Learning to love email marketing, with Kendra Corman

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with marketer Kendra Corman. In this interview, Corman talks about ways businesses can build their email lists and create content that engages customers and builds relationships. Corman has more than 15 years of marketing experience working with one of the top brands in the world all the way down to solopreneurs just starting out. Her passion is making sure that marketing expertise is affordable and accessible to all businesses.

For more information, take her quiz at https://kendracorman.com/quiz. This quiz helps people understand their email list-building style and provides them with actionable information they can use to grow their list and create engaging email newsletters. 

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Transcript

Erin Manning  0:02  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The dead pixel society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and School Photographers of America.

Gary Pageau  0:19  
Hello again and welcome to the dead pixel society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by marketing coach and consultant, Kendra Corman. Hi, Kendra, how are you today?

Kendra Corman  0:30  
I'm great. How are you doing?

Gary Pageau  0:32  
Good, good. Well, welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast where today we're gonna be talking about marketing, specifically, email marketing. Can you tell us a little bit first about your background and getting into this field?

Kendra Corman  0:48  
Oh, yeah. So thanks again, for having me. I'm really excited. I love the name of the show. Because I'm a big fan of the Dead Poets Society back in the day, so I can date myself. So yeah, so I started in advertising and public relations back as a student at Penn State, went to go work for Chrysler worked my way up into marketing, there was the SRT, which is Street and Racing Technology. So the Viper, the Grand Cherokee, SRT, eight, all the fast cars. And so I was the Marketing Manager for that, then I moved into being the Jeep advertising manager, I took a check at the end of 2008, to quit my job, went into business-to-business insurance. So I worked for an insurance wholesaler, and really saw their the impact of email marketing, got my MBA, and then went off and started on my own, and continued to see email marketing, driving business and driving results for my customers. To the point where it can't be matched anywhere else by any other tactic.

Gary Pageau  1:59  
Yeah, because that used to be a thing where in marketing people do what I call is, you know, they chase the shiny thing, you know, whatever is out there, the newest platform, the newest thing with the newest tools, you got to have a tic tac, you got to have an Insta, you got to have a Facebook ad or a LinkedIn, you got to have all these things. But email has been tried and true. And people just seem to not get that very much. Why do you think that is?

Kendra Corman  2:28  
So a couple of reasons. Before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about people saying that they don't want to bother people, right? Our email inbox is very personal, not social media, where you can pick and choose when you want to be on it. It's not your regular mailbox that the US Postal Service delivers mail to right? You are going in someplace that's very personal to me. And that scares people. They don't want to annoy them or bother them. But it's so when I treasure it when people allow me into their inbox, my goal is to provide them value at all times. Because if I'm not providing value, then they're gonna like uninvite me from their inbox and unsubscribe. Right? Right. Right, right. But it's so key to creating relationships building a know like and trust factor because people really get to know you that way. With a regular email series, and consistency, those are key things to do. Right. It's also a great way to monetize social media. Because when you're on social media, you don't own that you don't own those contacts, you can't export the likes on your Facebook page, and contact them when Facebook went down, when it's been down twice, right? In the last couple of years, when Facebook goes down, you lose access to all of those people, right. But if you have a way to convert them over into email marketing, and then you still have a way to contact them, you own your email list, and you can go wherever you want with it. Right.

Gary Pageau  4:12  
So along those lines, there are those what's the you know, most of my listeners or readers are independent small businesses. And they you know, and I'm on a lot of their lists, so I see a lot of their stuff. And a lot of them are very sales driven. Right you have a new offer for this and new product that does this by this but seems like the more attractive ones that I see. And I mean attractive in the sense of I'm more engaging, not necessarily that they look better, is they really make us make a make an effort to tell you what's going on in their business, or share some information nuggets. It's

Kendra Corman  4:51  
it's about that know like and trust factor, you really start to build a relationship through email again, because it's more personal than a lot of these other chain Annales. So when you're building that relationship and showing behind the scenes, or doing a review of a product, it's more than just sales, I'm a big fan of the 8020 rule, you can't sell more than 20% of the time, percent of the time, you've got to be adding value. And sometimes that's a discount. Sometimes that's, you know, free equipment cleaning, or you know, something along those lines, right. But you have to always be thinking of value. And even when I'm selling in my emails, and my client emails, I'm always looking for adding that value.

Gary Pageau  5:37  
One of the things people say about emails is I'm bothering people, which often gets into how often they send them. And for every business is going to be different, right? I mean, I get emails from some companies, like twice a week, you know, telling me the latest discount on, you know, their photo books, or whatever. So I kind of toss all those. But for someone who's interested in this approach, what would you recommend, like how often the

Kendra Corman  6:07  
first, it depends on who it is. So, first, decide what you can do, okay, and what you're willing to do, because whatever it is going to be, you need to be consistent. And I'm telling you that firsthand from someone that had a sometimes once in a while email newsletter, you know, if you're not consistent, then people forget why they signed up, you forget that they've joined your list. And then they unsubscribe a lot faster than I do if you're consistent and even sending daily. So how much value can you provide regularly, I used to be a staunch supporter of no more than once a month, that seemed to be the right cadence for most of my clients. Most of my nonprofit clients that I work with, I do about twice a month for them. And for me, I've actually gone up to weekly, and I've actually seen an increase in engagement. So an increase in the number of people clicking an increase, you know, in replies to my emails, because they're seeing it consistently. I feel like weekly for online and retail businesses is probably one of the stronger timelines. I'm not a fan of daily, but if you have a lot of value, I get daily emails from marketing profs, which is a professional education learning tool for marketing professionals. I delete most of them, but I always read to see what the what they're highlighting in it every day. So I think it really comes down to your audience, what they're looking for the value that you can provide them, and then what you're willing to do, because that's key, that consistency is extremely important.

Gary Pageau  7:53  
I think you hit a good point, because I think there's a lot of people who are maybe thinking, you know, either they're very discount or sales driven, or I just want to talk about this one thing this time, and they don't realize that it's an ongoing conversation that needs to happen. Because really, that's how you build a relationship, especially if you're if you've maybe your brick-and-mortar store isn't really the destination anymore, maybe it's more of an online experience.

Kendra Corman  8:20  
Yeah, you have to stay in front of people, right, you have to stay in front. Even if people are deleting your email. They're seeing your name, and your store name in their inbox, even if it's not what they're interested in right now. Or they're going on vacations and they're not reading, you know, they're cleaning up their email box in bulk. It doesn't matter, they're still seeing your name, right? That's part of the power of email marketing.

Gary Pageau  8:46  
Do you ever recommended platform people should use I mean, there are all kinds of platforms out there that are pretty big ones I you know, Constant Contact MailChimp, etc. They seem to me like actually being a user of one of those for my own newsletter. It seems to me like they're trying to evolve even away from newsletters and getting into CRM and all this other stuff. But what would you suggest for, you know, a small business looking for a platform, what are the things that should be part of that?

Kendra Corman  9:20  
So the number one thing you need to look at is deliverability. I, personally am not a fan of MailChimp, just simply because their deliverability has been lower, and their customer service has not been as effective for people that I've had on that. However, MailChimp does have really good integration with a lot of systems, a lot of other CRMs and things like that, because they have their open API. I don't remember what API stands for, but it's fancy stuff. We're giving talks to each other

Gary Pageau  9:49  
application programming interface. 

Kendra Corman  9:54  
There you go. See, but because they have that those tools are able to integrate with a lot more systems and some of the others If you're building a lot of content, I love ConvertKit. Because the emails look really nice. It's designed a lot for content creators, online course creators, and things like that. But it's a fantastic tool that way. Constant contacts, is another one that I do a lot with, because well, most of my clients were on it when I started with them. So I better figure out with a system, and I've loved it, I love Constant Contact because you can get a local rep, like I'm an affiliate of theirs. So I can I actually service and train the people that are on Constant Contact under My Account. So you get a lot of personal connections there. They've done a ton of investment into their software. But I know other people that are on a million different platforms. I think I started on exact target, which is a huge industrial version of it. So I it's all about finding the right fit for you. But start with deliverability, we want to make sure that the emails get delivered more than anything else. And if they've got a lot of I'll call them spammers, even if they're not spammers, or people that aren't following email best practices of having people opt into their email, they can negatively affect your deliverability and your emails going to spam.

Gary Pageau  11:25  
Let's say you choose one of these platforms and you create a great email, what would be a reasonable expectation for open rate and clickability? I mean, you've heard I've heard way different numbers, but in your world, what's acceptable?

Kendra Corman  11:44  
So I don't actually track opt in are open rate anymore. And I don't track click rate, because click rates a percentage of open rate. And thank you Apple for pre opening everybody's email to protect their privacy. Starting with the Apple iOS 15 update. That's one of my favorites. So Apple pre opens all the emails so that I can't tell what type of device they opened it on and what day and what time and all that fun stuff. So open rates are going through the roof, which means click rates are going down the toilet as a rule, but I usually encourage people to set their own benchmarks. So let's, I'm always looking for improvements over time. And so if you're looking to do that, I think that that's the goal. In the past before Apple iOS 15, average open rates were about 20% 19 to 20%. So nowadays, we're looking to get up towards 50. The Apple iOS 15 update didn't just affect people with dot Mac, iMac, and.me email addresses, and all those Apple email addresses and actually affects anybody that opens email inside the Apple Mail app. Why is that my work email on my Apple Mail app, but not in an Outlook app. Right. So it was pre opening my emails, then too. So from a benchmarking standpoint, I do recommend tracking your own metrics, tracking your total clicks, tracking who answered the question that you're asking it looking at those conversion rates. Sometimes for some clients, I've actually built special landing pages that come just from the email newsletter so we can track the purchases of an item just from the newsletter. Yep, very typical. Yeah. So I love the fact that email is so trackable. But again, it's about engagement. It's about getting that engagement. It's less about the open, a lot more about the clicking. And then ultimately, the purchasing.

Gary Pageau  13:50  
We've now convinced everyone in our audience to get more involved in email marketing, what are some of the ways you can use to grow your list?

Kendra Corman  14:01  
Okay, so I love growing lists. First, you want to talk about your email list everywhere, everywhere. So your email signature should sign up for this. You should have a sign-up on your website. If you're a retail outlet online. You know, any or brick and mortar store, it doesn't matter. Have a popup on your website. Pop-ups are annoying as all get out. But ridiculously effective when it comes to growing your list. And do not ask people to sign up for your email list. Nobody wants more email. I don't want more email. You don't want more email. I don't know anybody that's like, I can't wait. I need some more email. Maybe my 16-year-old niece but that's about it. She's clearly not on enough lists. But we sign up for so much stuff. We get inundated with email. We can spend all day just dealing with email. We don't want more email, but people want them value you can provide. So think about what value you can give them for signing up. Now, if you're selling products, maybe it's a discount. If you do regular reviews, or email subscriber value-only items, you can let them know that value that you're going to be giving them, rather than having them sign up for your email list, because nobody's doing that.

Gary Pageau  15:28  
So you really have to phrase in such a way where you're yours, it's more of a keep in touch thing, then sign up for an email kind of Yes. Or offer a benefit of some sort.

Kendra Corman  15:40  
Yes, offering a benefit is a huge thing to do. So you should have links to if you have any guides, do you have any comparison guides, equipment, comparison guides that you've created, any have special How to videos that you can highlight that they can get exclusive access to? You know, there's so much value that we as content creators, and um, you know, our whole audience is content creators, we're creating constant content on a regular basis, even if we don't think we are, right, we have a tendency to take the value of our content for granted. Because it was easy for us. Right? You went on a regular basis, right? But it has value to people that don't,

Gary Pageau  16:24  
what are some of the other ideas instead of posting everywhere? I mean, obviously, there are pop ups and like you said, most of the people that you mentioned, the cost contests in MailChimp. So that's all built into their system is putting a pop up on your system. What about things like QR codes on business cards? And that kind of thing? I mean, I because I've seen more and more of the QR code thing popping over the last few months, people seem to much more comfortable with it. I think part of it is because apples made it so much easier on the iPhone. And of course, what else?

Kendra Corman  16:55  
 Thank you, COVID and restaurants, exactly. Reviving QR codes? Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were a sign that you were cool and new technology way back in the day. And then all of a sudden, it was like, nobody knew how to use them. So nobody actually used them. And now thanks to restaurants, even my father in law, when we were vacation for Thanksgiving was show me how to do this the restaurant, I gotta figure this out myself. So we walked him through how to use QR codes. So it's, yeah, they're, they're very powerful. So I love putting QR codes on fliers. I'm not a big fan of putting it on social media posts and things like that. I know, some people are, but they're already on their device, they can click on something, right? I mean, so you don't need to scan it. Anytime there's paper or an offline connection. That's when I think that the QR code belongs there. And again, you can link directly to a signup form, or you can link to a link tree version, where they can see other things of value that you're providing you can. I'm a big fan of landing pages, posts on social media, drive people to a landing page that tells you what you're going to give them and convert them from being just a social media contact into an email contact. That's huge. But I'm a big fan of anytime you have anything that's paper based, you can do a QR code. That's fantastic.

Gary Pageau  18:27  
So you mentioned linktree for the people who don't know what linktree is, could you explain what a linktree is because it's not only just linktree, but there's other like people that actually don't use linktree.

Kendra Corman  18:37  
I actually I use Kajabi for my landing page. But when for Instagram, everything's  bio, you can't put links in the posts to the extent that you can on other social media channels. And that's how linktree became popular, because people had more than one thing that they wanted to link to at a time. And they didn't want to be updating it on a regular basis. So link tree is just a tool, that's basically a landing page that has links to different places that you can reference in social media. It can have your different social media handles, it can have landing pages, your website, it can link to products, wherever you want it to go. And it's a website, so you can use a QR code to link to those types of pages.

Gary Pageau  19:25  
Okay, so we've talked about why you need an email, an email marketing program, and how to get it and the content involved. How if you are the person who is you know, running a photo store, for example, and you've got, you know, 15 employees and you're worried about who's going to show up that day, is this that we should be doing yourself, or delegating and if you delegate it, how much oversight do you need to have? Is this something you just let your Gen Z Counter first I run with what's your advice there?

Kendra Corman  20:02  
So I'm adjunct faculty for a local university. Just want to do not, you need to read everything that they do. Because the the word I want it spelled is like the letter i in a sentence is capitalized, and you should be spelled out Y O U. Those were two errors that I recently gotten papers. It happens all the time, unfortunately, I really wish it didn't. But, yes, you need to make sure that it's someone that knows and understands your business, or is willing to know and understand your business and willing to understand who your target is. Everything that you write should always be written to one person, who is that ideal person that you want to talk to. Right. So if you're dealing with a professional photographer, or a hobbyist photographer, the tone is different, can be different, right? And so you really need to think about who your target audience is, and then write to them.

Gary Pageau  21:01  
Would you recommend segmenting your emails to that extent? I mean, because that is something you're gonna do. Maybe you should explain what segmentation is before you get down that road.

Kendra Corman  21:09  
Yes. So segmentation is an amazing tool that allows you to appeal to different groups and send different emails to different groups of people. So I work with an insurance agency, they have a personal insurance, email newsletter, and they've got a commercial insurance, email newsletter, sometimes the contents the same, sometimes it's not. It gives you the flexibility to be able to do that. I know I am a Nikon girl. And I know that there's a lot of, you know, Canon, and Sony people out there. Even separating by what brand people are interested in, I think you have to really narrow down and really talk to that person. Because an email newsletter again, it's personal. So then you need to be talking to them. I would say and won't going back to whether or not you do it yourself or outsource it. That comes down to you, and what you're willing to do. If writing an email newsletter on a regular basis, you're like, No, like, I'm not doing this, then don't do it, then you need to outsource it. And you can outsource it to someone that's that wants to learn and grow in your business. That's totally fine. I would read it over. Yeah, it's pretty fit a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Outside of that, as long as you give them direction and some bullet points, some a good writer or good communicator can take it from there. But I think it all comes down to what you're willing to do, and where your time is best spent. So I probably do 20 newsletters a month for clients. And I mean, it's a lot of work. Because we're also writing the blogs that go with it and or the other pieces of content to highlight it looking to see what's trending, what people are searching for to answer those questions and help people out. I think that, again, it just comes down to where's your time best spent? If you love writing, and you love communicating with your customers, then you should go all-in? You should be writing your own email newsletters.

Gary Pageau  23:27  
So you raise something earlier about picturing that customer was so much that business moving online, however, because they usually I mean, the photo business you should be very, very face to face, right? I mean, you always talk to people in the industry. And they're like, I remember when we used to process people's film, we'd hand them their envelopes, they stand at the counter looking at their pictures. And we talked to them about their vacation and all that and, you know, things have changed. The world doesn't work that way anymore. How do you learn more about your ideal customer in a more digital world without being like a super creeper.

Kendra Corman  24:10  
So odds are you know a lot more than you think. Okay about your customer. First off, you know what they're interested in, you know what questions they're asking because you're getting those questions on the phone, in your store via email via your content, your contact form. You're getting it via reviews on products, and you're hearing it from the manufacturers, right that you're buying from. You're hearing all of these stories and so there's a lot of information that you have about your customer. And some of them are still your customers that used to come in and get their envelope right? Photos and go through them and say look, by you know a lot about them to start off with. Then you start asking them like you don't do it in the first email like I only started out, but you do it a couple of a couple of days, couple of weeks into emailing with them or a couple months, you can start to ask, ask questions. Hey, I was wondering which do you prefer? Nikon, Canon, Sony, whatever you like to do have them click on a survey button, they just self-segmented for you and told you what they're interested in. Right? But talk to them. For small businesses. That's what I work with the most talking to people is the best way to get more information from them. I was talking to a client of mine, and he was like, He's business to business. And he's like, he was telling me he's like, Well, how am I supposed to know what they're doing on their weekends? Because I have this survey that fill out about your target audience? What did they do on the weekend? Where did they go? Where are they hanging out? Where are they spending their time online, all of that stuff is great information for you to know. And I was like, You're telling me you have no personal, you know, communications with I can tell you what most of my clients are probably going to do this weekend. Because I've had conversations with them. And they've been clients for a while. So if you've got a hobbyist photographer, they might be going out and taking photos this weekend. You know that? You know what they're looking for, you know what they're struggling with? Because they've called you, they've asked you those questions.

Gary Pageau  26:24  
They want to know what sense to use for this situation, right? I mean, there is a lot of feedback that people are getting. But I think what happens is they don't think to put that into have some sort of system in place to track and record that. So you can send out when you send out your your twice-monthly newsletter, that person gets the travel newsletter, but he doesn't get the sports photography newsletter.

Kendra Corman  26:52  
And I will tell you, it's hard. It definitely is I'm not gonna under scale and say, but anything in marketing that's worth doing takes some effort. You don't just double your business by posting on Facebook or Instagram, right. So you have to really invest a little bit of time into it, figure out how much you want to get out of it, because you're gonna get out of it, what you put into it, and use it as a balancing act to make sure that you are giving them the information that they need and want. It's also a lot easier than a lot of people think, because you could have if you have a staff meeting at the beginning of every shift, or at the end of every week or the beginning of every week. Hey, what are the questions you guys were asked this week? Right? Anything trending right now?

Gary Pageau  27:39  
What's the interest in this new camera?

Kendra Corman  27:41  
Plus, you can Google it. Google is really smart. They've got a whole section that says of questions that people also ask around that topic. Right? You can also go to manufacturers' sites, you can go to Amazon, you can go look at different products, and see what people are asking about that product. They have a question section. So you can actually get a lot of insight. If you don't have the insight, and you're so busy and you're not seeing those questions come up at the time. Which means Been there, done that at the t-shirt myself. You've got and you're not writing them down. That's okay. There are other resources because people are searching online and there's ways to get at that information.

Gary Pageau  28:26  
Speaking of questions, you have a quiz.

Kendra Corman  28:30  
I do I have a quiz that talks about your list building personality because he doesn't want an online list building quiz.

Gary Pageau  28:38  
And where would someone go to take this quiz and learn more about their list building personality? 

Kendra Corman  28:45  
So you can go to Kendra corman.com, forward slash quiz. It's Kendra with a K and Corman with a C. So dendracorman.com/quiz. And you can take it and get your list-building personality. Just so you know, if you want to take the quiz just to check out quizzes as a general, you're welcome to do it. You don't have to opt in to the results. I will actually give you the results because I'm very passionate about email marketing. And you don't actually have to join my email list to do it. Because I do think it's so important. And I only want people that want to be on my email list on my email list. Which is important too. But yeah, so you can find out your list-building personality and understand a couple of tips and insights based on that. What you can be sending, how you can be gathering information and how you can be growing your list.

Gary Pageau  29:36  
Well, thank you Kendra. It's been great talking to you again, the place to go is kendracorman.com/quiz, and best wishes for future growth.

Kendra Corman  29:50  
Thanks, Gary.

Erin Manning  29:52  
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.thedeadpixelssociety.com