The 3 Emails That Could Add $10K+ to Your Freelance Business | With Danielle Weil

374. Email marketing with Danielle

===

Danielle: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the six Figure Creative Podcast. Uh, this is a very different intro from normal because it's a very different place than normal. I am in, on my workation. Which is where my wife and I travel and work. We'll do this like one big trip, like this a year. And I'm currently in Grindle Wall, Switzerland, which is like, if if I turn the camera on and shut out my window, it's I literally can't see the top of the mountain.

Brian: I'm so close to it, and it's just absolutely gorgeous out there. it's like something from Lord of the Rings, and I think I heard that, the Elvin area in Lord of the Rings is inspired by this area. the, lot to Bruin or something area. It's, it's hard for me in my American tongue to speak it.

Brian: But anyways, I am here with a very special guest today. That's Danielle. We, she is our email marketing strategist. She's been with us for a couple months now. And, we've talked email marketing on this podcast before, actually multiple times, with this 374th episode, I think, if I'm doing my math right.

Brian: And so email marketing has been a topic we've brought up over and over and over and over again. And so when Danielle had this podcast episode she wanted to bring to me to talk about on the show, I thought, absolute hell yes. Especially considering, and this is just a quick backstory on [00:01:00] Danielle.

Brian: She has sold over a hundred million dollars worth of products and services through the words that she has written. She's also the fastest reader I know. she's worked with some really cool names in the past. One of them being,Ryan Leve, who hasthe Ask Method, which I think is a New York Times bestselling book. But Danielle, welcome to the podcast.

Danielle: Thank you.

Brian: one of the things that I think you and I both agree on is. When it comes to email marketing freelancers get this messed up a lot and I'd love for you to just start there. Like, what do you see freelancers doing that are so wrong with email marketing, especially now that you've gotten know our audience and what we do and how we work and how we operate compared to maybe what you're used to in some of your past gigs that you've had.

Danielle: So I, I think the first big mistake is just not doing it doing everything manually, doing the follow up. I mean, you and I both had that experience of you have a referral, you have somebody that you're following up with and you just forget to follow up with them. You have the email starred and like, oh my gosh.

Danielle: And you're going back through it. You're like, I never followed up with this person. Oh crap.

Danielle: Not good. And having to do all of [00:02:00] that yourself manually. Right.

Brian: I think we can all relate to that, the,pit in our stomach when we realized we forgot to follow up with a lead that could have given us thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Brian: we kind of have two buckets of freelancers that listen to the show. One is like, you have very few leads and so it's easy to follow up with the very few leads that you have, but the other side is the people who have tons of leads coming in. Like you've kind of started figuring out the lead generation game.

Brian: Maybe you have a social following, maybe you're running ads, maybe you just have a large network. Maybe you get tons of referrals from people. But that's where it starts getting outta hand. that's some of the stuff we're gonna cover in the episode today.

Danielle: for sure. I think the other situation that we find ourselves in is not just, oh, I forgot to follow up with this lead, but the awkward, I forgot to follow up with them. It's been a minute, maybe they're a little colder. How do I reach out? do the, oh, just checking in. You know that?

Danielle: That's always awkward.

Brian: Yeah, I, I I was one of those freelancers for like, most of my career. just checking in, just following up. just seeing how things are coming along. Like I have very little to add and I think with the amount of emails you've sent, the amount of follow ups you've sent, the amount of hundred million plus dollars that you've sold in, your past, [00:03:00] just writing really good emails.

Brian: You would cringe at some of the emails that I've sent in the past. And so I bow to you in this episode and say, don't listen to me in my horrible follow-up game back in the day. Listen to Danielle and how she writes, because she knows what she's doing.

Danielle: We're gonna go a little beyond just checking in.

Brian: please God. I think one thing to just talk about really quick is, we've brought this up a billion times, but it's, worth talking about in this.

Brian: Context before we get into email marketing is the 3% rule. And that's where, like in any given market, let's just say you have like a hundred people who are considering working with you. Only about three of those people are ready to hire you right this second, the other 97 or so. I mean, this is just like a rule of thumb.

Brian: The other 97 people or so are not ready right now. They don't have the finances right now. The timeline's not good for them right now. Maybe they don't have the,need for it right this second. It just hasn't come around to needing your services. And the easiest example is like a music production.

Brian: They just haven't written the songs yet, or they haven't saved for the album yet or whatever. That's my background is music production. And so email marketing is what we can do in the meantime to keep those people warm and engaged and want to buy from you. I mean, this is so important.

Brian: [00:04:00] This is literally why we hired Danielle to work for us as our email marketing strategist, is because we hadso under invested in email marketing in our past where, you know, we have an email list of. 50 ish thousand. I don't know. It it,ebbs and flows because we clean the list all the time.

Brian: But just say it's 50,000 people on our email list that we have permission to contact. And over the past, like three years of really growing,six figure creative, we've only ever really sent the one email link for this podcast. So if you've gotten any emails from us in the past, since June, I think they were probably written by Danielle.

Brian: So hopefully you've liked them compared to what you may have usually gotten from me.

Danielle: we're trying some new things, trying to bring more value, more content, more good stuff.

Danielle: Yep.so, alright, so let's talk about what emails freelancers can write, or types of emails or, what they can do in email marketing to make more money. I think the main. Point that I wanna get across is if you are not currently doing email marketing, you don't have to go do everything at once. You don't have to go, right? Like, I'm gonna go mail my list every day. I'm gonna do a whole big newsletter. I'm gonna do, you know, all crazy segmentation and automations.

Danielle: We're doing that stuff. You don't have [00:05:00] to do that stuff yet if you're not currently doing it. So what I want to cover and what I wanna dive into today and have a conversation about is the three essentials that you should absolutely have before you do anything else.

Danielle: That makes sense. And real quick before we get into that, how does the email have to look? You've written like thousands of emails in your life. Do they need to be like all prettied up, like a crazy, beautiful newsletter or can they just be plain text Plain text. Please send plain text. Sometimes, people do like a banner at the top. You can, but generally, and we've tested this, across multiple businesses, you'll get a better response the more personal it feels, the more it feels like, Hey, I just opened my email to type this back to you.

Brian: Yeah, and this is what I've seen, like we've tested this in the past, which is why I bring this up. And it's surprising how poorly, like the more formatted emails do compared to just plain text emails like you would get from anybody. But I just wanna bring that up. 'cause a lot of freelancers, especially our designer listeners, people with the more like visual look to them, they want their emails to be [00:06:00] this like masterpiece of beauty.

Brian: And then it delays, the actual important thing is like sending words to your potential clients. It doesn't have to look amazing. It could just be a normal, normalized email. but let's get to this. So, what's the first of these three essentials?

Brian: So the first one is, something that you should put in place even if you are not. Mailing your list regularly. And that is just what we call the abandoned ship or the abandoned cart or the abandoned app email. And this is one of those cases where having anything is better than having nothing.

Danielle: And this is what you wanna set up for people who make it to your application or who make it to your inbox. And either don't complete it or don't check out. And this is just a simple, Hey, you didn't finish this. Did you wanna finish this? And usually we recommend like send two or three spaced out.

Danielle: So the first one is like an hour afterwards. And you could set all this up as automations in your CRM in your email system. Yes. assuming that you [00:07:00] have one.

Brian: you can do it manually as well. You don't have to automate. It depends on your lead flow. Like, just to kind of clarify a couple things this assumes you have a good flow setup. I've talked about this in past episodes. I can't remember the exact episode I talked about, but. Where I talk through, like most freelancers should have their business set up in a way where, on your website, it should be a court request form or an inquiry form of some sort, where you gather a little bit of information, and that information then goes to a booking page to book consult call with you or a discovery call, whatever you wanna call it.

Brian: And then on discovery call, you talk through the process, you diagnose, and then you prescribe. And what she's talking about here is just. When somebody starts to fill out that inquiry form or they fill it out notebook a call, having those follow ups throughout that and having multiple ones. And if you have like two leads a month, there's not a huge need to like automate this.

Brian: You can do it manually and just have them queued up in your CRM. But if you have like, just to tell about the scale of six figure creative, like we have hundreds of applicants a month, maybe close to a thousand applicants a month that. For us to manually fall up with that many applicants is absolutely impossible [00:08:00] for us.

Brian: So we have to automate that specific part. Yeah. Okay.

Danielle: Yeah. And the, what I want you to be thinking about is where are the decision points? Where are the commitment points? Where are the potential breakage points where some woman can. get stuck, get distracted Sometimes. It's not always that they don't want to finish it, it's just that something else came up and they didn't get to finish it.

Danielle: They said like, no, I'm just gonna do this later. Leave the tab open. Not right now. You know, their kids start screaming, whatever it is. So you wanna have something in place to be able to say to them Hey, you started filling this out. Did you wanna come finish it?

Brian: and this is especially important for those of you who are doing, any sort of paid ads or if you have a social following where you're doing like. Build and harvest. Build and harvest where you have, you have,nurture content and then you might have something where you're really trying to get people pushed over to your inquiry form.

Brian: we've seen this where people will especially just think about paid ads. You're swiping your doom, scrolling, then you see an ad for a service that you might be interested in. we've seen ads work in just about everything. So don't feel like you're a special snowflake where ads will work for you, if that's, if [00:09:00] that's what you think.But they're on their phones. And then something might happen, the doorbell might ring, or, they might get a call on their phone, they might get a FaceTime. They might, again, kids screaming. They might be, god forbid, swiping and,and driving or something. And they're just like, oh, I can't fill this out right now.

Brian: does anyone do social media while they're driving? I don't know. don't for I hope not.

Brian: I hope not. I, you know what, I've seen some people do some crazy things driving, So it's important for that. But we've also seen with this follow up email series in place where it's like, did you want to finish your inquiry or did you have any questions?

Brian: Or, some of the things that maybe we'll have some specifics from you, Danielle, on what,to say on these. But, we found that they didn't have their text set up correctly. Someone replied back to that email. It's like, Hey, I would love to, but your page didn't work. And then they go investigate and realize their stuff didn't work.

Brian: So without that in place, who knows how long that would've gone on? Just letting leads just leak out the bucket because they didn't have the basic setup correctly.

Danielle: Yeah, for sure. And so we wanna keep these couple tips on these. We wanna keep them really simple and conversational. We don't wanna get fancy, no design needed. Literally looks [00:10:00] just like you are writing an email to anybody else. We wanna blame something else for the fact that they didn't finish.

Danielle: We always wanna leave like the escape hatch open that I call it, for there to be a reason that they didn't finish. Like, it's cool, it's not your fault. You got busy. You know, maybe our,link didn't work the tech broke or whatever it is, do address why they may have stopped in the first place and why they can pick back up and remind them what they were doing.

Danielle: So this is like, hey, you were. Inquiring for clients by design, or you were, checking out to work with the studio, whatever it is. Just make sure you get that in there because people forget, they get an email, they're like, I was applying for what? I don't remember.

Danielle: Please remind me. And do, create just a little bit of urgency. Make sure that it's real urgency, But just say, Hey, we've got limited spots in the calendar. Or I really would like to speak with you or,

Brian: the big one that do with your application?

Brian: the big one we'll use is, if there is true scarcity, like with some of our [00:11:00] more likeadvanced clients that we work with who are truly booked up through like it's July 23rd is the time we recordthey're booked up through, let's call it September or October. It's like, Hey, saw your inquiry come in, didn't see you finish the form or didn't see you book a call.

Brian: I'd love to chat. We're currently, booking up, October of this year, or we're currently booking up November of this year, so I wanted to have a chat as soon as we can. Things like that that's the true scarcity. If you don't have that true scarcity, I wouldn't try to fake it. But those sorts of things can get a,better response rate than just nothing at all.

Brian: I heard somewhere that having any sort of reason is better than no reason at all, if the reason doesn't make

Danielle: influenced by Robert

Brian: Yes.

Danielle: did a study about the Xerox machine, right where someone tried to cut in line for the Xerox machine. Again, this book is written, God knows

Danielle: It's showing its dates a little bit. Yeah.

Danielle: but. Oh, hey, can I use the Xerox machine? They wanna cut in line, or, Hey, can I use the Xerox machine because I need to make copies?

Danielle: It wasn't even a good reason, but just having a reason increase the compliance of someone letting you cut in line by, I don't remember how much percent.

Brian: Yep.

Danielle: that's the story.

Brian: you [00:12:00] said you recommend two or three, like how do you change it up so I understand the first email. And you just recently read ours, which is why I'm, I'm asking you versus telling our audience what to do,

Danielle: So the first one is just, hey, we need a few more details. We saw you started but didn't finish this. We just need a few more details from you to complete your application. Again, fill in the details here.

Brian: again, when she says application. It's the exact same thing. Like when people fill out our application, it's really just an inquiry. They're inquiring about working, with us. It's the same thing with freelancers. You fill out their inquiry form and especially if you are higher up the food chain in your freelance career, people are applying to work with you.

Brian: You should have a threshold. It shouldn't just be somebody with a credit card or, $10,000 in the bank can hire you. It's like you have criteria of who you'll work with because you've built your name up to a certain level. Like, for example, some of the Grammy winning producers that we work with.

Brian: Those people are not just gonna take any artist in the world. Just like if you do like a hundred thousand dollars budget video as a videographer, or you do, you know, 50,000 branding packages for B2B, you're not just taking any client with a pulse. You know, you have standards, even if the budget is the [00:13:00] standard, So we can say, filled out the form, contact, form, application, whatever language you're using there. Saw you filled it out. Need a few more details so that we can complete it and have a chat. That's it. And just that alone is good enough. I think that's kind of what we did for a while, but you added someone's after that. Like what is maybe an email, two or three in that.

Danielle: Yeah. So then we wait, I believe, a day. Then we send another one it's also super short. Hey, did you wanna finish this? And then a super short case study at the bottom in the PS just saying, you can give some results of. Some of your best clientswhat it's typically like to work with you?

Danielle: Just so they can kind of see the future of what's possible. Oh yeah. This is a real person. Sometimes that's something that makes sense for you to do and sometimes it doesn't, depending on where you are in your business. And then a day or two later, depending, we send another one that is just, do you want us to do with this?

Danielle: Are you still interested? Hit reply Fill out the form here. Usually a hit reply [00:14:00] will do the job there. Hit reply and let me know.

Brian: Yep. For the email too. I think an easy one would be like ps check out. This project is just wrapped up. We did X, Y, and Z with this client. and then linking to kind of a case study page of just like seeding a case study without it being cringe. Like if you're like, oh, I don't wanna be like, check out Johnny's work where we did X, Y, and Z.

Brian: Got a billion streams. You know, like

Danielle: Yeah, or if you have a page of testimonials, past projects, a portfolio page, on your website, you can send people there too.

Brian: True. ps, if you haven't checked out our work yet. Go here to hear some of our songs or to see some of our sites or to see some of our,designs or whatever. Cool. Alright, so that's the abandoned ship email. one to three emails sent either manually or automatically, depending on the lead flow that you have.

Brian: And any half decent CRM or email marketing platform that you use can do this. If it can't switch, buddy. Just switch. All right. thing number two to do, talk through this with me now. What is it?

Danielle: So this is when someone has booked a call with you and [00:15:00] we assume, okay, someone's on the calendar, they've even maybe used the ad to calendar button. They're living in their Google calendar, their I Cal, whatever it is. Maybe they're not, maybe they're like not like me, who is constantly, our family is color coded and everything is run by. If it's not in the calendar, it doesn't exist. Not everybody's like that. Some people are busy, they're running around, they forget to add things. They sometimes get cold feet about things like, I booked this, but I'm not sure. And then they'll find an excuse to not show up. Or they'll come unprepared. And we want someone to come to the conversation as prepared as possible.

Danielle: And so the email that we're talking about is we call the show up sequence. So what happens between the time that someone books, between the time that they get on a call with you

Brian: to, note real quick, the further out you allow people to book, the less chance they are of actually showing. if you follow, Mr. Oz's advice, he says no more than two days out. So today, [00:16:00] tomorrow, and the next day. So I guess three, if you count today, I don't know, but no more than that if possible.

Brian: And then we will go further than that sometimes if our calendars get booked up and we just don't have any inventory for the calendar at all. It's better to have four or five days out than nothing at all on the calendar. But, this gets really important as you,as you start getting, colder and colder audiences, meaning like the referral of the good friend or somebody who already knows, likes, and trusts you, the chances of them no showing youare pretty small.

Brian: Now, there can't be just genuinely honest mistakes. They just forgot that the call was happening, in which case, again, this,show up sequence is wonderful for that. Just a constant reminder. But with cold leads, there will literally be people who forgot they booked it. especially if you're running paid ads, like

Brian: our average is like a 72% show rate, which is right at or above where you want to be in any sort of scenario. Insanely good considering we do so much with paid ads. even if you're going towards social media audience, people that know of you but they don't fully know you, you can have show rate issues.

Brian: And so if you have anything below 60% on your show rates, this is something you definitely want to invest in and [00:17:00] not ignore. that said, just to sidestep it for a second. If you have a high show rate because you have so few leads, because you're only working with word of mouth clients, this is my challenge to you to say, Hey, it's time to step out because it's hard to scale up and grow and get consistency if you're only working people who,already know you.

Brian: So generally, that's where I say if you're not having show rate issues, it's because you're not trying hard enough to get strangers to hire you. the first thing we run into with our clients is they start getting book calls from strangers, complete strangers who didn't know you yesterday, you're starting to get, people to book calls today.

Brian: Your show rate starts to drop there, and that's where we'll start to really work with 'em on getting their, show up sequence in place like this.

Danielle: But even think about if you're using any kind of calendar software, Calendly can book me whatever they are. Those have built in reminders as well. It'll happen to me. I'll book a call with somebody who I know,you know, who I would consider a friend and I still need that reminder, Hey, your call with so-and-so is in an hour.

Danielle: Here's the link. So it's good to have no matter what. If you are using any sort of system to manage your calendar and your calls, you should have those built in. What we [00:18:00] wanna do is go a little bit beyond the, Hey, your call is in an hour. Here's the link. And create, we call micro commitments. So that they not only show up, but they also, they show up, prepared. Again, we're talking about colder leads, people who might not know you, getting them to know you as much as possible before that call happens. so if you've got, let's say that show up window of between two to three days, that process starts from basically the minute they book.

Danielle: And so they get. A confirmation email that says, Hey, your call is booked. And of course it gives them the technical details. Here's what's happening. But what I like to do is also, depending on your industry, depending on your business, give them something to come to the call with. And usually it's focused around the problem that they have and getting them to think about and be more aware of where the specific gaps are so that you can go right there and talk about them.

Brian: do you have any examples you could think of, especially for our audience? [00:19:00] 'cause you,you write to our audience, so you may,

Danielle: Yeah, for sure. So example, I'm thinking about like a web designer, so you can ask them, Hey what do you, love about your current website. Where are the gaps? what is the next iteration of your brand? Whatever the relevant questions are, you can give them one or two questions to think and really highlight where the gap is in the problem that you're coming to solve.

Danielle: And you can also, again, at the bottom, have a link to your portfolio page, your projects, hey, check out some of our work so they can see it

Brian: I can definitely go to like the audio engineering and music production space because that's where I lived for a over a decade. You can have them come prepared with demos. if you have any demos ready, come prepared to the call with those. And then if you want to have them something like to think on, you might ask them like,maybe create a small list of what issues do you run into when you're writing or finishing your songs?Something like that. So again, every niche is gonna have little things that if you know your niche really well, you can do that. But at least those are some decent examples to say like, Hey, in my specific niche. This is what I would wanna know. you're a copywriter.

Brian: Like what would yours be? [00:20:00] In in yours?

Danielle: Well, so here's actually a good way to figure out what you want to ask them think about what you normally ask someone when you get on the call and just preempt some of that. What is it that you would need from them to be prepared that you would normally ask on the call, that if you got that information just a little bit earlier, it would move the conversation forward?

Brian: But without sending them, don't send 'em your entire discovery call.

Danielle: no, give them the first.step. Make them do something. Think about something. Um. we wanna just create micro commitments here. We wanna say like, okay, I clicked to view the portfolio. I actually, found a demo and had it prepared to bring with me. The more that these small actions, these small thoughts, the more time spent around that, the more that relationship build.

Brian: So that's kind of email one. It's just like when they first book, you're sending them something that's not just the default. Calendly, your call has been booked at this time, at this date. Here's the Zoom link.

Danielle: They need all of that, but you can also give them a little bit more,to

Brian: All right, [00:21:00] so else do you do in the, in the reminder sequence?Like how many

Danielle: So.

Brian: is enough?

Danielle: How many reminders is enough? It depends. It depends on the window, right? So again, if you are leaving a window of between two to three days, you want to have the confirmation, you wanna have something generally, a couple hours later, and then you definitely want right before, an hour before. So we call it like the T minus and the zero plus.

Danielle: Counting down from the action and then counting backwards, and then you sort of meet in the middle. So we definitely wanna have the, your call is starting. We wanna have the one hour ones and then, 24 hours before, and then generally you'll like again, meet in the middle. So what is that between three and four

Brian: I think what my team does. I believe we send one out the night before the call just to confirm them, to say, Hey, are you still good for our call tomorrow?

Brian: what are your thoughts on just email for these versus mixing in texts?

Danielle: that was the next piece because, Especially if you are asking for a phone number and you have the ability to text someone, people are more [00:22:00] on their phones all the time and it's much easier to get a text and say like, Hey, are we still good for our call tomorrow? They'll reply, yes.

Danielle: You'll be like, okay, great. And if you have a system where it's all integrated, even if you don't, andhaving both email and text can just reinforce it.

Brian: Yeah, I think text for the night before is good. we have like the sheet we give our clients, it has like literally every template and like when to send it and it's just like really easy to do. I don't have that in front of me or else I could give more information on like when all these texts go out.

Brian: Exactly. But I do know if you're trying to get a reply, text is way, way, way, way better. And if you're just notifying them, text or email can work because even if somebody doesn't read the email nine times outta 10, they're still seeing the notification on their phones at some point, at least the subject line in the first couple lines in the email.

Brian: And generally that's about as much as you put in a text anyway, so you can, kind of start communicating, just,notifying, pushing information to them for those sorts of things. And when people think it's overkill, there's a phrase that I liked. I don't like it, but one that I, thought was interesting. It's something like, I would rather be annoying than irrelevant. Most freelancers live in this [00:23:00] world of irrelevance,obscurity and when I say irrelevant, it just means that you're not relevant to the person that,on the other side. they haven't thought a second thought about you because you haven't followed up with 'em in any way, shape, or form because you didn't wanna bother them.

Brian: And I can't tell you the last time I had somebody complaining about the number of texts or emails we send related to someone who booked a call or who applied for a coaching program. Got pre-approved to at least have a conversation and then showed up to have a call. People don'tcomplain, because generally they're higher quality.

Brian: But you could definitely see people complaining if they missed the call.

Danielle: I think you're speaking to something bigger there, which is this feeling of, I don't want to bother people. And it's not just with call reminders, it's with marketing in general. This may be a bigger topic, but the, I don't wanna bother people with my marketing or my reminders or my whatever.

Brian: that's the freelance marketing mantra right there. I don't wanna bother people, so I won't be bothered to make money.

Danielle: So you can, you should, and if you do, you will get more people on calls.

Brian: Yeah, again, Danielle has sold over a hundred million dollars worth of [00:24:00] stuff by bothering people through email.

Danielle: Basically, but just be, also be a real human.That's all. There's no real trick to this. just be yourself, but automate it. Be consistent about it. Do it. I like to tell people how many reminders should I send? Send one more than you're comfortable with

Danielle: So just to recap, we talked about the abandoned ship email or series of emails. and that's for when they fill out your inquiry form or start your inquiry form and don't finish it, or they finish your inquiry form and don't book a call. And then we talked about the show up series just to make sure people, when they book a call, a discovery call with you, they actually show up.

Brian: You can see the trend so far is we're what I call pushing the dollar down the funnel. Where let's just say for example, you spend money on ads and somebody starts their application and they don't finish it, or they start the inquiry form and don't finish it, that's money down the drain. And if you send reminders, all of a sudden, ah, they book a call that's pushing them the dollar down the funnel, but they don't show 'em the call.

Brian: That's money lost. Same damn thing happened. It's still $0 earned. But, oh, you did this reminder [00:25:00] sequence and they actually showed up on the call so you could have a conversation, a good conversation, and they close. You push the dollar all into the funnel and you got more money back than you put in.

Brian: That's what we're talking about here. What's the third big thing here, related to this?

Danielle: So the third one is we call a welcome sequence. And this is, we're talking about the 3%, right? You mentioned the 3% who are ready and this is for the 97% who are not or who are your, not nows who are like, I like this, but not yet. And those not nows are not always going to be, not now as they might actually come back in the future.

Danielle: Happens all the time.

Brian: Oh God, yes. I was just looking at, I was looking at our numbers 'cause we tracked this with our sales team. And we have people that come back after just this year so far, someone after 500 days, 300 days, multiple people at a hundred plus days mark. So there is like a very long tail.

Brian: Just I'm talking about from when they have a conversation with the sales team and then we nurture them long term and then they come back again. But that's just what we track in the sales department. There's also the [00:26:00] people who have been on our email list since 2017 and here they're in 2025. Just applying for the first time and then joining Our Coaching program.

Brian: Most freelancers I know have not been emailing that long. I've been building the list since 2017, so I have that sort of long tail data to see. Even after a year of having email list, we see how much you can start to pick up the pieces of that 97% who weren't ready a year ago that are ready now because they have all the things they need in order.

Brian: To be now qualified to work with you. So yeah, this is a huge part

Danielle: or because they've done everything you need to qualify or because the pain has gotten worse, the problem has not gotten solved, and they're like, okay, is it time to finally solve this thing?

Brian: it's been a year since you've been on the email list. Your website is still ugly. It still converts horribly. Now it's finally time to hire you to do a new website. You know, this web designer example. Same in music production.

Brian: I,went with a cheap person last time with my cousin last time. It's a year later, we still hit our mixes. It's time to hire a real professional. You know, it's like with time can come even more pain. We see this all the time in our world. 'cause it's like feast or famine. Feast or famine. Somebody hits a feast mode and they're like, [00:27:00] ah, I don't, I don't need, I'll,I'll listen to every other episode or every 10 episodes of the podcast.

Brian: But then all of a sudden that family mode comes. It's like, oh shit. Yeah, that email hit their inbox at the right time. I need to finally figure this out. You know, it's been one year, two years, seven years, and I still haven't figured this out, and I'm in pain for it, you know? the pain thing is real.

Danielle: the pain thing is real, so again, a

Brian: not right now is not a no forever.

Brian: exactly.

Brian: So let's talk through, it's like how many emails do you feel like is good for a,your first. Email nurture welcome sequence.

Danielle: So the number that I like to tell people is anywhere between five to 10 emails, and generally want to give someone about a week. You can space those out. They don't have to be every day, so they are close together in the beginning and then they get further apart, as you go on.

Danielle: So day one, day two, day three, then you could send day five and then day seven, that is a perfect basic welcome sequence. If you don't have one, that's what you can put in place.

Brian: How many have you written in your, in your days?

Danielle: dozens [00:28:00] if you're counting. Originals or updates because you should update your nurture sequence also. Let's not, let's not scare the folks,

Brian: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Danielle: here's the shortcut though. If you're like, I don't know where to start. Yes. I wanna welcome people. I don't want it to be cheesy. I don't maybe wanna tell my entire life story. I don't know what to put in these. Two shortcuts.

Danielle: Shortcut number one is send them your best stuff. Meaning if these are new people coming onto your list, they don't know what you've sent before. So maybe you have a blog post, a social post emails that you've sent that did really well, that you really liked. Use those content that performed well. You can recycle that back into your nurture sequence. That's what I did for my first nurture sequence, for my list. I took emails that I had written to my list that I really liked, that performed well. That was like, great. Now they're in the nurture sequence. Done,

Brian: what if they've never sent emails to the list before? Let's just say they are. You know,newish to be on their list. They've neglected it, and now they're like, I'm going to finally take this seriously. What do they do? What's the second trick for coming up with [00:29:00] email ideas?

Danielle: so the second trick is to. We call a little mini bridge of beliefs and think about what the main objections someone might have to either working with you or buying your program or taking your offer and handle one objection per email. So you've got the first one. That's a welcome. Hey here's what's gonna happen here. Here's what this is all about. You can add personal stories to it and then. Think about those top three to five objections, the things that you've heard from people on calls, and it's not just, this is too expensive, or, I don't have time for this or whatever.

Danielle: Think a little bit more nuanced, right? What don't they have in place that they might not be ready? What do they need to be ready? Talk about those and bonus points if you have a project or a case study or a client that you've worked with in the past that was in that same situation that you can talk about. Because it's always easier if you have other people talking you up than [00:30:00] you talking you up,

Brian: Yep. But I will say this, if you don't have other people talking you up, you're still better off talking yourself up than not talking anything up at all. And when you say talking yourself up, it doesn't really mean like, Hey, look at me. I'm amazing. But it is something like, you know, in one of the nurture sequences start with the objection.

Brian: Objection. Could be something like, the last X that we worked with. Butchered our, whatever, or steamrolled us. that's another one. They steamrolled us. They didn't like take our input for any of our stuff. They just said, whatever they say goes right. Maybe that's an objection that you've seen before.

Brian: And so the email just talks through how they felt before validating their feelings, talking through how you're different, why you're different, how you operate, and then, a call to action at the end of it of if they're ready to work together. Go here, fill out my inquiry form. It doesn't have to be anything like that.

Brian: Crazy, that little small outline to do, you could do for every objection out of the sun. if you don't know objections, like it's probably 'cause you're not talking to your clients at all. You don't know anything about your clients. But most of you, especially if you're good at what you do, you've had these conversations enough times and you've worked with enough [00:31:00] clients to know what those objections are one other thing you can do, and this is what I've seen we've helped clients shift to a new niche or a area that they haven't gone before, is chat. BT can be good at brainstorming objections in a new area or a new niche, wonderful for that.

Brian: But, while chat, CBT is brought up, or AI in general. Why not just get AI to write your whole nurture sequence, Danielle?

Danielle: You can if you train it right. what happens if you don't is that you will get a lot of m. Dashes and it's not blank. It's blank. And

Danielle: the people

Brian: my God.

Danielle: who spend time with AI will know that a robot write it. And that is not the way that you wanna start a relationship with a potential client, which is, I did not care enough about you to write this email

Danielle: myself.

Danielle: Use it to help you think. feed it recordings of your discovery calls and ask it to pull out the patterns and the objections. Have it, do all of the legwork. Try your best to write it yourself. Have it be your voice. 'cause it's [00:32:00] like the, what's that? The uncanny valley, paradox, right?

Danielle: Where itsomething is, this close to human, but there's like this gap and it's actually creepier than the thing that is not, and that I think is a lot of what's happening, or like a Splenda or a sweetener that is supposed to be sweet, but there's some sort of off taste about it. That's a lot of, I think what people are sensing in a lot of ai.

Danielle: AI copy when it's not done right.

Brian: and not only that, Because so many people are using AI for writing, now you start looking like everyone else's emails. And so when you look like everyone else's emails, I don't wanna read most of the emails I get. So it's like, it's harder to stand out and actuallyit's not the hard to stand out.

Brian: You just write like you talk, like you've seen my copy, Danielle. It's like I just write how I talk very plain and straightforward.

Danielle: Yes. And I mean, again, that's what people at the end of the day are going to wanna work with. They wanna work with you. They want your personality, they want your take on things. They want your talent, they want your expertise, they want your perspective. They don't want the robot washed version of [00:33:00] that,

Danielle: certainly not in the first couple emails that they're seeing from you.

Brian: Yep. And again, there's,the reason we hired you versus just getting AI to write our stuff. 'cause like. AI just does not write great copy. there's no humanity to it. It can write copy. I'm not denying that, but it can't write great copy. I would argue, didn't even write good copy.

Brian: It writes passable

Danielle: Not out of the box. No. And not even without doing a whole lot of training, manipulation, examples, whatever, which most people are not doing. So you have to know what good copy looks like in order to get good copy from the robot. And if you don't, you won't even know what you're doing wrong and it won't work.

Danielle: And you thought you saved time, but actually did not.

Brian: Yes, So, anything else around these three things? We talked about the abandoned ship email series. We talked about the show up sequence, which is part email, part text, and we talked about the welcome sequence, the series of emails you send out.

Brian: I'll ask one more thing. 'cause we, we talked about long-term nurture and like having hundreds of days and I feel like the welcome sequence only covers a small span of time. Just when it comes to nurturing [00:34:00] your email list. What's your recommendation on cadence to long-term nurture your list.

Danielle: minimum once a week. I have people who tell me, oh yeah, I'm gonna start a monthly newsletter because I don't wanna bother people again. But from my experience, if you are not. In someone's inbox at least once a week. You're not top of mind,

Danielle: There's not enough of a relationship built so aim for once a week to start with. Then you can gradually build from there. I know people who mail every single day to their list. You can if you have enough material and you're like, excited about that and really wanna do that.

Brian: say, our newest coach does that in his business, and we'll probably have him on here sometime in the future, but. He emails every day on his email list and they're not bothered by it.

Danielle: No, if you're writing good emails and you're getting engagement and you have the capacity to sustain that, by all means, most people don't. And so I don't wanna scare you out of not emailing. Once a week is great.

Brian: Yep. Cool. Awesome.

Danielle: I also maybe wanna sum up by [00:35:00] saying

Danielle: everything that we talked about is emails. Minimum, right? Like just by writing 10 emails, you can essentially transform the way that leads flow through your business and nurturing long term. So this is not a big, overwhelming thing that we're trying to get you to do.

Danielle: It's 10 emails

Brian: And some of those 10 emails are like a hundred words,

Danielle: exactly

Brian: that.

Danielle: right. So it's just a matter of doing it. It doesn't have to be perfect with this. Anything that you put in place is gonna be better than nothing.

Brian: that's what I want people to take away

Danielle: it doesn't have to be a lot.

Brian: it doesn't have to be overwhelming. If you do get overwhelmed by this stuff, we're happy to help. This is Lori. What we do with Clients by Design, which is our, Cushing program, we have literally systems like this that we help you install. We give you the software, we give you the training on it, we give you the templates, we give you the checklist, we give you the.

Brian: When to send white email. we set you up with the software to automatically follow up and text and do all these things. When it comes to like the show up sequences, we give you ways to track these things. We actually monitor your metrics to know, alright, [00:36:00] this show rate's not good, let's work on that.

Brian: Or this metric right here is bad, this percentage here is lower than it should be. Let's fix that. we put a lot of work into making sure that we're looking at those numbers and we're not just a feely like. Life coachy kind of program. Like we're very like tactical with what we do. And if that's your approach and that's the way you want it done, consider going to six figure creative.com/coaching to apply and see if you're a good fit for it.

Brian: so Danielle, if somebody wanted to connect with you, where might they go?

Danielle: sure, you can find me at my website, dw copy.com, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn and just reach out with a message.

Brian: We'll have links to that on our show notesPage@sixfigurecreative.com slash 3 7 4

Danielle: And that's, it for the episode of the Six for Your Creative podcast.

Brian: Thanks for listening peace and thank you Danielle.

Danielle: Thank you.