Ever wondered what kind of success people in our membership, The League, experience with email marketing? Let's find out from our very own member Kay Peacey, who teaches people how to use ActiveCampaign for their email marketing and automation. Joining The League changed everything for Kay. She lost the fear, started implementing our campaigns, and by using the right product launch emails she didn't just meet her targets when launching her own membership (the ActiveCampaign Academy) – she smashed them!

Want to find out what Kay did to skyrocket her sales and totally boss this email marketing thing?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(4:40) Why Kay was too scared to email her list. 
(7:20) What happened when Kay started emailing her list. 
(8:42) What did Kay's email marketing look like before she joined The League?
(10:22) The magic of our Get to Know You welcome sequence.
(13:30) How hard was it for Kay to get started with email campaigns? 
(15:32) How Kay used email marketing to promote her membership launch. 
(20:31) How Kay smashed her product launch targets. 
(22:40) What's next for Kay and her email marketing? 
(24:58) Has email marketing taken over Kay's life?
(27:44) Subject line of the week with Kay Peacey.

Why Kay was too scared to email her list

While Kay has been helping clients with their email marketing for a few years now, she only recently got started with it herself. In fact, she confessed that for about 4 years she had a dormant email list. She only started emailing her subscribers about a year ago.

So what was holding Kay back?

Like many of the coaches, consultants, and online business owners we help, Kay was being held back by fear.

She was scared to speak. Scared that people on her list wouldn't want to hear from her (which is a little ridiculous because they signed up to be on her list!). She didn't know what to say and felt frozen – rabbit-in-the-headlights style. Even though she was helping other people write their emails, she couldn't do it herself.

But there was something else holding Kay back. Trained as a teacher and working as a proofreader for an exam board, she felt her writing was very formal – her style stilted and pompous. She felt her emails were boring and horrible, and it took her a while to get past that.

What did Kay's email marketing look like before she joined The League?

Up to about a year ago, Kay's emails to her list were very sporadic. She’d typically send welcome emails to anyone signing up for her online course, but they simply welcomed people to the course and included their login. Nothing else followed. Kay wasn't offering any other products or sharing any other content. She was keeping a very low profile.

Her reason (ahem, excuse)? That she couldn't possibly email her list because if she did, more people would ask her to do consultation work, and she couldn’t take on any more clients. On the surface, it made sense to leave her list well alone.

But did it really?

What happened when Kay started emailing her list?

As soon as she found the courage to email people, Kay's emails were immediately well received. She started a free Facebook community that allowed her to interact more with her audience. And that's when she started emailing her list to let them know what she was working on. She was very reluctant at first – can you believe she would have rather continued to answer questions for free than send emails?

But it's thanks to those initial emails that people started signing up for her free course – an introduction to ActiveCampaign. And that's when Kay decided to join our membership, The League, and implement our welcome sequence – the Get to Know You sequence. She started telling her audience who she is, what she does, and why people should pay attention.

She also started to build in segmentation by taking a survey to find out more about her audience so she could easily signpost people to any existing content and deliver quick wins that way.

But more than anything, emailing her list allowed Kay to start conversations with people. Suddenly, her subscribers were in her inbox, connecting with her one-to-one. Until that point, she'd almost felt like she had this invisible army of fans who liked what she was doing, but she wasn't really hearing them. Having conversations with people gave Kay a huge boost though, and that made all the difference.

The magic of The Get to Know You Sequence

We call it a self-fulfilling cycle. Our Get to Know You Sequence (i.e. a welcome sequence campaign) allows you to tell your audience who you are and what you’re all about. In turn, that generates replies, which give you more confidence, permission, and information to then have the confidence, permission, and information to create the next bit of the sequence. Brilliant, right?

Kay also took our welcome sequence and amended it slightly so it could be used with her existing subscribers, which is genius. And that makes for an important point. Because most people don't start from zero. They already have a list. And no matter the size of that list, there’s some gold hidden in there – in terms of money but also information and emotional ‘stuff'. And sure – the list possibly needs to be turned upside down and shaken a bit so it starts working for you. But what then happens is that your army of fans can turn around and give you the boost of confidence you need to really start serving them.

Isn't that just magic?

How hard was it to get started with email campaigns?

Kay admits that when she first started sending out emails, she found the process terrifying. She was scared of losing people, which goes against what she advises her own clients. Because, in Kay’s case, if people on her list didn’t want to hear about ActiveCampaign, they shouldn’t be on her list at all! And that goes for everyone on your lists too – if they don't want to hear about what you sell, they shouldn't be on your list!

But that fear is amplified when you’re putting a whole chunk of contacts through a launch email campaign, for example. No matter the size of your list, there’s an element of bravery involved before you put them through a new email sequence.

For Kay, it was about finding the courage to take the first step. But when she started emailing her target audience via her list, she started connecting with people more. And that allowed her to be herself. Connecting with people on your list feeds your confidence and allows to start  growing your business. But first, you have to get over the fear barrier.

How Kay used email marketing to promote her product launch

So Kay eventually got over her fear. But she also did something awesome – she moved to the one-to-many model and launched a membership. And she used a webinar model for her launch. Kay ran three live webinars in the space of a week where she'd educate her audience on what she was offering and why it mattered to them.

To get people onto her webinars, she ran the webinar registration campaign we teach inside The League. And that alone got Kay a huge 20% conversion from her list. Now, let's remember that Kay's list wasn't super warm either because she hadn't been emailing that often up until then. But out of the 20% of subscribers who signed up for her webinars, 70% actually attended live, which totally blew Kay (and us) away! Those who didn't attend live asked for the replay, which also played an important part in her launch email sequence.

Launch announcement emails went out for about 20 days from the first webinar. And then Kay ran our Columbo campaign straight after the webinar sequence and then our Timelord campaign (bet you’d love to know what they’re all about, don’t you?).

Kay trusted our advice and implemented our campaigns. Want to know what happened? Her conversion rate was incredible – 60% of the people who attended the webinars purchased the membership straight out of the gates! The conversion rate from her entire list was 8%.

BOOM!

How Kay smashed her product launch targets

Before her launch, Kay created some social proof around her membership through her beta students. She'd worked with a dozen of beta students for around three months and shaped the membership around their needs, rather than creating something she thought people might need. This allowed her to create a product that would work for her audience – Kay says her beta students were pivotal in helping her get the membership right. Plus, their feedback also helped communicate what the membership was all about in the launch emails.

Kay’s original goal was to have 50 founder members, and she got 5 members during the first hour of the first webinar while she was still live! By the end of day 2, she had 50+ members. Soon enough, she hit 100 members and closed the launch at an impressive 130 members.

Is this making you as emotional as it’s making us?!

What's next for Kay and her email marketing?

Looking back at her transformation, Kay went from being this really fearful person with a few people on her list to someone who joined The League, launched her own membership, and got some awesome results from implementing some of our key campaigns. And she's now genuinely excited about email marketing.

She has loads she wants to do, but what’s really changed for her is the fact that when she writes her weekly topic emails, she’s telling stories. Kay feels she's found a vocation and is having lots of fun with it. And she never thought she’d been having fun writing her marketing emails!

The one piece of advice Kay would like to share with everyone? Unlock your inner weirdo. (We LOVE this!)

Kay says there’s something about the continuing messaging. You need to tell stories and be yourself – be human. She's been hearing this from us over time, and she's progressively got braver and braver in her emails.

Now, since her membership launch, she feels like she’s hit her stride. And the recipe for success has been a mix of confidence and embracing our key teachings. She reckons it's all about the confidence of letting your inner self show through your words and your emails. And when you start doing that, they just come out, and it feels easy. And people love those emails. 

Has email marketing taken over Kay's life?

While Kay is now loving email marketing and getting amazing results, she's not spending too much time on it at all. In fact, she’d like to carve more time to spend on her emaill marketing because she’s seen what it can do, and she’s got the hang of it a lot more.

Kay sends weekly emails to her list, so she blocks out a couple of hours every other week and batches her emails. She’s having fun doing that, and she’s looking forward to writing her stories. Email marketing is now a pleasurable part of her week.

So this was an incredible story of transformation from Kay. And if you think email marketing won’t work quite in the same way for you because you sell something completely different, Kay invites us all to think about the fact that when we walk into a shop, we want a conversation with the person who’s selling us something. And when you think about it, those conversations are often about all sorts of random, weird stuff!

We have conversations all the time in our daily lives. Why not have them over email? Because as human beings, we often find common ground outside the thing we’re doing.

Subject line of the week

Kay’s subject line of the week is, “I got the rage at the Christmas cheese shop again.” Intriguing subject line, right?

So the email was leading to an ActiveCampaign teaching point, and it was all to do with pre-populating your forms with the email address people use for your business. The story that inspired this email subject line is a true one. Kay ended up ordering Christmas cheese a whole month earlier. And that’s because when she was ordering the cheese, she couldn’t remember what email address she’d used to set up an account with the cheese company.

The moral of the story? If you want someone to log into their account with you or fill in a form, pre-fill their email address to remind them of what email address they use with you. A great tip, a great story, and a great subject line!

Useful Episode Resources

About Kay

If you want to connect with Kay, you can find her on her website, where you can also find links to the trainings Kay has on offer and all sorts of lovely juicy information about ActiveCampaign.

Related episodes

Who should not join The League of email marketing heroes.

Using Email Marketing to Build a Profitable Business – a Success Story from a Member of The League.

How To Master Email Marketing with The League’s Campaign Workshops.

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

Want to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books! They will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

Join our FREE Facebook group

We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We get to share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing by applying everything we talk about in this show.

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