really a lot of what we're talking about. People have paid courses on this stuff, and we're just thought we'd talk about this on the podcast for free because we love sharing with you what we've learned. And the reason that is, is because together what Gena?

[00:17:14].110] - Gena
We have writing momentum.

[00:17:16].000] - Chris
Bye bye.