Forget Generic Advice: Tailored Email Marketing Strategies with Bev Feldman

H: So Bev, I wanna get this straight, there is so much mass marketed cookie cutter advice out there in the internet about how to do email marketing right but from what I see, most of it does not apply to genuine experts. Most of it seems to apply to people who wanna grow a huge ass list, run Facebook ads, get a 2% conversion rate, and maybe sell their course. So, how do we do it differently because I know this is not what I need and probably not what most people listening to this episode need either.

G: Yes, I a hundred percent agree with you on that, it's certainly not what I need as a consultant. So I've been in the online business space now for so many years that I feel like I've had to unlearn all these years of learning of grow that email list, get as many people on your list as possible, causes the least amount of friction as possible to get people onto your list and I don't think that applies, like you said, to most of us. What we really need is a list of people who are engaged, meaning they're opening our email list, they are clicking on those links, they are replying to us, and you don't need a huge list in order for most of us to have a thriving, successful business. I know for myself as a consultant doing one-on-one work, if I had, you know, thousands of people at a 1% conversion rate, that would actually not be a very, it would be very stressful for me, it'd be too many people, but the way really most of us need to focus on our email marketing is showing up consistently so we can build these relationships through that content that shows up in people's inboxes.

And for me, I really look at email marketing as not just getting, growing this giant list, but really about how am I building that connection as people come onto my list, and some of it might be automated. I always recommend people have some sort of what people call welcome sequence so that you know whatever you have going on in your life, you know that when people come onto your list that they are getting a feel for you as a business owner, what you do, and if it's a mutually good fit. Because honestly, that's the other piece of this is letting people know, am I the right person to help you with what you need support on and if they unsubscribe because it's not a good fit or it's not a good time, I always look at that as a good thing, quite honestly. So my biggest takeaway for everyone in regards to this, for people listening, is that you don't need to have a giant list what you want is a list of people, of the right people. I'd rather you see, you have a small and mighty list of people who resonate with what you have to say and what your offers are than a giant list of people who don't care about what you have to offer.

H: I think it comes down to, like on social media, for example, everybody wants to get that blue check mark, but vanity metrics don't pay your bills. I work with coaches, consultants, service providers, small businesses and independent professionals. They do not need thousands of people, they wouldn't be able to serve them with the work that they do. But let's talk numbers because I don't even know what a small list is versus a large list. So if we're talking to consultants, not course creators, talking to consultants and coaches and independent professionals, if they have 200 people on their list, 500 people on their list, 20 people on their list like what kind of ballpark are we talking about, Bev?

G: Honestly, any of those numbers you just threw out at me could be great. And it really, I mean, it depends on how many people you work with, what your capacity is, how you're serving people. And I will make a note that, and this isn't something that I take credit for having come up with, is that if you run something like a group program, you might need a bigger list but for those of us who really focus on one-to-one work, as long as you're bringing in the right people, potentially 50 people could be all that you need. It's quite possible. I don't feel like there's a hard and fast rule. It really depends on, you know, what your capacity as a business owner, how engaged those people on your email list are. So if you have 50 people in every week, you've got 90% open rates, which would be phenomenal. Then that's great, I know I can do this math. What that's 45 people putting your emails every week.

H: We're gonna do the basic math, we're not gonna do the in-depth math okay, so I don't want anybody to bounce off this recording right now. But, so if you could have 50 people, you could have a hundred people, you could have 200 people but we're talking about engagement. And let's go a few levels down on engagement so the first level of engagement is, are they opening the email? Now we're gonna talk about different email platforms in a few minutes, but on any platform, you should be able to see whether they opened it or not. So let's say you have an email list of, let's say you have 200 people and you have a 40% open rate, meaning 40% of those 200 people every week are opening your email, is that good, average, better than average if they just open it and we're gonna go into other levels of engagement next.

G: Yeah, I think, I mean, partially depends on what industry or industry you're in, but typically that would be a really good open rate overall. I do wanna caveat though, the thing with open rates while we're talking about it is that open rates are l going to be your least reliable metric when you're looking at your email marketing as people may or may not know, Apple did a massive update to IOS a couple years ago, which throws off that number so it may artificially inflate what your open rates are, what they look like. So I do think it's open rate is an important thing to look at, but I also think it's actually more important to look at kind of in comparison. So looking from, you know, to look at say a month's worth of emails, looking at those open rates in comparison to one another. And if you notice one that's got a much higher open rate or one that's much lower compared to what to other open rates versus just looking at open rates on its own, you need a little bit more context to get an accurate view of that metric.

H: And by the way, just as an aside here, sidebar folks, when someone answers a question with it depends you know that you are talking to a legitimate expert because otherwise, if they say, oh, a 40% open rate is fantastic, and that's what you should go for. Okay, you are listening and taking advice and possibly making a business decisions based on a copy of a copy of a copy, of a copy, of a copy of someone's advice for someone who's not anything like you running a business that's nothing like yours. So I really appreciate that it depends because it does, and even we're not gonna fixate on one particular metric because someone may be thinking, I'm doing so great, I may only have 20 people, but I have an 87% open rate, what else you got? So the next level of engagement would be, there's different ways they can reply to your email, but they might send you a DM on one of your favorite social platforms instead of replying to the email, right?

G: Oh, absolutely and here's where I think, again, kind of that mass marketed copy of a copy of a copy messaging that we're hearing is you're not gonna necessarily be able to track that within your email marketing platform. So like if you send an email and someone replies to you via DM, you kind of on your own have to set up that system that lets you know that people engage with that email. So, but I love that you brought up that point because that the point of email, because we're talking about building relationships, as long as that relationship is continuing somewhere, it doesn't have to happen in your inbox. It could happen on a phone conversation, it could happen via social media, but as long as you are seeing that people are comment, you know, telling you, oh, I'm on your email list, or you can see that your email, that they are on your email list and that conversation is happening that's how I feel like, you know, it's a great way to gauge if your email marketing is moving the needle forward on your business.

H: I appreciate that you're saying that, Bev, because I used to get frustrated and confused by this. Like I'm emailing every week, I have a what I think is a good open rate, but oftentimes when they do respond or engage with the content of that email they're doing so somewhere other than hitting reply. So it’s, everybody has all these tools and we're trying to use all these tools and the whole point of this conversation today is how to use the tool, the strategy of your email marketing as an expert in a way that's simple, sustainable, and strategic. But if you expect that they're gonna automatically hit reply and engage with you in their inbox, that may not be what they do. They may read the email and think, oh, this is so good. Maybe there's a link to your most recent blog post, or a podcast episode, or YouTube video or TikTok or whatever, and they may later go look at that thing and then respond to you from that platform. But they never would've known about that thing had you not emailed them so it gets a little trickier. And I know we're gonna talk a lot about automation, this is a big area of your expertise is email automation, because otherwise you're literally running all over the place trying to collect this data and figure out what's working and what isn't so the more automation the better, I'm all for that.

G: Yes, I agree, and so of course, you know, like I said, unfortunately not everything can be automated, but there's a lot that you can automate. And because we were talking about metrics, you know, we talked about the replies, which may or may not happen via email, and depending on your email marketing software, that information might not, may or may not be tracked in a way that you can really see that data. You might have to kind of take a little extra step on your own, but it's still, you know, because we're talking about people with smaller email lists anyway, chances are you're going to be engaging with people on your email list in a very different way from someone who needs the very large email list and doesn't have the relationship building with the people on their list. And that's not a judgment to people who have that business model. It's just the reality of having a very, very large email list.

H: I don't think I've heard anyone say this before, Bev, in quite this way, but what's really coming through loud and clear is sometimes it comes down to, sometimes do you want a big list or do you want to have relationships with people? Is it more transactional or more relational, what you do in the way that you do it. I think that distinction will be really, really helpful for people to figure out, because some people just wanna sell a bunch of stuff to people that they don't know and they're never gonna know and they don't wanna know, and they're serving them through that information, but they don't actually want a relationship with them and other people would hate that business model.

G: Yeah, and I've had that business model and I didn't like it. The only thing I liked about that business model was when people replied to my automated emails and I was having a conversation with them and I was like, oh, this is why I'm doing this, that's the fulfilling part of it. And going back to what you were just saying, that kind of, you know, more hands off approach, I think a lot of times that's what we're taught to do and if that works for you as a business owner, great. But I think for a lot of us, that's not why we went into business. I didn't go into this business to be as hands off from my clients as possible, I love that piece of it. I like having the human interaction and that is why I have a consulting business.

H: But and remember it depends, we're gonna do a lot of, it depends in this, in this conversation. I know that automation is important because it takes the lift out of the repetitive things that we know we need to do, but they're time consuming, they're a little bit tedious, they're necessary but you might not see the ROI right away. So I know that automation is an important part of this, but if what we're going for is relationship building, help me understand like how, what role does automation play? Because what a lot of people will say is, well, you can either be automated and hands off, or you can be high touch and have a relationship. I know that you know a way to do both, let's talk about that.

G: Yeah, so I think kind of the, like, I'll go back to what I talked about before, having to give a very concrete example, having that automated welcome sequence. If you had to individually welcome everyone every single time they came onto your email list, that would use up a lot of your time most likely and it wouldn't be the best use of your time per se. That being said, you still want people to feel welcomed and there are ways to do it that teel in alignment to how you wanna be showing up. So I'm not one to say, well, you have to do it this way or that way, I'm saying you should do it in a way that feels good to you. I do recommend having some automated emails as people come onto your list just so you know that relationship building is kind of help happening for you, but those are your words hopefully that you're putting into those emails.

So even if you aren't the one to sit, hit, send, right as someone comes there, your personality, how you show up in your business will start to come through in those words. So, and the other part is of, you know, the automation piece, like being automated versus building relationships is, we talked about getting replies on emails, inviting people to reply to the emails, and you can, from that, you know, if you know you don't necessarily check your inbox every day. I have an auto re responder for my inbox. So if someone emails me and I have it set, I think, so it goes off like once a week. So every time someone emails me, they don't keep getting that autoresponder but it's giving them, you know, it's saying, oh, hey, I'm, you know, thank you for your email about X, Y, Z, wanna let you know that when you can expect to hear from me, I also share a little bit in that, like make it a little bit more personalized. And I've had people reply to my autoresponder to tell me they loved my autoresponder.

H: I like that.

G: Yeah, so I think you can also inject a little bit of personality into that. So you're setting the expectations that you're not living in your inbox, but you value people's time and giving them that expectation of when they can expect to hear back from you. And the other piece of that is if you know that people email you with certain questions, you can put some of that information also in your autoresponder. So for example, I will have people email me periodically to say, Hey, I would love to chat with you about ConvertKit help, how can I do that? My autoresponder has a link to book a call with me so I have on a couple of occasions have noticed people got that autoresponder and then booked the call from it. They're like, oh, I, I see, here's the information I needed. You gave it to me and that was automated so they got what they needed. We built that relationship and I was able to save some time as well on the back end.

il, like big picture overall,: 2023

G: Well, no, I actually don't think it depends. I think as much as people wanna say, oh, email is dead, it's not. I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but people check their email all the time. We rely on email to have conversations so email's not going anywhere, anytime soon. Versus, you know, there are certain social media trends that have come and gone. Well, I never got into it, but Clubhouse, I think is the example that I see people using a lot. You know, I don't think places like Instagram, Facebook, they're not going anywhere anytime soon. However, you are at the mercy of the algorithm so even if someone chooses to follow you, they might not see your content, versus if someone signs up for your inbox while you don't have a hundred percent control over them actually opening the email. And there are cases where you could end up in their spam or those hidden folders. If you have people using Gmail, at least you know that you are going to show up in their inbox and people are going to check their email. That even for people who don't check it every day, most people are going to check their email, I say at least a few times a week. So I don't, it's all to say email is not dead, it's not going anywhere anytime soon and this is information you own versus your Instagram followers, you don't own that. Facebook could decide to shut down your account so a hundred percent email all the way.

H: Yeah, they just had over a billion dollar fine applied by the EU today to Meta for privacy policies. So yeah, that could factor into things, but I think a lot of people have a love hate relationship with their email. Like, it's kind of like I hate, well what, what is that? I forget what commercial it was, I hate it, but I use it kind of thing. And I think when we are in our inboxes and there's a lot of spam and there's a lot of, you know, potentially bad news, uncomfortable news, but then we see that email from someone we've chosen to follow if it's worth opening, we're gonna open it. And I think it's one of the things that my clients in particular and even myself struggle with is, you know, what is good content? What is a good reason to be in their inbox? And are you putting the same stuff in the email that you're putting on social media or elsewhere like what makes it different when it's email?

And I think when I see it done well, it's something that I'm not necessarily gonna find somewhere else. It feels more personal to me, and usually I only have to do one thing. I used to write like a email newsletter, had so many different things, you could do this, you could do that., you could go here, you could go there and I realized, oh my God, that feels like so much work. Even I don't wanna click on any of those things so now it's like, here's one thing you could look at and oh, by the way, here's a related thing if you like that, you're probably gonna like this too. And then I wanna get out of there because I just think about how I respond to emails that are too long, or too wordy, or too complicated, or give me too many choices. I don't think anybody's got the bandwidth for that anymore.

G: I agree, I think the days, I mean, I will say, again, it depends. I think there are some business models where that would make sense. I think the majority of us, do not and probably should not be doing newsletter style emails. And by that I mean, you know, kind of like the summary of a magazine, oh, here's seven articles you can click on. I think keeping it about focus on one specific thing with one call to action. Now, that's not to say you might not have instances where you do share more information, more calls to action and I do think overall it can be beneficial to kind of change things up a little bit. Have a really short email one week, a longer one another week, sometimes having encouraging people have the call to action be for people to reply to your email versus encouraging them to click somewhere else. I do think kind of varying it up a little bit, almost to keep people more engaged because not to say, oh, what's gonna happen, what's gonna show up in their, in my inbox today. But mostly to see, you know, for people to say, oh, okay, I know I tend to be pretty wordy for people to say, oh, Bev didn't send me a really long email today, it was more of a conversation piece.

H: And then they might reply and say, are you okay? You're usually really wordy, but that was short, are you all right? I do think varying it, and I need to get better at this myself, I do think varying it makes sense because if you just put that within the framework of everybody's busy, everybody's stretched, everybody's got too much going on. They have a limited amount of bandwidth and attention, but if you can hook their curiosity by varying things, they're more likely to read it and engage with it. I wanna go back to something we've kind of circled around a couple of times, and I wanna make sure that we really address this because I know it's important. You mentioned a couple times about fitting your email strategy to your business model, and we've kind of already debunked the huge ass list. Facebook ads, like millions of subscribers, 1% conversion rate, we're not selling courses here primarily. Even if you have a course, if you are primarily a consultant to coach a service provider, an independent professional, you've got hundreds maybe rather than thousands. But what would be the right email strategy for that type of business and is it possible some business models don't even need an email list?

G: So to answer that last question, correct, there are some business owners that really don't need an email list. I have a local business friend who has such a thriving business she has built up such an incredible referral network that I have told her you do not, not that she's asked for my advice, but I'm just like, you don't need an email list. It's cuz she knows it, she's almost over capacity and wouldn't make sense for her to then take her time to start an email list. So if you are fully at capacity and you know, people are constantly referring you clients and that pipeline is not going to go away anytime soon, I would actually say that you don't need to focus at all on an email list. That would not be the best use of your time for other people and again, it depends. I think, you know, if you only need, and I'm not gonna, you know, take credit for sharing this being Michelle Mazur was talking about this in a group that we're in, you know, if you just need a couple clients a year because what you offer is so high touch, then maybe it's something you show up in their inbox quarterly and focus more of your energy on other networking event, other relationship building activities.

I do recommend generally though for people who you might not necessarily have such a large pipeline of clients like you. You need more people or you are, don't have quite enough people coming towards you that you do wanna show up somewhat consistently. So for me, I typically show up weekly. I'd say, I would not go less than monthly just because you also run the risk if you show up too infrequently that people might forget who you are and why you're on their list. I've certainly had times of people where I don't quite remember signing up for their email list, and I'm like, well, I haven't heard from you in half a year and I don't really understand anymore what it is you offer, so I'm actually gonna unsubscribe, which is you know, unfortunate, and again, I don't think there's anything bad about having people unsubscribe from your list, but you don't want people to also forget who you are. And cuz then you run the risk of too many people unsubscribing because they're not used to hearing from you. You also run the risk if you go the route of emailing too many times in a week, a day, that you will also get people unsubscribing.

So it's about finding that balance that you're showing up consistently enough that people are remembering who you are without burning yourself out also at the same time, because I think email can be one of those things where you're like, oh, I just don't wanna do it, and it kinda gets pushed by the wayside. So I do encourage you to try to show up consistently so that you can build those relationships, but in a way that feels good to you. And both the consistency of it, you know, the cadence of how frequently you're showing up, but also with the words. I mean, I don't consider myself for my own email per se, like the best salesperson via email. But I also know that people have told me they enjoyed reading my emails, so that encourages me to keep showing up and to build those relationships with people.

H: No, I think it makes a lot of sense and I think most of my clients don't feel like they love writing emails. They also don't feel like they love receiving emails, but if they like receiving your emails, they open them consistently. Even if they don't respond, I mean, would you ever recommend, I'm thinking right off the top of my head now, would you ever recommend doing like a little experiment where maybe you change the day or you go from weekly to maybe every other week and then see if anybody notices or cuz I see people I don't like reading this, but when someone has missed a few weeks, and then they roll back into your inbox with a big old apology, I'm like, don't do that. First of all, nobody's sitting by their inbox waiting for your email no matter how big a fan they are, they probably didn't notice, or if they did, they just thought, well, she must be busy, she's back now. Like, don't, wouldn't you agree like there's nothing to apologize for.

G: Yeah, I agree, I would just not apologize. I recently actually had someone's email, someone whose email list I'm on who typically does show up weekly, and I was like, oh, am I somehow no longer on this person's email list? And then their email showed up the other day and they mentioned something going on in their life. Not an apologetic way, like, oh, that's probably why they haven't been showing up in my inbox and I really appreciated that. It was a little bit of kind of a reminder of what they've got going on without being like, so sorry. Like I don't think we need to apologize, we all have lives and things happen. That's also not to say you shouldn't feel like you can't share what's going on in your life, if that feels right for you and the type of business you have, but I don't think you need to apologize like you said.

H: Yeah, and you're right it's a different value alignment. Some people like to share a lot of personal information. Some people that is just verboten, it's not who they are. They don't like that, they don't wanna do it, and they don't attract people who expect that either. So, can we talk about platforms because there's so many of them and everybody's got their favorites and a lot of the mass marketed cookie cutter copy of a copy of a copy advice is like, you have to do this one but you have lots of options, don't you?

G: Yes and I will even say that as a ConvertKit consultant, I would not recommend ConvertKit to everyone. And I have friends, depending on what their business is I've said, don't get ConvertKit, you will wanna use this other email software instead. So the other piece to that is, you know when people are like, oh, should I switch cuz I think it can get so easy to get wrapped up in like, oh well, you know, people are talking about this platform and this platform, should I switch. The way I look at it is if your email marketing software that you're currently on, if it's working for you, just stick with it. You don't need to massively do the work of having to switch everything over. However, if what you're currently using is not working for you either you don't find it intuitive, you don't like being on it, it doesn't work with whatever else you're using to run your business, then that would be a good indication that you might wanna switch.

And I'll say at, if you were haven't yet set up a platform, if you're not sure yet what you're gonna be doing and you're looking into it, I think it's really easy to get hung up on the price tag piece of it. And yes, you wanna factor in what it's going to cost you, but I actually would not look at the cost as a way of comparing platforms because some have really great free options for up to like a thousand subscribers, which is amazing. At the same time, you might run into some limitations later on, so I really feel that you should look at the platforms that are going to work with what your business is right now and what you needed to work with, and also look at it itself. I've had people who have come to me because they really liked the really pretty email marketing software, and they're like, this is not the right fit for me. Or other people who are like, this other platform is not remotely intuitive. So I do recommend taking a look at it and making sure it's something that you feel like you'll be okay being in.

H: That makes a lot of sense, Bev, because I think all of us have different brains. I work with a lot of people who are neuro divergent and I am neuro divergent and I have signed up for things in the past because some coach I was working with, or consultant or group program I was in just told everybody in the program, this is the one and this is what you're all gonna do, which was more for her convenience and comfort than for ours, but almost everybody offers a free trial seven days, or you, you know, if you give them your credit card, you can cancel within seven days. And that's long enough to kind of play around in it and see is it intuitive, how does it feel? Do you like the look of the interface? I remember one of my clients knew she had bought the wrong program because she thought it was ugly and she said, every time I opened the thing up, it's like the colors were garish. It was not organized in a way that made the least bit of sense to me. I couldn't figure out what I was doing right and what I was doing, I'm like, that is a hard no. I don't care how many people recommended it, you have to be able to go in and feel like.

It'd be like if you were looking for a house or an apartment. If you walk in and you instantly get the feeling like, oh my God, this is get out like you don't, you don't need to make it work. And I think especially a lot of creative problem solvers, which tend to be a lot of my clients, they think, well, I just need to give this more time. I just need to spend more time getting to know this. No, you don't like, it shouldn't be that hard, especially when you consider it something that you really are going to want to like well enough to do regularly. If it looks ugly, if it looks complicated, if it looks confusing, if it just anything about it is like gives you the ick, pass. There's so many options and you don't need to make this harder for yourself than it may already feel like it is. But on the hard factor, is it really that awful to migrate because I know that's something that keeps a lot of people in a program that platform that they don't actually like, that probably isn't really serving them. Because a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it's kind of like changing your phone plan you just, I don't know if you can keep that number, sister it's like, is it really that hard?

G: So again, it depends. It's so funny. I feel like later on Ill to have a bingo sheet or something, it depends because here's the thing, it depends. The reason why it depends is, you have to look at what you currently have set up. If you have a lot of really complex automations already set up in your current software, then yes, it's going to be more complicated. If it's integrated with other pieces of software, yes, it's going to be more complicated. If you just have kind of your subscribers hanging out there and you've just been sending out weekly emails, or maybe you have a simple welcome sequence and that's all you've got going on, it will be a lot simpler. I also, you know, part of it also depends on how quickly you figure out new tech software and that varies so much from person to person.

H: No, that's absolutely true and you're anticipating one of my last couple of questions is there's a lot of options you need to find the one that works for your brain, your team, if you have help and, for your business model. But, shoot, I forgot the question I was just gonna ask you. That's the first time that's happened on an interview. Okay, come back to me, come back to me. I am drawing a total blank.

G: Oh, gosh, I hate when that happens.

H: Oh, no. Oh, it usually happens, but it hasn't happened in a podcast interview before. So if you can migrate to a new platform and it's maybe not that hard, I remember the question and I'm not cutting this out either because what you see is what you get with me. If you decide you wanna change, do you need to hire help for that which leads to the bigger question the question I actually forgot is, how do you know when is the right time to hire help, whether it's someone like you or an assistant or whatever, how do you know when you might actually need more than just DIYing it or handing it off to your virtual assistant if you have one.

G: So hiring someone like me, for example, so there are people who can just do straight migrations. In fact, if you're migrating to ConvertKit and you have over a certain number of subscribers, they will do it for you for free. The difference however, is someone like me who does but the consulting and the strategy side of things, I will help you migrate things over, but also you might get the assistance of people telling you to do things or making, not doing, not telling you to do things, but making suggestions for things that you didn't even know were possible. I mean, I know people like me, whether you know, I'm focused on ConvertKit, I know people who know all various other platforms as well. We know these email marketing softwares so well that we're gonna be able to make suggestions for you that you didn't even know were possible.

That can theoretically help you to better automate things while also creating more opportunities for sales and booking calls or learning, you know, finding data that you didn't even know you could find in there. So I think that's part of it, is that, no, if you, feel like, you know, it's simple enough, I can move it over, great, you should do it. Maybe down the line you want someone to teach you something about it, you can learn a little bit more, or have them check to make sure that you'd set it up the way you meant to. So I think that's part of it is, you know, looking at the complexity of what you already have set up, do you need both the implementation and the strategy of it. A lot of people come to me, for example, because they are in a phase of growth with their business. They're going to have increased visibility and they know not only do they need to make sure that things are working streamlined, that they've got edit everything set up correctly. They wanna make sure that they have some additional things set up that will help them to automate things with their business so that their business can grow with them.

H: So that would be one example of somebody I'm hearing kind of, yeah. Two examples, one would be if you don't just want the implementation, but you want the strategy, and you definitely tickled my ears with, if I were to give this to an assistant, even a rockstar assistant, they're going to do what I asked them to do. Someone like you, who's a strategist, is going to like, hear between the questions and you're gonna say, well, do you want this? Do you want that, are you aware that you can do this? Do you see your business going in the direction where something like this would be helpful? Like that's like future forecasting and helping you recognize some platforms may be better than others for things that maybe you're not doing in your business right now. But six months from now, a year from now, you're gonna be so glad you chose this platform rather than the other because you know what questions to ask, which again is the other mark of an expert. So if someone is going to be growing their business, let's say they're going from one-on-one to group, or they start adding a whole other level of service or bigger ticket, contracts and packages and stuff. That would be one example of when to hire a strategist. When would be another time that might be a good fit for hiring.

G: Oh, that's a great question. I think, well, another time would be for someone who's currently on a platform, so it's not just for people looking to switch. I also help people a lot who are already on it and know that they're not using it as well as they could be. They are people that, you know, I've tried doing this thing and every time I do it, it never seems to work. Or, yeah, like I can do what I want it to do, but I know there's more I could be doing and I don't even know how to begin to do that. So that's the other piece is helping people to understand who already use it, how to use it even better.

H: Yeah, when they realize they don't know what they don't know and it's not a good use of their time to try to figure it out. Okay, bonus round, last question cuz I know we both need to move on is why ConvertKit like you could have become a consultant. I mean, you're the personal tech fairy. You could have been a consultant for any of the companies, for multiple companies, why did you personally decide ConvertKit is where you're gonna focus?

G: I love that question and because part of it is I can give an answer that it was not the right decision when I first switched to it. So, I like it now because and I've decided to focus on it because I've just been using it for so long, I think at this point I've been using it for seven years. So that is why I focused on it and when I started this business, I thought maybe I'll learn other ones and I've decided, you know, I'm just gonna stick with ConvertKit. And I like Convert Kit for a few reasons. I like that it integrates really seamlessly with a lot of other platforms people are using. I feel like it's pretty intuitive, versus some of the more like, Active Campaign is super, super robust and as a result it's less intuitive, for example.

So there may be instances where I would recommend something like Active Campaign over ConvertKit, but for most consultants, they probably don't need something quite that robust. And they're gonna my, in my opinion, learn ConvertKit a lot faster because it's a little because it's simpler, it's more intuitive in my opinion. I also like that the company itself is actually pretty transparent and they've made some choices in the past that they got a lot of pushback on. They were supposed to go through a major rebranding a number of years ago, and people pointed out to them their new business name that they were going to switch to was actually cultural appropriation. It was, I think a Sanskrit word they were gonna use and instead of pushing back and just saying, well, we've already invested all this time and money into our rebrand, we're just, you know, we're gonna keep going for it.

Instead, they said they listened to people and owned up to the mistake they made and continued on with the name. So I'm sure they lost a fair amount of money, I don't know specifically. So to me that was, that's been a signal that they hold true to their values and it's not to say that, you know, like any company, I'm sure you know, they've done things that I might not a hundred percent agree with, but that moment really stuck out to me because I don't think you always see businesses doing that a lot of times and this was a number of years ago that they did that too. That was another piece is like, it's the platform itself I think is great, and I also like the values that their business stands behind.

H: This is the perfect place to wrap up this episode for so many reasons, because as a small business owner, as a consultant, a coach, a service provider, an independent professional someone's choice to work with you, to follow you, to subscribe to your email, to listen to your podcast often comes down to your personal values and whether they align with them, because no matter what you do or how brilliant you are, people have choices. And increasingly, I see our culture moving in the direction of people making buying decisions, relationship decisions to do business with people and businesses where there's a values alignment. And I am here for it because at the end of the day, we have to make choices anyway and that's a more reliable way to make choices instead of what's the cheapest, what did my friend get? What did the gurus say like if you can go to bed at night saying, I feel good about giving my money to these people because of what they stand for, like that's a win all the way around for me. How do people find you online and where are your preferred social platforms for them to connect with you beyond this interview Bev?

G: Yeah, so we can connect on either Instagram, you can find me at yourpersonaltechferry. I'm also, I like talking to people on LinkedIn and I don't know the direct URL off the top of my head, but you know, we'll make sure the links are there and you can also find me on my website at yourpersonaltechfairy.com.

H: And maybe you just wanna get on her email list and see what her emails look like.

G: Yeah, even though I'm talking about email marketing tech, I've been told my emails are fun to read so.

H: That's the first thing I'm gonna do as soon as we hang up, I'm getting on that list. Thank you, Bev, this was a lot of fun and a lot of valuable information.

G: I'm so glad. Thank you.