Do you think you have a ‘small' email list? Then you might want to think again because our member Kronda Adair from Karvel Digital made a whopping $86,500 using ONE campaign from a small email list of just over 600 subscribers. 

Want to know how it's done? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:16) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 
(4:03) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. 
(5:51) Who is League member Kronda Adair?
(10:25) How did Kronda get started with email marketing?
(12:07) What was Kronda's biggest barrier with email marketing?
(15:13) What's the first change Kronda made when she joined The League? 
(18:12) Was the time doing email marketing well-spent for Kronda?
(22:19) What results did Kronda get with her email marketing?
(25:36) What's next for Kronda and her email marketing?
(27:37) What's the ONE action that had the most impact on Kronda's email marketing?
(30:16) Subject line of the week.

Who is League member Kronda Adair?

Kronda is a certified marketing automation service provider. She builds automated engines in marketing, sales, and onboarding for mission-driven service-based business owners. After moving away from making WordPress websites, for the last four years, Kronda’s flagship, front-facing offer had been a Content Boot Camp designed to teach people how to create content that makes sales.

However, after reviewing her business and her customers' needs, Kronda recently created a brand new offer called CRM to Sales, which is focused on helping people build marketing automation for sales or onboarding. Kronda and her team do an audit to optimise their clients' existing automation and create a strategy for them.

How did Kronda get started with email marketing?

Kronda was the type of business owner who used to tell everyone how great and important email marketing was, but, ironically, she wasn’t doing anything specifically with it! She had a ‘join my newsletter’ type of approach to email marketing and had about 100 people on her list.

When Kronda decided to become more consistent with email, she started publishing a blog post every week and would then email her list about it. This gave her lots of opportunities to start speaking on podcasts and stages. By the time she found The League, Kronda was sending out an email every week but didn’t really have a system.

What was Kronda’s biggest barrier with email marketing? 

Kronda's biggest struggle up to the point when she joined our membership was finding something new to talk about every week. With the plan to create content with a purpose, she'd focus on what she was trying to sell. And that felt like a heavy mental lift because her content wasn’t planned out in advance and it was emotionally draining to come up with ideas for it. Kronda said it felt like a lot of work! Plus, selling to her list was an uphill struggle, and she had to burn a lot of mental calories to keep up with that.

A writer by inclination, Kronda didn't put the process off, as such. In fact, as a natural extrovert, even before email marketing was a thing, she’d send out emails from her account and BCC a bunch of people she knew in order to keep in touch with them. She’d always wanted to share her thoughts and work, and writing wasn’t a problem for her, but coming up with ideas was. 

What's the first change Kronda made when she joined The League?

When she joined The League in June 2021, Kronda started putting our processes and systems in place. She went through our onboarding and started following the plan and doing the thing! She wrote her new Welcome email sequence and spent 80 hours in that first month tearing everything apart and building a new email engine that followed our teachings. 

Funnily enough, Kronda mentioned that she lasted a whole 4 days on our list before she decided to join our membership, so she is living proof that our campaigns work! We often hear our clients push back on the fact that some of our sequences can feel quite intense, and they're not comfortable implementing them. But they're often the same campaigns that turned them from subscribers to customers! So if the marketing works on you, you'll probably want to put that into your world so it works for you, too – just like Kronda did. 

It's also worth pointing out that while Kronda spent 80 hours implementing our campaigns when she first joined, most of our members take much longer and work at a slower pace – and that's fine! What's key is that you stop doing what doesn't work in order to focus on the things that are proven to work. So the lesson here is to stop doing what doesn't work and invest that time in email marketing instead!

Was the time doing email marketing well-spent for Kronda?

Kronda joined The League during summertime, and being passionate about travelling, camping, and taking her dog for walks, she used the excuse that she had trips coming up as her driving motivation for doing the work. In other words, she didn't want to get into her holiday season without having email marketing set up. And that created urgency for her.

But the time she invested in setting up her email marketing certainly paid off. Because while she was off-grid camping, she was making sales! And having people see your messaging and buying your resources while you’re off doing something else is no small thing! When you write a campaign and send it out, you can make sales for a few days from that campaign. And when you automate it, it works for you forever. So you're not wasting time doing something that only gets used once and never again – it's recyclable marketing. You don't get to waste effort because you're building an asset that you re-use again and again and that continues to work for you over time. 

So the idea is that you create your email engine bit by bit and monetise it as you go. You don't have to spend ages building it in the background to then reveal it all at once. It starts working for you as soon as you put it out into the world. 

What results did Kronda get with her email marketing? 

Kronda did a launch for her new offer in October 2021, and because she had a conference coming up, she wrote a new Overture campaign at the last minute before her trip. She sent the campaign to her list of 621 people (including 21 past clients), and while she was away she watched the applications coming in for her service. 

Within 6 weeks of using this one campaign, Kronda was fully booked. Between October and December of that year, she made $86,500. Why did it work? Kronda had a great, well-refined offer. She emailed her most engaged subscribers and used a well-structured campaign that sells people from different angles. In other words, she followed the plan and did the work!

And she made that whopping amount of money with a list of ‘only' 600 people, which, by a lot of people's standards, is considered small. Not by us though – there's no such thing as a small email list. Because you can make money from a ‘small' list. And if you can't, growing it isn't going to help you! Growing your list before you have nailed your offer and created a great conversion mechanism to sell your product or service, won't work! So don't put it off – just do the work! 

What’s next for Kronda and her email marketing?

Kronda has recently changed her business proposition entirely. Now she not only gives people templates but also coaches them through implementing them. So when it comes to her email marketing, she's going back to foundations. Having torn her existing email engine apart, she's creating a new Welcome sequence (our Getting to Know sequence) and a new Overture campaign to sell her new offer.

What’s the ONE action that had the most impact on Kronda’s email marketing?

If you’re already inside The League, Kronda’s piece of advice is to get stuck in and do the work! Putting together an email sequence, Kronda says, isn't that challenging or technical – you just have to do it! Plus, our membership is less expensive and much more valuable than some of the masterminds Kronda joined in the past.  

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “A [poop emoji] start of the day.” So you can read it as “a shit start of the day” or “a poo start of the day.” And the email wasn’t about Rob having a shitty day ahead but about his new dog’s morning toilet habits. That's right – Alfie starts his days with poo! But interestingly, when you use an emoji instead of a word, people can make their own interpretations. Check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How A League Member Made Over $10k With Just ONE Email Campaign – Case Study With Aidan O’Sullivan.

How Emily Made Over $14k In 7 Days With Just ONE Email Marketing Campaign.

And How Brad Brown Made $90k By Automating Webinars.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that 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

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! 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 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. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

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