Let’s talk lesser-known insights and strategies in email marketing that can significantly boost engagement and conversion rates with guest Rachel Lopez.

Bio

Rachel is not just your average marketer; she’s an intentional entrepreneur on a mission to revolutionize the way heart-driven business owners approach their marketing. As the founder of Gal Marketing, Rachel creates intentional marketing plans that go beyond algorithms and metrics, while providing sustainable marketing solutions that feel good for her clients. Get ready to discover the secrets behind Rachel’s approach as she empowers business owners to thrive in the ever-evolving world of marketing.

“How can we use email to be a tool that supports what you’re currently doing instead of trying to change your entire buyer behavior?”

– Rachel Lopez, Email Marketing Strategist

Transcript

Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of Unbreakable Brands, the podcast where we dive into the resilient strategies and mindsets behind successful women led businesses. Today, I’m talking to Rachel Lopez, pronouns she/her, about email marketing and some things you probably didn’t know. So we’re dropping all the secrets.

Rachel is known for her human-focused approach to marketing and customer journey development and has over a decade of experience in the email marketing space. She’s the founder and CEO of Gal Marketing, an email marketing and strategy agency that combines data driven strategy with done for you execution to help female coaches and service providers create marketing plans that feel good for their business.

Thank you so much for being here, Rachel.

I’m so excited. Every episode I do with anybody, I just go full detail. So if this episode is just jam packed with marketing strategies, take what sticks and like, just release the rest. Cause I tend to go a little overboard on podcasts. So I’m so excited.

I love it. And also for anyone listening, Rachel is who I send my clients to—she’s a trusted partner of mine—if they have any email marketing needs and they want to run campaigns and things like that. So I fully trust her expertise and I’m so excited for her to share all of that today.

But before we get into that, Rachel, can you share a bit about your background? What drew you to email marketing? You have so much experience in this area just so that people can get to know you and your entrepreneurial journey a little bit better.

Yeah. When you said a decade, I’m like, :Oh, nobody’s phrased it like that before.” They may feel very established, I will say. So I have a degree in marketing. I knew from the beginning, like, even in high school, there was a program at my high school called DECA that was marketing-focused and I went all the way to nationals with that. I literally just knew from the beginning that marketing was exactly what I wanted to do.

After I finished my degree, or while I was working through it, I started out like part-time campaign manager doing general marketing for a tech company. And in that job, and kind of in the like vastness of my corporate career, and I tend to consider myself a corporate escapee, but in my corporate, I think it was about seven, eight years that I just primarily gravitated into the email marketing side of things.

So I’ve seen all sides of the marketing spectrum where it comes to like top of funnel to ads to SEO and all of that stuff. But what I really, really love about the email marketing side is that it’s just so consistent and you really don’t need some crazy strategy that’s going to be fighting an algorithm or anything like that. It’s a sustainable approach that actually works if you’re a big tech company to a small dietitian service provider in the online space; it’s something that’s just so incredibly versatile. Something I’m very, very passionate about. And yeah, I mean, 10 years in the space and you really just like learn so much about businesses and how things work and why things work. And it’s really just driven my passion to take a lot of these corporate-like strategies and just give them to the people who don’t need to spend massive, massive budgets in order to have a really good business marketing plan.

Yes. Yes. Okay. I love it. And then when I asked you to come on the show, I wanted to make sure that we were going to talk about things that maybe aren’t talked about as much. So if you’re listening right now, this isn’t like the email basics, right? Everyone should have a list. We should have lead magnets going to our list. We know these kinds of things. So I asked Rachel to come up with five things to share that you probably didn’t know about email.

So let’s dive right in and tell me about the first thing in email marketing that most people don’t know but should.

Oh, gosh, this one always blows people’s minds, and it’s kind of two-in-one. The end goal does not always have to be a conversion. Like your email list does not have to be the main character in your full funnel strategy. It can literally just be a tool that supports a more established or a more validated part of your marketing strategy.

So many times people come to me and they’re like, “Oh, I just want my email list to make me all of this money.” I go, okay, great. Let’s back up and say, where are you currently making the most conversions? It’s like, “Oh, well on sales calls or in the DMs,” I’m like, okay, great. How can we use email to be a tool that supports what you’re currently doing instead of trying to change your entire buyer behavior? And say they want to talk to somebody, but I don’t want to talk to them? I want to just make them buy through a checkout link. So those are two things that I always try to advocate for where it’s like your email list does not need to be the point of conversion. It can be in the flow of conversion and just influence it. And then it doesn’t have to be the main character.

So many times we want to reverse engineer and say, “Oh, I want effortless sales.” And you’re like, well, as long as we know, effortless sales is not really a thing. There’s a strategy behind the people who market that to make it feel effortless.

Exactly.

So in some cases, don’t reverse engineer or change your buyer’s behavior away from something that’s actually working. So that’s one. I always let that marinate because it sometimes doesn’t hit well. They’re like, “Oh, so you’re telling me email doesn’t work?” I’m like, “Yes, it does.”

You’re like, “I wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work.” Yeah, I think that’s an incredibly important point, because I literally, I mean, like, “Hi, I’m the problem.” It’s me. I came to you with that same thing, because I had grown this big list. And I was like, well, I really just need it to convert. And your response was, “Let’s see what’s actually converting for you.” And I was like, Oh, what an interesting idea. I just was reading all about how my email is converting and it’s a money making machine and tool. And it was such a good perspective shift for me in that initial call we had. So thank you for putting that out there for everyone.

Yeah, I know. Let it marinate at first. It doesn’t always hit. Let it marinate and then look at your customer journey, which leads me to the next thing that people don’t always understand about email marketing is that if you do not have a customer journey, your email strategy is going to be insignificant. Your customer journey is really outside of every single platform and understanding from problem-aware to solution-aware to ready to buy kind of thing and understanding where they tend to get influenced the most.

Your email list can’t do much if you basically don’t have that understanding of how to bring in your leads from top of funnel, understand their awareness level, how to speak to them in a certain way that takes them from slightly problem-aware to slightly solution-aware. And without that understanding in your business, no matter what you do, you can run ads, you can start an email list. You can post every single day, five times a day on social, nothing will really stick for you. So that’s like a foundational thing that you can’t just put a bandaid over.

Do you have like an example of one that you’ve built for a client or one you have on your own of kind of what that looks like? Big picture in terms of walking people through a journey like that?

So I always break this down because there’s so much, as you know, there’s so much nuance in the online space. People who are entering in to being a business owner in general come with various levels of awareness. So I always break it down in starting your business, stretching your business and scaling your business. So when you’re starting your business, you may not even have an audience. And so you’re like sitting here and what you should be doing in that starting phase is building really good marketing habits, getting consistent with writing something every week, getting comfortable with your voice and all of that.

The stretching side of it is where you have validated offers. You have people in your audience. You have an understanding, and I think in that space, you’re just really much more comfortable with the awareness side of things. So really in that space, it’s like building those inbound flows, understanding how to hook someone.

So like an email strategy for starting could be just a newsletter, just getting into that space of saying, I’m going to add my clients to this. I’m going to talk to them on a regular basis. I’m going to ask for referrals. I’m going to do that.

Strategy for stretching, which is like kind of that space where year two plus in business, you’re two to three, you’re like at 60 percent capacity all the time. Like really kind of in that zone, you really want to start saying, okay, I have a very specific offer who speaks to a very specific person. And I want to fill my list with those types of people. So it’s going from, I can do it. I can really get out there and make sure that I can be consistent with this thing too. I’m going to get targeted. I’m getting focused. Like I’m really trying to understand.

Then once you have that, you have conversions working, you move into scaling, which is the automation side of things. It’s taking your one offer that does really well and upselling using automation, it’s building out customer lifetime value, and it’s really new. It’s a spectrum of a strategy that you really should be understanding where your business is at. Cause I’ve had people come to me in like probably year one and they’re like, I need all the automations.

Okay, what does that mean to you? Like, do you just want to lead magnet? And they’re like, no, no, no, no. I want the cross sell the upsell, the retargeting the unengaged. I’m like let’s back up because I don’t think we’re quite ready for all of that. So it really just does depend on where you’re at.

Typically, if you’re getting to the point where you need like more support, like you have a VA, you have this like social media manager, you’re not necessarily doing the like every day, you’re not a solopreneur, I guess is the best way to put it. That’s probably when you want to start looking at those automations because you want to work smarter with your list versus working like, Oh, I’m just sending a newsletter out because if you have a starting strategy while you’re trying to scale, not going to not doing much, it’s not doing much in that space.

Yeah, I love that starting, stretching, scaling, like you can find out where you’re at, in that level of things and then make a plan from there. Beautiful. Okay.

What’s number three?

No, we’re on four. First, main character energy for your email is not always the case. Second, it doesn’t always need to be a conversion. Three, understanding your customer journey. I would say number four is the power of a newsletter strategy. I think it’s often overlooked, but if you have a consistent newsletter strategy that is built into your annual calendar, and when I say annual calendar, I don’t just mean, “Monday, we’re talking about this, Tuesday, we’re doing this, like, or June, we’re talking about that.” Like, it really does mean we’re launching Q2. We know when we’re ramping up. We know when we’re ramping down. We are going from promotional mode to nurturing mode. That’s what I mean by an annual calendar.

So if you have that, your newsletter can be the most strategic tool in your entire vessel of marketing, like in your marketing toolkit. And if you don’t have a consistent strategy, that’s when you get like the ick of showing up to your subscribers and being like, I’m here to sell you something. Who are you? I don’t know you, like you haven’t even talked to me since I downloaded your guide. And so, it often can be overlooked but it really is such a powerful tool if you have things laid out.

Yes. Oh my gosh. Yes. Like that same idea I see repeated in other forms of marketing. I’m just going to use social media as an example. I mean, I’m not a social media manager, but I see like, “Oh, here’s a year’s worth of content for social media, or here’s all of these ideas.” And it’s based around, you know, traditional holidays and it’s so generic and bland and it has absolutely nothing to do with the business plan or like your business growth.

But I definitely see the same thing around newsletter and email marketing in terms of education that’s out there or people sharing what they’ve done. And it’s like, Oh, just, you know, write what, like it’s June’s pride month. You should be sending out and for like a personal letter on that. And it’s like, okay, well, what is your business actually doing?

I’ve resisted the urge to put a lead magnet out about a hundred newsletter topics to send your list because it’s so fundamentally against what I preach on an everyday basis, which is have your stuff tied to a business goal. And if it’s not tied to a business goal, you’re just checking a box. You’re just going through the motions and not actually intentionally doing your marketing. And I think that that’s the part that I have to resist cause sometimes it’s so infuriating. I’m like, nobody cares about in-the-weeds marketing strategy that I really love talking about. Nobody’s sitting here and be like, “Hmm, let me talk more about customer journeys.” They’re like, “Just make this easier for me.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll try.”

I feel the same way. With brand strategy, sometimes people don’t care about that, but I always think like, by the time they come to me, they’ve gone through some of that other stuff at the beginning. Hopefully people are listening to this and they’re going to be like, oh, it needs to be really intentional and it can’t just be the next thing to check off your list because someone big on the internet said you have to have an email list and you have to be doing sending one email a week or whatever the current trend is overall.

So I love that piece of advice. That’s super, super helpful. Okay, what’s number five?

We kind of hinted at this, you brought it up and I’m like, Oh, I just, I love when we’re so aligned on things that it just effortlessly flows because the last one is that everything should be tied to a business goal, every single thing.

And it’s so important because one of the first things that I ask and really want to have a understanding of when I’m developing an email strategy is: What is the purpose? What can we say your email list is doing for your business? And oftentimes I use this kind of split when it comes to talking about being in business where it says you should be a CEO in your business, but also there are days when you need to be at the employee level, and there are days when you need to get some of the things going. And if you don’t do what you’re supposed to be doing and working towards a business goal, CEO hat can fire you and be like, actually, it’s not working out.

And so when your email list doesn’t act and have the same responsibilities as an employee, meaning reaching KPIs, following up where going towards a business goal, like in a proper direction. It’s really a waste of time and a waste of resources. And so it applies to everything, right? Like your email list, your social media, your blog strategy, if it’s all just doing just to do. And I always say, don’t just say it. Send to send, like really be intentional in how you use your email list to reach your marketing goals, your quarterly goals, annual goals, whatever that looks like. If it doesn’t tie back, it’s irrelevant, fire it.

Oh my gosh. I love that. Okay, these five alone, I feel should have at least mindset shifted for you or shifted your perspective on email marketing as a tool, email marketing as a tool to move your business forward, I think those were great. But let’s talk some practical action steps people can walk away with because I love to walk away with, “Oh, what are the things I can check off my list that I need to be thinking about?”

So what are some of those things that people can walk away with right now, practical tips and strategies around their email list? And maybe you want to separate it on like those three categories of where they might be at. But what should they do now that they’ve had that mindset shift?

So let’s do it with problems because I think that’s what most people are more familiar with. If you have low engagement, a practical tip is audit your subscribers. I have seen so many people say, Oh, I have very low click engagement, open rates, all these things. And I go, okay, well talk to me. How do these people get on your list? Oh, well, you know, four or five pivots ago, like I had some really good lead magnets and all these people kind of fluctuated and came to my list and everything.

I’m like, okay, so the people who downloaded, let’s say lead magnet a, are they still relevant to your offer suite? No? Okay. Well, that answers the problem of your engagement. So we really need to shift some of those old subscribers out. So if you’re struggling with FOMO, just look at where they came in from your list, why it’s important to have a tagging strategy or tag set up.

So you could say, Oh, this lead magnet from however many years ago, no longer relevant, probably can send them an email and ask if they’re still want to participate in the list, if not get rid of them. So that’s from an engagement standpoint, that’s the easiest, lowest hanging fruit you can do is just look at who’s on your list and how they got there.

And I want to jump in there and say that you did this for me. I have some really great lead magnets now, so I don’t have to work very hard to get people on my list. But there was a whole little group of folks who were downloading my single page PDFs back in the day. I don’t even know what they were for, to be honest. Yeah, they were just things I was trying out. And that made such a big difference. in my open rates and engagement immediately, and you put a tagging system in place. So then I could like, just let it be on its own now that I had established ones. But as someone who was a client, I’m just putting it out there for any listeners. It was like, Oh, okay, that was exactly what needed to happen.

And it’s so eye opening, right? Cause you don’t think to look into those, like that side of things, or even just comb through it. But that’s one of the most simplest things you can do is just say, yeah, that lead magnet about money making. And now you’re a web designer and you’re like, maybe I can be a little bit more aligned in how I’m reaching these people. So, yeah, if you don’t have the FOMO, I’d say delete them. If you have FOMO, you can easily just ask them, Hey, this is what I’m talking about now. Do you want to stick around? Yes, no, kind of thing. So, so simple. So I say that’s the biggest, the lowest hanging fruit from an engagement standpoint. It’s one of those that I think is So easy to do.

The second one I would say is if you’re working towards conversions or not seeing as many conversions as you’d like, there’s always something that, so I always call them your inbound flows, which are your lead magnet, like bringing the bringing in the right people. Again, it’s always talking about making sure you’re having the right people on your list. But also making sure that that initial grand tour of your welcome, your welcome sequence in your email is actually set up for you in a way that is leading towards conversion. One of the biggest mistakes that I see is that people tend to make it all about them.

And they’re like, let me tell you my life story and a thousand word email; they don’t care. The people that are opting in, they don’t care about that. They want to know: Can you solve my problems? Can you work in your experience so that I have trust and authority and understanding of what you can do? And, you know, just weaving that into the story, that’s going to lead to the conversion. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing you can do is what I love, and it’s one of my favorite topics, it’s called A/B testing. This is saying I have an assumption about how my list is going to behave. And I’m going to pit it up against another assumption and they’re going to battle it out for 24 hours and then see who wins. So with this one you could take “how to grow your email list” versus “three ways to grow your email list,” we’re talking subject lines here in case I just kind of sped through that part. You can see what actually get your audience to interact. And then you take data and you validate those assumptions. You could say, I do this with every single one of my clients that I like A/B test form. I make them vote. I say, which one do you think is going to win? And their assumptions are on the flip end of what actually happens in the results.

And they’re like, Oh, I’m positive this subject line is going to kill it. And it doesn’t. And so it really does give you a little bit more confidence when writing your copy, writing any form of like new email to your list, because you’ve done those tests before in the past. So it’s something that’s very intimidating to people. People don’t like A/B testing. I think it’s so much fun. But yeah, it gives you so much data and it leads to better engagement and to better conversions as well.

Yes, I had the same experience. I can’t remember the headlines, but We’ll use your examples. But it was like the what not to do, like the kind of like inquisitive/ negative ones or negative based. Obviously the content isn’t negative, but I didn’t think those would ever hit. Well, you know, I’m like, Oh, people are sensitive or they’re not in that place. We need to just give them three ways because I love a list. And I was, Doing exactly what I tell people not to do, which was like leading with what I was thinking instead of my clients or customers, and it’s such an easy data driven way to to know exactly how your clients or customers are going to feel that are within your circle. So I love it, too, but it’s super intimidating to do on your own. So I get that piece of like, Oh, how do I put this together?

Yeah. Honestly, so many business owners are working like how they would like do things. Like I am a very analytical buyer. I’m not an emotional buyer. Like I sit there and I comb through everything. And so when I write my emails, I come from a very analytical place and I go like, I’m just going to tell it to you straight, blah, blah, blah, very, very minimal storytelling, but that’s so necessary for someone who is an emotional buyer in order for them to be brought into like the story a little bit more.

So it’s a balance and it really is just like, everything is an experiment. Like really, really is like, what feels good to you, what actually works and then taking a combination of those two to push forward with a little bit more confidence than what you did last time you did it.

Okay, I want to ask, because I think that there’s this big shift in the online space in general, especially in the marketing world with AI and the idea that people could be getting emails that are now AI generated or maybe not as connected. And there’s almost this, I think this is my opinion, a little bit of, I don’t know, buyers are just getting smarter and less trustworthy, they’re less trusting.

I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that shifting landscape and what business owners should be doing to prepare for that, make sure they continue to build trust in a new way. What are your thoughts there?

I think every tool can be used for good and bad. Um, my mentor always uses the sales example, like everybody has been chased into the mall where they’re trying to get their hair straightened by the sales guy that’s like, let me show you this new straightener. You’re like, “I’m fine. Thank you.” Like that’s bad sales. And good sales is something that feels so effortless and you’re immediately connected. And I think when it comes to tools like AI, you use them to give you a little bit more ease in your business, but you can’t necessarily rely on them entirely.

I did a recent episode about the faceless marketing trend, which I think has a huge AI component where so many people just are coming out the gates with these faceless accounts. And one of the reasons why it’s not going to be super sustainable is because it’s lacking that relationship building community, connection side of things. And when you use AI, you are also removing those important decision factors for people to make purchases. And like you said, they are getting so smart and like the decision time to buy is getting longer and longer and longer.

I think before it used to be like seven to 11 touch points in order to get to a conversion. And it’s reaching upwards of like 15 to 20. Touch points that are actually impactful for the consumer to make that decision with intention. So it’s one of those that I think use it in a way that if you just have a blank slate on your page and you’re like, I don’t even know what to write, use it as a prompt to get you started. And then you work yourself back into the content. It’s just hard. It’s the lowest hanging fruit.

I don’t know if you saw, it was a couple of weeks ago, where the whole income claim now is like it’s becoming outed for like you’re being canceled if you use like income claims. And so I think it’s in one of those things. It’s like the sleazy way to do it or the intentional, actually impactful way.

I actually had a really interesting conversation with someone the other day and I just love their perspective on AI. I think it can be really helpful. I’m not like anti-AI. I feel like you can’t be. It’s like people who are anti streaming services, cable companies. It’s the future, but I see it as the mediocre. It’s like what you would get if you hired someone to do something super mediocre. It’s baseline. And it almost makes to me, my perspective, my positive shift on it is it makes our work that much more important because you and I both have the aligned values that we are like human first. I built human first brands, you do human first marketing. And so if we’re basically putting the human component back into it, it makes it even more important like what we’re doing here and something that is going to be a needed skill over time too. So it’s not like it’s a tool that It’s going to destroy the world. Hopefully, knock on wood, it doesn’t come back to bite me. But you know, like, I don’t think so. I think that it can be a helpful thing in the future.

Completely agree. Use it as a baseline. Don’t rely entirely on it because that’s not sustainable at all.

Okay. So I want to end by asking, did we miss any big mistakes or misconceptions?

I mean, I would just rally all of those people who are running their marketing on single platforms to just take that step to solidify an email list so that when things change in the online algorithm that there’s no shock or something really big when we have all those outages and people just spiral out of control. Reduce the risk for all of that by just taking an additional step in creating an email list. I think that’s the biggest call to action I have right now for people because I see it happening every single day. When there’s an outage or the real glitches, or they change up the algorithms and they’re pushing carousels again, people just lose their minds. And I think that it can be really impactful to your business if you just took one step to start an email list.

Yeah, totally. Correct me if I’m wrong, you’re the expert here, but I think for every type of business, because I see this overlooked more and more with personal brands, lifestyle brands, and influencers who primarily make money on all the other social platforms, but like an email list can fully support that. You know, you can still send affiliate links through there. You could still be making money.

Well, I want to thank you so much for your time today. And before we sign off, can you let us know where folks can find you, how they can get on your email list and be in your world and circle?

Yes, so you can find me at gal.agency on Instagram. My email list, I have an incredible freebie called, “Your Guide to the High Converting Email List.” I also have a new digital product, which is The Align Leads Formula, which will break down how to start a lead magnet with intention and call in the right people that ultimately will lead to a high converting email list.

So I’ll leave all of those links in the show notes. But come and hang out with me on Instagram. Sometimes I post, sometimes I don’t. I need to get back into it. But for the most part, I email my list every week, every other week if I’m feeling burnt out. So come hang out with me there.

Yeah, you’re walking the walk, right? You’re like, um, you can find me on my email list. That’s where I’ll be.