The Art of Conversation: Creating Community in Your Inbox

Community is not a Facebook group where it's many people talking to many people. Community is just, if you have a group of people who have that sense of belonging, and you can create that in email, but it, but you have to, there's a right way to do it and you really have to work at it.

Mm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Market Getting Brew. And I'm your host, Brett Deister. And if you could please subscribe to this podcast, all your favorite podcasting. Absolutely. A five star review. It really just helped me, let me know how I'm doing as well. But this week we'll be talking about How to build your community through email, because community email, I mean it's the two oldest things in marketing ever. And so why not bridge 'em together and try to make a great community? But with me is Paul and he is the owner of powwows.com and the leading online community celebrating Native American and Col arts and culture for the past 25 years. And he is, had a wealth of experience through email marketing emails in general. So this is why he's on the show. But welcome to show Paul. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time and you're welcome. And the first question is all my guest is, are you coffee or tea drinker?

So I'm I'm from the south, sweet tea. Yes. Coffee. Only if it's in, like I don't do like straight coffee. I'll do like a frappuccino or a nitro cold bru. Know something different. Can't just have a coffee killer.

Technically nitro cold brew's still black. It's just nitro shot through the I

put lots of sweet cream in it and yeah, some other,

oh

Yeah.

Fair enough. Anyways, I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can your listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah, appreciate it. Pows.com is a place for anybody to come learn, experience and connect with Native American culture. And we serve a lot of native people who are looking for ways to, stay connected with their culture, find out about powwows happening across North America, but then we also help educate people that are just interested in the culture through articles and podcasts, live videos, things like that. So powwows are open to the public and we encourage everybody to go and attend one. And that's what we want to do, is just to help everybody experience the culture.

Got you. So email marketing, I always call it the dinosaur of marketing because it's one of the older things in digital market, I should say, because we have traditional marketing as well. So how do you build a community through emails specifically? 'cause people don't really associate those two together a lot of times.

Yeah. And I think that's a big mistake. And right now I hear so many people say, email's been around forever, it's, it, like you said, this is the dinosaur, right? But I think now more than ever, it's so important with the algorithm changes on social media, Pinterest and YouTube and all these things are changing so fast. And then YouTube is just killing people with their helpful content update and the AI overview and all this stuff, right? You cannot depend on all these tra traditional marketing channels that we've used for years. It's time to, if you haven't been to look back at email and e 'cause when you send an email, you know they're gonna get it. They may not open it right every time, it's gonna at least be delivered. And for me it was building community and email is something, I didn't always do well. It was something I discovered probably about five or six years ago when I made a real shift in my email. I. Instead of what I see so many people doing, and I was doing the same thing as just shouting at our users and sending these nice, fancy, laid out graphical emails and just blasting them with it. I changed my approach and now I'm sending text-based emails where I'm talking directly to people. I'm still putting links and encouraging people to click on things and go read other things, the. First part of my emails are me just talking to people, asking questions, and it is so fantastic. I just, I'm just telling my wife, I got a really cool email a few minutes ago because somebody replied to my message. We've had four or five email exchanges today that is building community. It's getting those responses. Community is not always a Facebook group where it's many people talking to many people. Community is just, if you have a group of people who have that sense of belonging, and you can create that in email, but it, but you have to, there's a right way to do it, and you really have to work at it.

To be fair, community has been around since the dawn of mankind, basically because we always needed each other to survive. So funny part is community is a bigger dinosaur than the email marketing is right now. 'cause it's the oldest thing you could ever do. Do you change that mindset? Because I, a lot of people, a lot of marketers don't think about that as well. We just think about we need these shiny graphics, we need a video, we need something to consume. So they'll consume. So they may open our actual email because we think in that like type of way, we don't think about a two-way communication. So how do you retrain your thoughts just on that?

You asked me earlier, tell you a little bit about my background. So yes, I worked with powwows for more than 20 years now. I'm adding on and not shifting, but adding on the, helping some people achieve their business goals with email marketing and building community and so many people that I'm working with right now and over the last few months. That is their struggle, right? And so one of the things I like to start with, and I think is an, it takes a little bit of work, but is really easy way to build community with email, is to stop worrying about what you're gonna send out every week. Stop worrying about those broadcast messages and let's figure out what your audience wants from you, right? So if you are a a travel blogger, right? Maybe some people are coming to you because you have really great content about Paris, right? Maybe you've got several posts on the restaurants and the attractions visiting Disneyland, Paris, or whatever it is. You've got some really great content and people want that. So let's figure out a way to develop an email series about that group of content, and let's write it in a way that you're talking to people, not just shouting at them, but giving them that information in a really direct, conversational way. Asking questions along the, through the emails. Having this, exchange with people and thus create those kind of email series that will build community faster than these broadcast messages that we're sending out every week. And, if you're somebody who's depending on your ad revenue, you need the clicks back, it's, you're gonna get lots and lots of clicks from this kind of stuff because you are delivering the information they want. So that, that's where I start people and get them to see those email shifts. So many people, start with Figure, trying to figure out like, what am I gonna send every week? And maybe they Tie it to their RSS feed and it just automatically sends out the latest podcast or the latest article. That's not the way you do email, right? You've got to put a little time into it. You gotta put yourself into it. Just what people tell you, if you're going to be posting on Instagram or TikTok, you gotta be your authentic self. And sometimes that means writing your authentic self, if not just showing up on video.

So it could almost be like splitting up the email marketing kind of campaign in different buckets like a Almost like one is like a problem solution for your community type of thing. So you're talking to your community, not at or a little bit at them, but you're still talking to them because you're solving a problem. They may or may not have a community spotlight, like something that makes them feel connected, and then you could broadcast maybe another week and then you can do something else the next week after that.

And, look at your stats or look at the questions you're getting on social media or in your comments. What are people asking for If you're, if they're asking those same questions over and over again, then build that as an email series and answer those questions to deliver that content that they want in a conversational, direct way, and that's gonna build your community, right? You could be, you're going to be giving them what they want instead of just shouting these weekly broadcasts at them. You're gonna deliver the information they want when they want it.

And you can still like form templates around that too. Once you figure it out, 'cause it's, everything's new, but once you figure it out, you can build a template around like which ones you're gonna send out. Plus it helps them go, oh, someone's actually listening to me. The person that I'm watching is actually listening.

Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's so repeatable because I'm working with some recipe bloggers and. If you've got different buckets of, whether it's your grilling recipes or your holiday recipes, all of those can be little email series that you can get people to opt into it in different ways and you, and they come to your website because they're looking for your Turkey recipe for Thanksgiving and you're able to deliver them a five email series on here are my best holiday cooking tips that's going to get them to really engage with you and, It's gonna perform better than just getting that next weekly email of, Hey, here's my new recipe. Because yeah, that's good, but you're not really in, you're not gonna get them to engage and open with it and really wanna read it because they ne maybe didn't want your newest recipe. They wanted this specific grouping of recipes.

Yeah, and like for coffee shops, you could do one thing about what's the different types of brews, like which ones have more caffeine than the other one. Like you could build that community around just coffee or if you have a product, maybe someone, maybe you keep on seeing the reoccurring questions or issues they may be having. And then your email blast is, we're just gonna go through these and step by step if we have to through an email. But it is still some talking to them. Yes, exactly. And so how do you get started? Because it seems like a lot of times when people start this, they don't really get a lot of community feedback and they're like this is a failure. I shouldn't do this anymore. Nobody's listening. Like I. W what type of encouragement could you give people that are just starting out or maybe want to do this? Because like I said, a lot of times you start something and you get no responses.

Oh, for sure. And email marketing. I is a lot slower to see success and to see results than posting on social media. And, if we post, a TikTok, we're gonna get views and comments right away, probably. Email's a little different. First thing you're gonna have to do is be a little bit patient, right? You're gonna have to set some realistic goals. And look, if you have 10 people subscribed to your list and you're getting a 50, 60% open rate, that's really good. Now let's just get more people on the list and keep performing it. It's not about having the big, huge numbers. It's Whoever, whatever numbers you have, it's making sure you're delivering value to them. And then as you grow, you're just going to, it's just gonna scale up from there, right? So it's really concentrate on getting value to the people you do have, and it'll build from there.

And what would be some of the key elements to put in with this community focused email?

Yeah. So some of the things I love to do is, I have a email series on what to expect to powwow. 'cause people are a little apprehensive that, if they're wanting to go this, they have a lot of questions. And in the first email I say here's what a powwow is and here are the things you're gonna see. And over the next few days I'm going to give you this. But before we get to any of that. I have a question for you, and so I ask 'em a little question and I get responses, and here's Here's the thing, people forget. Another thing people forget in email marketing, you put that question in there and you get a reply in your inbox. You gotta answer it. That's where you build the community. Don't just let those sit there and pile up and don't answer 'em. You've gotta follow up with it. What, whether or not, as you scale, you maybe you template that or you, maybe you have a response or whatever, that's fine. But just make sure you're replying to those emails and responding to people. I had a good example today. I had somebody write me and they were not happy with something on the website. They were frustrated. And after about five or six emails, they were like, you delivered. Thank you. You actually listened to what I had to say. We had this nice conversation and now she's okay, I get it. Thank you. That's what you can do with community, right? Because you're gonna respond to people and you're gonna have these conversations and it will build.

And if you are actually busy, just actually reply, Hey, I'm a little busy. Lemme gimme a few hours and I'll get back to you.

Sure. People understand that, right? Nobody, if somebody replies to you at two o'clock in the morning, they don't expect you to respond right away, but you respond within a day or two, right? And I think it's gonna be, you're gonna see huge results when you start actually engaging with your readers. Same thing, if you're posting on Facebook and you're not responding or not engaging in the comments. Your page may feel a little empty and not active. Same thing with email. You've got to, you got to engage and keep talking to 'em.

And is there a way to maybe dealing with some of the spam? Because for example, social media, there's always spam. If I post something on LinkedIn, I still get the podcast promoters trying to say, look, I'll offer you this. I have to block. And I'm like, that's not what I want.

Yes. You're gonna get some of that. You're gonna get Bot sign up for your email. All of that's gonna happen. I, there's and you're gonna get some people that are gonna just send you things that are out there. I've got a couple people now that respond to me almost daily, and it's, screens and screens of texts. Some of those, I don't know, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. It's just lots and lots of texts. Usually I'll just respond with, Hey, thanks for writing me back. I appreciate you being on the list. Thank you. And they list, they feel heard, right? You don't have to go through and answer every concern if they posted some kind of political treatise or whatever, you're gonna have some of that, right? But it's okay. You keep providing the content and the value that you project and you'll attract the right of people eventually, the, those people always. One of the things people get really scared of is unsubscribes. And people get really caught up on how many people are unsubscribing. If you get a high number of unsubscribes, maybe there's an issue or whatever but generally speaking, if people are unsubscribing, it's good, right? Because they weren't your people. So just keep delivering your message and the right people will get there eventually, and you'll snowball from there. But yeah it's okay. They'll eventually go away.

It'll help with your numbers too. If they unsubscribe, then your numbers of open rates goes up because, 'cause if they're never actually opening your emails, they're just help, they just don't help your open rates as it is anyway.

Yeah, exactly. And it can cost you more, beginning of this week, I purged my email list. I, I do it about once a quarter and I unsubscribe to about 16,000 people. That's a big number, but yeah, it's, it's gonna help with my open rates. They hadn't opened anything in more than 30 days. Get 'em off the list, stop paying for 'em.

Got you. And moving on to like the list breakdown, maybe just do that too with a list of super users or super community or whatever you wanna put it like. Put them in different lists, and then you can highlight maybe eventually in one email, like the ones that are the super users, and then build even more of a collective through that. Because again, if this is all community, you want to highlight those that actually care the most.

Exactly. And I've got several people that respond. Every time I send an email, they respond. And you get to know them, you can actually, respond and call them by name. Like one guy, he responds all the time. I know what he does for a living. I know where he works and where he, he goes and hangs out in his, so when he replied with something today, I was like, Hey man, I know you're busy doing your job here. Hope to see you at the next event, whatever. And because you start forming those relationships and you're able to. To actually have conversations. It's amazing. It, because it's not this big faceless void that sometimes it feels like when you're on social media and you're just talking to nobody you're actually talking to people on email. It's really cool. I love, I've loved that part of it.

And have you found different types of content help with the community? Not just the broadcasting, but the community based thing? Have you seen that, you said text, does video, maybe personalize one for that specific email work could work? Is there a way to vary it up a little bit too?

Yeah, I think it, I think everybody should test all of those kinds of contents. It, for my emails, the things that work best are pictures and links. Other than me just, being direct with text my users like video, but they're just gonna go to my YouTube channel and watch my videos there. They're sending, I. Videos and email doesn't always perform well. So try everything right? Try sending out an email, try or a video in the email. Try sending out some photos, maybe, try all kinds of different things and see what your audience responds to. Everybody's audience can be slightly different and just find out what it is and again, just keep delivering that value to them, the content they want. You keep delivering on that. Listen to their feedback. Keep revising. I, I was working with a client the other day and She's oh my God, I, I don't know if this is the, this opt-in is the right thing. I was like, okay let's let it run for a week and we can adjust it. Nothing in email is permanent, right? You can adjust what you're saying. You can adjust your opt-ins, all this stuff. You can make adjustments along the way. Just listen to your users and take their feedback and adjust.

And what specific metrics should markers be looking at? We know, we talked about unsubscribe and open rates, but what specifically? 'cause open rates have changed largely because of Apple, but it's changed where open rates are inconsistent about specifically what's going on. So any community based emails are gonna be different because you're not really sending them to sell something. You may have a link for it, but it's not specifically about selling something.

For me, the things I'm looking at is I want to continue to see people subscribing every day. Even if there are days where I have more unsubscribed and I have new subscribed, that's okay. As long as I'm still seeing new people coming and opting into my email series, like we have several different ones. So as long as I'm continuing to see that and, again, my most valuable feedback is that I continue getting Messages in my inbox. If I go, if I stop, there's one particular email going back to the what to Expect, the Traverse powwow. If I stopped getting responses to that first email, then I would know something is wrong and I need to go and look. But as long as I'm getting, 10 or 15 or 20 of those a week, I. It's working right? That's the metric that matters to me is that people are actually reading it and responding to it. And if they're doing that, then your click through rates and your open rates and all these other metrics that we like to look at will be good. But for me it's, I wanna make sure that they're actually engaging and responding to me. 'cause then I know they read it.

Yeah, so like community based stuff, you should really just focus in on the reply rate, I guess is the best way of saying it. And not the open, open rates too, but the reply rate is more important than the open rates. But even though they go hand in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Mean, yeah. Think about it, the emails you get every day it, how many emails do you get a day from Amazon? And you probably open them and look at 'em, but did you really engage with it? Probably not. You just glanced at it. So for me, when I see people are responding to certain emails, I was like, I'm, it's one, yes, they opened it. Two, they were looking at it, but three, they were actually reading it enough to see that I ask a question and hit the reply button. That's when I know that I'm, I've got something working.

And how does automation play in with the community management of this, because. Usually it's gonna be markers in a small or one man team. So how do you like, utilize being authentic or actually caring about your community, but still automating it so you're not overwhelmed?

Yeah, there's a couple things I do. Like I do send a broadcast message every Tuesday that is here is all the new content we published this week, right? Whether sometimes it's five articles or tens, sometimes maybe two. The bulk of that email, which is, here's the headline, here's the picture from it, and here's an excerpt of the article. Click here to read more. The bulk of that email is written by a va, and so the VA comes every Monday. He writes it, it's ready for me on Tuesday. Tuesday I go in and I add, I write the introduction. I write my piece at the top again to make it personable. It's talking to them directly and then I can send it. So that saves me a lot of time. Yeah, that's something I could do, but that's an hour that I can Be doing something else. So that helps a lot. And then of course, like I said, I think the most important thing with especially establish establishing yourself in email marketing is building these series and building some automation around getting people into these series. And then they get a set number of emails. You spend the time upfront to do that, and then it just becomes a more passive thing. And it's just, your focus then is just getting people into those sequences and then they'll just churn through 'em.

Is there any effective way use turning the casual subscribers into the community member? Because I'm pretty sure you get a l you're gonna always get more casual than you are gonna get your actual community. So is there any way of plucking some of those into it, or is it just gonna be persistence and just the slow, like you're the tortoise, not the hare.

So again I think the value is really in these email series. So one of the things I do is occasionally in a broadcast message, I may say something like, Hey are you interested in going to a powwow? Have you never been before? I've got a whole series about going to your first powwow. Click here and I'll send you all that. And so it's again, figuring out. Maybe they came into your email list through another way, but if I can get them into that series and answer all their questions, alleviate their fears or whatever, then I know that they're going to really be more engaged because I deliver the content. Like we dig a little bit deeper. So if somebody comes to my page and there are. They've never been to a powwow, right? And they, but they're interested and they didn't come through that what to expect. They're gonna get this broadcast message that's gonna be all this jargon and stuff about powwows. It's just gonna go over their head, right? So if I can get them in that other sequence first or even later, then the broadcast messages become a little bit more relatable. They understand what's going on once I give them some background information. So it's still getting people, getting them going through all the The same, onboarding task, getting everybody to have kind of that same base of knowledge. Then I find that they stay around.

And is there any like common mistakes to avoid? Because like I said, if people are new to this, everybody's gonna make a mistake. But is there some things that they can help avoid making mistakes? 'cause everybody's gonna make a mistake once in a while.

I just put out a YouTube video of my three most common mistakes I see people make with email marketing. First thing I can't tell you I did an I spoke at a conference last year and afterwards I audited a bunch of people that were at the conference. I did an audit on their website about how they were what their strategy for email marketing was. And almost every person who's Hey, I want you to look at my website. I really wanna grow my list. And you look at their website and their offer for, join my email list is down in the footer and it's just a form that says name, email. It doesn't say why they should subscribe. It doesn't, and it's down in the footer. Nobody's gonna see that. Or worse if people are putting it in the sidebar. So users looking at it on phones, miss it completely. So you've got to, you've gotta ask, actually ask people for their email and tell them why they should subscribe. That's huge. And that's probably the most common mistake I see is that people on, they spend so much time making their websites, the, these great dynamic and beautiful things. And then the email is their afterthought and it's just put somewhere down here. I even saw one, I was work working with somebody last week and I saw their, on their website, they had, a popup, right? And it said, I. It was for getting people on their list. It popped up and literally all it said was name and email. Submit. It didn't even say subscribe to my list. There was nothing. It was just two form fields. Name and email address with a button. Yeah. Why am I gonna click that? I'm just going to exit out of that and keep on moving. Yeah, and so that's the other mistake is a lot of people make is they then their next step, is to try to figure out what the lead magnet's gonna be. And people will spend hours and hundreds of dollars sometimes building these fancy PDFs. This a hundred page PDF with all their best tips and tricks or recipes, whatever it is. And those are great, and you can get people to subscribe to that, but I don't think you need to, I think you can. Like for me, hey. Are you scared of going to your first powwow? Have you got lots of questions? Click here and I'll answer all of 'em. That's enough, right? Because that's what they're coming here for a question. If I answer their question in email, they're gonna gimme their email address, right? So that, that's another one.

So it's almost like if you're gonna build a website, maybe go through it yourself first and see if everything works correctly, because you're right. If it just said, name, email, I'd be like, for what? What? Why do I need to do this?

Right.

So are we gonna see email marketing become more community based in the future? Is it gonna be more about that because we're all searching for community because of the past four years and being locked up and then missing that community side of, because we're all humans, we all wanna be part of something. Are we gonna see more email marketing become shift to that? Because we have social media, we have algorithms, and they don't They don't really form a community as well anymore as they used to when they were new. Are we gonna see email marketing or emails in general, just I guess bridge that gap?

I hope so. What I'm afraid of and what I'm seeing some people doing is using chat GPT or some other AI to write their email messages, and yes, that's better than the fancy, salesy Graphic email, but at some point people can see past that and it doesn't it doesn't always relate to people and talk to, it doesn't. Get people to want to interact with the, so I'm afraid we're gonna see a lot more of that first, I think if you want to really stand out in email marketing, if you can find your voice and your personality and put that into emails, I think you're going to kill it in email because you're going to be doing something that just not many people are doing.

Gotcha. And people are listening to this and wondering where can they find you online to learn more about email marketing?

Yeah, so please I'd love to help you out. If you're looking to level up your email marketing, you can come over to paul gatter.com. I have some coaching there and some courses. And if you're looking to just, learn some of the email tools that I'm using, I, I got a video on that, my favorite email tools, and that's paul gatter.com/email tools and that'll get you started with some of the ti tips and tricks I use to grow my email list.

Alright, any final thoughts for listeners?

Yeah. Remember, Community is not just a Facebook group. It's not just TikTok page. Community is talking with people. So use your email as community.

All right. Thank you Paul for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on email marketing.

Thank you

and thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave a five star review it really just help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry. Alright guys, stay safe. Get to understanding your email marketing, build that community as well as you can, and see you next week later.