153: Streamline Your Online Business: Email Marketing Automation Tips from Jenna Carelli
Welcome back to another episode of the Course Creator's MBA Podcast! In today's episode, our host, Dr. Destini Copp, sits down with a special guest, Jenna Carelli, the founder and CEO of Email Marketing Automations. Jenna is an Active Campaign certified consultant with a wealth of knowledge in email marketing.
In this episode, Jenna dives deep into the world of email marketing automation, sharing her expertise on the importance of transitioning from manual data collection to using an email marketing platform. She emphasizes the benefits of utilizing such a platform to store information, analyze data, and optimize business growth.
We also get an inside look at the power of segmentation in email marketing, as Jenna explains how marketers can send personalized content to specific segments of their contact lists. She shares strategies for implementing automation, optimizing automations, and simplifying email marketing to ensure scalability.
If you're looking to level up your email marketing game and save valuable time, this episode is a must-listen. So grab your notebook and pen, and join us as we learn from Jenna Carelli about the art of email marketing automation on the Course Creator's MBA Podcast.
Mastering Email Marketing Automation: Insights from Jenna Carelli
Introduction
In the digital era, email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for connecting with customers and driving business growth. However, to truly maximize its potential, businesses must harness the power of automation and segmentation. In a recent episode of the Course Creator's MBA Podcast, Dr. Destini Copp sits down with Jenna Carelli, founder and CEO of Email Marketing Automations, to discuss the importance of transitioning from manual data collection to utilizing an email marketing platform. Jenna shares valuable insights, strategies, and tips on how businesses can optimize their email marketing efforts and save time through automation.
Building a Solid Foundation: Transitioning to an Email Marketing Platform
As businesses grow, managing data manually becomes increasingly burdensome. Jenna emphasizes the need to leverage an email marketing platform that fits both the budget and growth needs of the business. By making this transition, businesses can store information effortlessly, without requiring the constant manual upkeep. With a robust email marketing platform in place, companies gain the ability to analyze, optimize, and drive growth across various aspects of their business.
Segmentation and Personalized Content: The Key to Effective Email Marketing
Segmentation is at the core of email marketing success. Jenna explains the concept, emphasizing that it allows marketers to send personalized emails to specific segments of their contact list. By collecting basic information like first name and email address, businesses can begin building a solid foundation for segmentation. This information, along with other data collected from website visitors, can be added to an email marketing system for future use.
Automation is Key: Creating Personalized Customer Journeys
The true beauty of automation lies in its ability to create personalized customer journeys based on specific triggers and actions. Jenna highlights the power of automation in email marketing and stresses the importance of utilizing a thank you page instead of immediately delivering a lead magnet. By doing so, businesses can improve deliverability and recognition from email platforms. Automation allows for the addition of tags, wait periods, and updates to contact fields, ensuring a tailored and seamless customer experience. Furthermore, notifications can be sent based on contact actions such as email opens or clicks, enabling businesses to stay engaged with their audience.
Simplifying Email Marketing: Strategies for Scaling and Efficiency
As email marketing efforts grow, it's common for businesses to find themselves overwhelmed and disorganized. Jenna seeks advice on how to simplify and manage email marketing effectively to ensure scalability. She discusses labeling automations within email marketing platforms and recommends using naming conventions in titles and tags to identify the purpose of each automation and action clearly. Additionally, Jenna suggests integrating tools like Airtable and Skyvia to create a centralized database of information and easily view charts or spreadsheets based on personal preferences.
Strategizing for Success: Collecting Relevant Information and Fostering Personal Relationships
While the minimum requirement for an email marketing form is an email address, Jenna advises businesses to collect additional information from their audience to build personal relationships. Depending on the industry, capturing details such as the person's age or subject interests can help tailor content to their preferences. By strategizing and collecting relevant information, businesses can avoid making contacts feel like just another entry in their database. Jenna also highlights the importance of delivering lead magnets on a thank you page, followed by a confirmation email, to enhance the recipient's experience.
Conclusion
Implementing automation and segmenting email campaigns can save time while driving growth and engagement. As we embrace the future of digital marketing, it's clear that mastering email marketing automation is crucial to staying ahead of the competition and creating impactful connections with customers.
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Transcript:
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:02]:
And my special guest today is Jenna Carelli. Jenna is a active campaign certified consultant, and she's the founder and CEO of email marketing automations. And she's just one of 43 active campaign certified consultants in the United States. And, Jenna, I am super excited to jump into this topic with you, and we're gonna be talking all about email marketing, but most importantly, how email marketing can save you time if it's done right. And I know that you have all the goods for us. So we're gonna jump right in. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good just a little bit more about you and how you help people.
Jenna Carelli [00:00:52]:
Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I got started in business back in 2015. I was working in the corporate world as a paralegal. So I was working for attorneys and wanting out, but it wasn't until I found out I was pregnant with my first daughter And that gave me the force that I actually needed. The reason that I needed to find something for myself that I could call my own so that I could be home, with her when she was born. And that is where I developed a business I was in the fitness and wellness industry at the time, and I ended up building a digital marketing agency for wellness professionals. I ran that agency for several years. We worked with a bunch of different platforms, not just email, but website building, and tech, and cop writing, and I had a big team that was working with me. And it was through that practice that we identified the common denominator among our client success was in email marketing. And specifically, the automation component of email marketing allowed me to be a mom, to be a good friend, to still have a personal life outside of my business and really fit my business into my personal life. So I really held on to the automation portion of email marketing and eventually niched down my audience to just email marketers. in general. And so that's how I got so passionate about automation in general and email marketing and now we serve our clientele of email marketers to help give them back time in their personal life as well as their business, save them money, not only help them make more money through the power of automation, but have their systems and tools really work for them instead of spending their costs and expenses hiring and hiring and hiring human beings to do these administrative tasks, that our systems that we're already paying for can do for us.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:02:59]:
And I love what you said that email marketing can give you back time, especially with the automations, but it can also help you make money. So she's great combinations. Right? Yes. Yes. For folks who are they haven't really gotten started in email marketing. What would you say to them? Do you think it's important and how would you suggest they get started?
Jenna Carelli [00:03:23]:
Yeah. And one of the key phrases that I I use all the time, especially when I was just starting out, was free to paid. free to paid. If you don't currently have an email marketing platform, what you're doing is you're collecting names and you're collecting email addresses and you're collecting data, whatever that is for your business, a phone number, how whatever information is beneficial to you, you're collecting it within a spreadsheet. And that's okay to start. Right? But at some point, your business is gonna grow to the point where you need to you need a database to store that information that doesn't require your manual upkeep. So, the next best step is finding an email marketing platform that will work for you and also fit into your current budget and your current expenses that you want to be at in your business. There are plenty of email marketing platforms out there. I recommend looking at the functionality of each platform comparing does this platform grow with me as my business grows? But I find it to be extremely beneficial to get started with an email marketing platform as soon as you can just because it does help you store data and whether you're emailing right away or starting a newsletter, that doesn't matter. You're going to want to reference that data. to analyze and optimize and grow your business in different aspects outside of email marketing. So it will be beneficial to you.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:04:51]:
So let's delve into that a little bit more. You keep talk you talk about this database. Mhmm. Or somebody who's not familiar with, an email marketing database, exactly what is in it, what can we capture there, and and then we'll kinda delve into how we setting it up a little bit later.
Jenna Carelli [00:05:10]:
Yeah. So it depends on your business, and what do you find? Let let's think about your capture. So maybe you have a website or you have a landing page where you ask somebody for their email address. That's the bare minimum that an email marketing form needs in order to capture information. It's an email it's an email address. you might also find a first name and a last name is initial because you want to personalize the content, upon delivery. So you want to, you know, say hello first name, but you might be in an industry where you're working with parents and they have teens that you're working with or categorical in subject interests. If you're a blogger, then you have different categories of content that you put out and you might find it beneficial to have a toggle or a drop down selection upon that capture so that you can really personalize the content that you're sending the person who's opting in. So email address is really all the email marketing platform needs for you to get started, but then you want to start strategizing what Other information could I begin collecting from my audience that will help me build a personal relationship faster? and will help them feel the quality of the relationship that I'm building with them and not have them feeling like just another number or just another contact on your database.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:06:47]:
So what you're talking about there is segmentation and really kinda honing on the specific content that individual would want. Let's break this down a little bit further. Let's say that somebody comes to your website they sign up for whatever lead magnet that you have. So maybe they enter the first name. They enter their email address. they get added to your email marketing system. How would you suggest somebody, you know, they're just starting out in this, just learning this? How would you suggest that they start doing that segmentation. How would you set that up for a client?
Jenna Carelli [00:07:24]:
Yeah. So let's first talk about segmentation. What is it? most of us understand what it is to craft an email or to create an email campaign pain. So instead of sending the same email to an entire list of contacts, segmentation allows you to choose to send your email to a segment troll over who gets your email campaigns, and it allows them to have a personalized customer experience. So if we're talking component of your email marketing system, which is like an engine to your car, but with email marketing. The automation allows you to build a set of actions for a contact to go through at their own pace. So if they're downloading a lead magnet, then You know, the building blocks of an automation is generally first. Let's send an email. That's the most common step within an automation. They download the lead magnet they re they then receive an email delivering the lead magnet. one thing, a little pro tip that I always like to throw out there is do not deliver the lead magnet on a redirect immediately from the download when they click that submit button or download button from your website, have them redirect to a thank you page, reminding them to go check their inbox, to get their download or the lead magnet that they opted in from. What that does is it helps boost your deliverability, the domain health, and it sends them right to their inbox to open your email and it tells your email marketing platform that this contact once emails from you. So it it is a little tip to help, get your email in the inbox instead of a promotional or a spam folder, first. Then once they're in that automation, after the email sends, you can utilize your email marketing platform to add a tag, maybe they came from Instagram, and you want your database to know that this is an initial lead that came from Instagram versus an initial lead that came from your website. Down the road, you might put more marketing efforts towards Instagram versus your website if you find that you're getting more leads on a given month from that social platform. So the building blocks of an automation are not just sending an email. You can add tags. You can add wait periods or wait delays. You can update certain contact fields. If somebody enters their first name, they can adjust that if they want be called by a nickname when you email them. You can give them the opportunity to really personalize their experience with you. You can also send notifications internally to yourself or to team members based on actions when somebody opens an email, clicks an email, there's so many options, to personalize the experience that the contact has with you and your company as a whole when you utilize the power of automation.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:47]:
And you gave us a lot of great information there, and I love the tip that you mentioned where, you know, somebody's delivering a lead magnet on that thank you page. Don't have them download it there. Send them back to your email. Yes. Okay. That was a great tip. I love how you did that. So let's say that we're a little bit further along, and we've been doing this for a while. and we feel like our, you know, this is probably me out there. I I could put me in this category. I feel like my email marketing films a little bit of a mess right now because I've been doing this for a while. I have a lot of automations, a lot of sequences, a lot of tags, how how do can people keep this simple and keep it so, it, you know, it can grow with their business
Jenna Carelli [00:11:35]:
Yeah. if your email marketing platforms allows you to label certain automations, then you can filter wherever your automations live, you can filter, by webinar. So all of these automations are related to a webinar. All these automations are related to engagement. and data collection. All of these automations are related to lead magnets or opt ins. that's a great option. second option, or in addition to naming conventions when you are creating tags And when you are titling your automation, we always like to utilize all caps, the action. So let's say we're talking about downloading a lead magnet. In all caps, the automation title would be download colon lead magnet or download colon, the name of the lead magnet. For each and every lead magnet that you ever ever put out there. That way at a glance without having to dig into the automation and open it up and sift through it, you can see what's going on. Same thing with a tag. So maybe the trigger for the automation is downloaded lead magnet. The title of the automation is download lead magnet, the trigger tag is downloaded lead magnet. Very clear. Right? So if we can look at how we name our lists, how we name our automations, how we name our custom fields, how we name our forms, everything inside of the email marketing database, if it's related and clear, with a descriptor if your if your platform allows you to add a descriptor, then anybody can jump into the platform and understand what's going on. Now we, do email marketing for a lot of different customers and clients of ours, and they have this issue where they They need different people within the company to be jumping in and understanding what's going on. We utilize a tool called Airtable, and you might be familiar with Airtable, and a second tool called SKYVIya, s k y v i a. Skyvia, if it integrates with your email marketing platform, it will pull out all of the information inside of your email marketing platform, into a spreadsheet, so to say, that you can, connect the dots to. Right? So we're we we basically build a table, a database that says this list is connected to this automation, is connected to this tag. When this form is filled out. It redirects to this thank you page, and it's just all there in one place as an overarching database for anybody to look at. it really depends on the individual and whether they like to be inside the email marketing platform, working within the platform itself, or maybe the CEO of the company that you're working for would rather look at a pie chart or would rather just see, a spreadsheet with tables. so you wanna understand who's consuming the information first and then try and build naming conventions and a database that is going to work for everybody within the company.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:14:58]:
And I think what you said there is so important is developing what your naming convention's gonna be. And I think in in using right, throughout everything that you're doing, whether it's a lead magnet or webinar you're doing or, you know, I do a lot of summits and free bundles and that sort of thing. So, I love that. Jenna, any last minute tips here for the audience?
Jenna Carelli [00:15:22]:
Yeah. I think, the more you practice building automations, the more you practice analyzing the data that's coming into your email marketing platform and testing it yourself opting into things yourself to see what happens on the back end. And then, you know, after every five people that come through your automation, optimize that automation, are they opening? Are they not opening create different pathways for people who open and don't open to remind them to go download their thing that they came to download the more you practice building them, the better you're going to get automation to work for you and for your contacts. So the benefits are endless, right, outside of giving you and or your administrative team of release from time consuming tasks and processes. That's probably the biggest benefit we see, but outside of that, it allows your business to grow in other areas. And I want you to not get caught up in the tech aspect and the time aspect of setting it up because you can just set up and automation to deliver an email and then put a arbitrary wait a 100 years time period after that email delivers. and not touch the automation again. The biggest mistake I think we see is people think they need to set up this elaborate automation, strategize it for months before we can turn it active. And that's just not the case. you're gonna be building it and building and building upon it with every single contact who drops into the automation. So don't be afraid to test retest and optimize as you go.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:17:08]:
And just get started. Right? I mean, I think that's the message that you have for all of us today. And, Jenna, can you let folks know where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.
Jenna Carelli [00:17:19]:
Yeah. So my company is email marketing automations. with an s, and you can find our website at www.emailmarketingautomations.com. And if you go to emailmarketingautomations.comback/instagram, we have a couple options for you. a free trial to our recommended email marketing platform. You can subscribe to our newsletter, which every Monday we send out email marketing tips in general. Doesn't matter what email marketing platform you're working with. We help give you pro tip on how to better utilize the platform that you're currently paying for. and we have a free tool to help you identify whether your domain is healthy. That's your website. So our email marketing automations.com is our domain, and it has a lot to do with your email marketing, whether it's healthy or not. So we have a tool to help you identify that.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:18:20]:
And, Jenna, thank you so much for joining me today. I love talk chatting with you and just learning a little bit more about email marketing automations myself.
Jenna Carelli [00:18:29]:
Thank you for having me. I had a lot of fun, and I always love, helping move the needle forward for other business owners.