How to Use Engaging Email Strategies for Sewing Business Success with Kristen Kemp

In this episode of Made with MV, Kristen Kemp, shares a unique email engagement strategy inspired by Erin's emails. Kristen focuses on creating a seamless experience for subscribers by allowing them to click a link and be redirected back to MemberVault, where a simple page with an embedded gif awaits, eliminating the need for redirection to Giphy. Join us as Kristen unveils how this strategy can optimize the email engagement process for course creation and enhance the overall user experience within the MemberVault collaborative group.

Key Topics & Highlights

• Switch from an inadequate email tool to ConvertKit for improved communication with the audience
• Observation of effective engagement strategies from Erin's emails
• Highlighting the use of engaging questions and clickable links in emails to generate interest
• Comparison between genuine engagement and forced sales tactics

Connect with Kristen
MemberVault Site
Facebook
Instagram

Episode Full Transcript

Kristen Kemp [00:00:01]:
Hi there, my name is Kristen Kemp. I sew for a living doing clothing alterations and I work with sewists who are building their alterations skills. I spend most days educating clients that come to our shop for clothing alterations that there's nothing wrong with their bodies. Our clothing doesn't actually come shaped like humans. As Boomer generation is leaving the workforce, it has become increasingly apparent that I must have a process for teaching alteration skills to anyone that I might want to hire. This trade is lacking workers, and so in the summer of 2020, my brilliant idea was that I could offer digital apprenticeships to teach folks who wanted to start their own sewing businesses. I joined MemberVault in late 2020 and I've been soaking up information on course creation since then. There are so many moving parts along the way to coordinate, but a super important part of digital courses is being able to connect with your audience so that you don't waste a bunch of time creating something that absolutely no one wants.

Kristen Kemp [00:01:16]:
I'm excited to share my take on a strategy that I actually gleaned from Aaron's emails to the MemberVault crowd, and it makes engagement a little easier for your email list subscribers. Full transparency I'm relatively new to the emailing my subscribers game. I would say that I've been dabbling and learning up to this point, and finally I've made some strategic moves in our brick and mortar store to be able to really lean into the course creation space this year because I really want to make my dream of doing digital apprenticeships for sewists into a reality. Up until late fall last year I had an email tool and let me tell you, I just couldn't stand it. I've been using it for the last couple of years, but there were just so many things that you would have to do to do simple tasks. You had to click in 9000 different little places and it isn't mobile responsive and that doesn't work for me. So on Black Friday, I made the switch to convertkit and I'm emailing my audience more and more to build connections and dialogue with them. The goal is to build a library of skills that I want to build while taking into consideration what they actually want to learn.

Kristen Kemp [00:02:41]:
So I'm not wasting my time building this big, huge thing that no one will buy, because ultimately I want to support people so that they can be successful in their own skills with a dramatically reduced trial and error period. Something I noticed Erin was doing were these little tricks for engagement in her emails. This one trick stuck out to me because it was so fun just as a recipient of her emails, it was so fun to respond to her questions and the way to answer them made me really want to do the thing. Here's how it works. You ask your audience a question and then you put some links right in the email and they can click on them to indicate their answer and essentially that's it. Now, when I've seen other people use a version of this strategy, it's been linked to a sales page, and then you're immediately feeling like a used car salesman is trying to get you to buy, I don't know, a timeshare or something. It feels really bait and switch, like you thought you might get to connect with the writer of the email, but all they care about is your answer, and then somehow they've turned into a door to door evangelist and all you're good for is being converted into a sale. The vibe it gets off to get sent straight to a sales page is so icky when you're a subscriber because you give them your time and attention in this email, hoping to make a connection, and somehow the writer leaves you feeling like you weren't worth connecting with and you're being asked to pay for this disappointing and disconnecting experience.

Kristen Kemp [00:04:33]:
The thing that Erin did that made me want to click was brilliant. Erin asked her question and then she had her links for the answers so that we could just click without having to go anywhere else or do anything. And then she added a little sentence that said something like, you'll know that you did it right when you see the gif I sent you. What I like about this strategy is that it immediately takes the pressure off of the idea that clicking this is going to send you to a sales situation. It's like creating a big flashy red button that you just have to press. I immediately wanted to see the Gif Aaron had picked out, and because now there was suspense and anticipation. What gif is it going to be? This wasn't going to be a sales page. And this link went directly to a cute gif inside the website.

Kristen Kemp [00:05:35]:
Giphy I feel like a lot of the lessons I've learned in the last couple of years are things that I've observed organically by being a customer of other people's courses and really paying attention to which onboarding experiences felt rewarding and dopamine inducing, like it came with whipped cream and a cherry on top. And that's what this strategy felt like for me as a user. I knew that I was being funneled into answering feedback questions and I happily clicked the link. Anyway, the only thing about this process for me that felt a little weird was that this strategy dumped me out into Giphy. The first time I saw Erin use this strategy, I remember thinking, well, I loved this, but it's OD that this is where I ended up. So here's how we're going to take this fantastic email strategy of Erin's a step further and really optimize this thing. And it's so simple you might have already guessed it. One of the sayings we have over in the MemberVault collaborative group that's repeated often is how your product page is like a binge and buy area.

Kristen Kemp [00:06:53]:
You share your course with your audience and then the default homepage is your marketplace so that people can poke around and get curious about what else it is that you have to offer. MemberVault added the ability to create web pages in early 2022 it's March of 2024 at the time of this recording and the features on the page builder are so easy now that you can make a pretty simple page and embed that gif that's suited to your needs. And that's how this works. Now let me walk you through exactly how I'm headed to use this in my very next email. And the timing of this is really perfect because right now Erin is walking the MemberVault account owners through some tried and true email strategies and how to optimize our accounts. I'm thinking about offering a product to my audience that is a collaboration with another sewist in a topic that's adjacent to my niche. It isn't alterations, but it is sewing related. And I recognize that this product won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Kristen Kemp [00:08:14]:
However, I do know that there are people on my list that are there from a similar collaboration I did in a similar niche that's also an adjacent topic. That one was also sewing, just not alterations related. Now, I know that this topic deviates from the focus of my main body of courses, and if that's not what my audience came for, the last thing I want to do is have them feel like they were tricked. So before I exhaust the people in my email list, I'm going to ask, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. Is this something you want more information on? And then I'll briefly explain that this is like one of those notes from middle school where it says do you like me? Check yes or no. The words yes or no in my email will either be buttons or simple hyperlinks. I haven't really decided which yet. Now, over in my MemberVault I've already created two invisible web pages.

Kristen Kemp [00:09:28]:
One of them is titled yes and the other one is titled no. And when I say invisible, I don't have them listed as active because they don't really need to be indexed on search engines. They won't be a part of the navigation of my site anywhere. They only exist to have a place where people can land so that I can collect the data off of their clicks over in my email tool. The pages are very simple pages that have a short sentence that says thank you for answering the question with gif images. One of them that I picked is David Tennant as Doctor who and the other one is Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown from back to the Future. And both of these gifs just say thanks on the customer end. That dopamine hit of getting to see the GiF is going to happen on my website.

Kristen Kemp [00:10:30]:
So not only am I baking in the feel good vibes into this recipe, now they're going to be back in my site. MemberVault just had a feature release of communities at the end of this last month, so we really want our users to experience that. Our sites are a place that they want to hang out in or check when they're bored or in between things during the day. So any way that we can get them to pop over and feel good about it really helps people feel comfortable, like we're creating this space just for them. On the back end, there's some cool things that we can do with the fact that they clicked this link. And this is going to depend on which email tool you're using in Convertkit. I've noticed that with link clicks I can tag my subscribers based on which link they clicked. So everyone, that is a yes about this product that I'm considering.

Kristen Kemp [00:11:32]:
Number one, it provides validation for that idea, but also it lets me know who my potential buyers might be. So I'll be tagging the subscribers who click yes to this topic so that I can easily send them the follow up emails that talk more about the thing. That way I'm not exhausting the people that are not interested in it at all. I'll probably add this question into my next few emails just because I don't open all the emails that I get myself and if that's how I use email, not everybody is going to open every single email. So I want to give the opportunity for people to opt in a few times, but I don't want to overdo it. So you really can get as fancy with this as you want. You can set up a whole sequence of emails that these folks would get sent to, which might be good for a stage that's a little bit further down the road than where I am right now. Definitely something to consider though, because then the tools are doing the selling for you rather than you feeling like you have to repeat yourself all the time.

Kristen Kemp [00:12:48]:
I would say that the things to watch out for in this strategy are really the same as any other strategy. You don't want to use it too often because people won't necessarily want to have to click every time they come to your emails. You don't want to give too many options for them to choose from because then you'll overwhelm them with too many choices. Make sure the positive experience is really what shines through so that from the user's perspective, it's really a dopamine inducing experience rather than you doing this strategy just because it's easy for you. That's about all I have for today. I would absolutely love to see your links for how you use this strategy. You can share in the MemberVault collaborative at Membervault Co. Collab with your takeaways from listening and let us know if you're going to try it yourself.

Kristen Kemp [00:13:52]:
You can often find me hanging out over there in the MemberVault collaborative group and in my own MemberVault at ww projectsowingvault.com.