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Why Does Email Work?

You're going to get started by talking about why does email work so I am a mom of three girls um and my oldest daughter roxanne is eleven she's finishing fifth grade now and in our town after finished fifth grade you started middle school for sixth grade and so she came home from school one day toward the under fifth grade and she said mom, my backpack is lame I don't want to go into sixth grade in middle school with this purple backpack is all being backpack I didn't think it was lame but look find a maid but she wanted something fashions and they knew so I said fine, so I do a lot of online shopping because I'm a mom and I have a business and I don't really go to the mall very often so we go online we start searching around, we go to a bunch of different companies looking for backpacks that are not lame and eventually we go to pottery barn teen you know if you've checked that out but they've got some good backpacks so we're searching through she finds one that she likes its black it ...

has little white hearts all over it she thinks it's really cute perfect so we buy it it comes the house we have been up she's thrilled she's saving it for middle school super excited feeling good and now I am on the pottery barn teen mailing list whether I like it or not how had this has happened to you? How many of you this happened to you where all the sudden you buy one thing and you're on this mailing list you're like how did they even get on this mailing list and they send you so many e mails it's like it feels almost like it comes twice a day like why do I need all these e mails from old navy like pushing skinny jeans? I don't know I don't want all of this stuff um okay, so I'm on the list a couple months later we're coming into the summer now and she's thinking more about middle school my daughter and she says that she liked to redo her bedroom her room is yellow and orange, which were the colors we chose for it when she was a baby before she was born, when it was a nursery we picked yellow and orange and we have a carpet and everything else in there and it looked nice but she's like I you know, I want to read to it before middle school in aqua and gray okay, so s so that it looks more, you know, teenage whatever so I could find so we went out we bought betting I made her like a quilted pillow for her bed that's, aqua and gray it looks really pretty and we got a really cute like cool beanbag chair that she can sit and read uh just looking good but she needs it area rug the area rug in there is yellow and orange gave it to her little sister and she needs a new area rug so like where did I recently sea area rugs and teenage girls bedrooms like where a rate pottery barn teen so we go back right to pottery barn teen this time no more looking around because I know exactly where they are I go on the site there's like ten to choose from this one that's gray with white hart squiggles on it if you go on the site you'll see that it's really cute she bought we bought it came unrolled it put in her room she loves it perfect. Okay, so why did pottery barn teen send me so many emails? Because it works that's why? Because they have a whole marketing team that's you know, developing this email strategy they have graphic designers have all these people hold team of people I mean meeting after meeting happens right to plan each of those campaigns it is not just like one guy I mean it's a whole thing and they send them out to people just like me like on the target market I have three kids who are going to be headed into being teenage girls like that's and so they send those e mails out because it works so here's the thing we are craft business is right I'm a sewing pattern designer you all have kraft businesses of some sort and you know we aren't pottery barn so we are just for most of us one person I mean for me my business is me there isn't I don't have any employees I don't have any buddy working for me so it's just me and despite that though we are businesses so we do need to act like a business and do what works for big business even if were tiny but we can also do it and kind of a different way I think a better way right? So we can do it but we don't have to do it in that way that super annoying that's way overwhelming that seems so sales e and just sort of raise a sort of spammy and annoying we can do in a way that's like riel and develops real relationships and makes people feel good about being part of you about being part of your you know, having your business but part of their identity. So that's what we're going to work on today so when we think about why email works there's a bunch of different reasons first email is universal ninety two percent of adults in the united states have an email address, which means you're really able to virtually reach everybody in the u s okay, and also, you know, worldwide, of course on dh emails also universal, and that people who are older people who are young and everywhere in between have an email address. My eleven year old daughter roxanne she is an email address, my eighty eight year old father in law he ford's me corny jokes on email all the time. Everyone's got an email address, so you're really reaching everyone, whereas if you think about social media, right, like my mom, totally not on instagram, she's not on instagram, she's not going to get on instagram doesn't really understand what it is. She doesn't have time for it, it doesn't meet her knee and she's not there, but she's got an email just e mailed me this morning so she's, you know you're reaching everybody. I think that that's really important on dh it's easy, the email is easy, it's, easy for people to understand it's easy for people to access and it's private and I think that's important tio think about too, especially as a craft businesses, a handmade business in those private, which means that when I email you and you hit reply and email may back, it doesn't go into like a news feed. Where everybody is seeing our conversation so if you have a silly question or or I'm saying something that you know I think could be a little controversial or a little whatever it all just goes back and forth between the two of us and it's not out there for everybody to see it's really private and that's kind of nice and it allows people to write back to you directly so when I sent out my email newsletter mind goes out on wednesdays I get tons of email back and we'll talk about that a little later, but those e mails that come back they come directly to me and I respond directly to those people who email me and we have a back and forth one on one conversation which I think it's so nice I just love that and I really think it builds your business and build your customer base and helps that word of mouth kind of marketing, which is really the most powerful kind where people are like yes, awesome she totally e mails me back and I feel like I know her and that's really nice e mails got that privacy which other social media doesn't afford email also can't be missed, so if you're busy like today, I'm kind of busy I'm not on instagram, right? So so I'm not on instagram today and I'll be back on instagram tomorrow but in the meantime, a whole lot of photos meant by then I'm not ever going to see because there's no, I'm going to catch up you know I can't go back days and days and catch up so with an email though if you send me an email right now it's sitting in my inbox and it's there so it's waiting for me to do something about it either I can delete it I can open in aiken reply to it, but it's just I can't miss it and I think that's important about email that's a good feature of email and people check their email often how many of you checked your email already today before coming to class? Okay, that's, everybody who's here so I mean I checked mine at least three times before I started this morning and we started at nine so everybody's check their email and often people check their email multiple times throughout the day, especially people who have a smartphone you have a smartphone, you check your email typically more often than people who just have a computer and that's a lot of me in a lot of us have smartphones now, so you know email is and the only good thing about e mails that it's it's old if you think about it I got an email dress my freshman year in college which was nineteen, ninety three so email that was a long time before facebook it was a long time before had a blogged it was before twitter before anything before any of these things were here and it's still the number one thing I check in the morning that's a long time like I really think it's here to stay I got a sigh if it's been here that long like check in with me in a decade but I think we're still going to be checking on our checking our email s o I don't think you're banking on something that's going toe you know change you know building that list it's it's not going to disappear as a way to communicate with their followers um okay, so those are the advantages of email and I think there's significant I really dio I think it's the number one channel I gotta say here's another singer that's great about email so I have two thousand eight hundred thirty twitter followers I love twitter I'm on twitter all the time if you want to talk to me in there and abby glassberg and it's taking me a while to build up you know, over two thousand twitter followers because you know you have to be on there every day all day talking to people and sharon stuff which I love doing but you know I read in the news in the paper twitter financial health of twitter as in order as a company I don't know like who knows it could things could go wrong twitter could disappear and what would happen if it did so what would happen to my two thousand eight hundred thirty names of those people who follow me if twitter disappeared tomorrow or if twitter made some sort of radical change to my ability to reach those people I don't have their email addresses so there's no way for me to hang on to them if they go they're gone and all the work and the years of building up that following is gone it's just totally disappears so that's sort of scary right like it's great and it's awesome now but then all that works for not you know and we all know what happened with facebook there was a time when having a facebook business page was really really useful and everybody recommended doing it and then facebook made all these changes to their algorithm and on dh now we can hardly reach our facebook fans you know I have a nice following on facebook I put up a post and sixty people you know it says sixty people have reached like what I have like four thousand people how is this enough so facebook messed up our ability of small businesses tio reach our followers unless we pay you know now if you have all of those followers email addresses they're yours. Facebook can't get in your way. So instead of sort of focusing on complaining about facebook or complaining about all these things, take that honor, jay, and get those email addresses. And then you do what you can to reach out to those customers on your own, and you can do that through email. Um, okay, so you own it. That's, important there's, no algorithms.