The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 99. Creating an Intentional Experience With Email Marketing with Kyle Adams

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

We have Kyle Adams, ConvertKit’s Creator Growth Manager on the podcast to share more about email marketing and why it’s such a crucial marketing tool. He shares more about the direct communication that email marketing provides along with higher conversion rates compared to other platforms such as social media. He shares the importance of providing valuable content to your subscribers and repurposing your content to reach a wider audience. This was a powerful conversation with Kyle on something we believe is so crucial when blogging! Tune in and let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsConvertKit is the email marketing hub for creators like you. Check out our affiliate link for more information.Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode99

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Hey, everybody. We are so excited today to bring you Kyle Adams. Kyle Adams is the Creator Growth Manager at ConvertKit. And he helps some of the world's leading email list operators continue to find success. He also shares everything he knows through Creator Glue, which is a newsletter where he shares powerful insights about building an email list packed with super fans who read, buy, share, and stick with you. We are so excited to have you today. Welcome, Kyle.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah. So before we jump into everything email marketing, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be sort of an expert, I guess, when it comes to email marketing? Yeah, it's kind of funny. I feel like I fell into this a little bit. But it all kind of started around 2013 or so, actually. So it's been like a decade now. I started my own list. I had no clue what

I was doing. I just started sending emails out to people, writing a blog post, sharing it through an email. And that was about the extent of it. And as I went on, I started growing my own business. My focus at the time was design and illustration. So I was doing design work for clients. And I really wanted my work to be out there and seen and also to help other people who are wanting to do the same thing I was doing. And email really helped me do that. I saw the significance of email. And as time went on, I met some people, you know, in not only in the design sphere, but also kind of business, entrepreneur type people, and came across somebody who was a friend of a friend of Nathan Berry. And so Nathan had just started ConvertKit.

And it was like fairly early stages. And I remember he kind of pitched it to this little community we were in. And I thought it was really cool. And I was excited about moving over there. And I eventually moved my email list over. And then in 2017, Nathan put a tweet out and just said, Hey, we're looking for someone to join ConvertKit in a contract position to help with support. And I'd never helped with support. But I had clients and I had customers, because I built a course and I built some products at that point. And I thought, okay, this would be great,

I can learn how to interact with my customers. But I can also help convert kit because I think convert kits awesome. And I'd love to have a foot in the door over there and meet them and like, just see what that's all about. And so in 2017, I did that part time to kind of supplement some of my income and like continue to grow what I was doing. And that was great. It was like, actually, over time, I continued to more and more get invested in that. It went more and more full time with that, but it was a contract role. And I knew that long term, I couldn't necessarily do that and sustain my family. We had our daughter in 2018. And so, of course, like all these new things are in my head about I need to be supporting us a little more.

And then 2020 rolled around. And as we all know, 2020 was not a great year for anybody. But in December of 2020, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. And that's like shook our family to the core. And it had me thinking even more about I need to really like step up what I'm doing here because I don't know, like she was at the time teaching school. And she was like our insurance at the time, you know. And so I thought, I really need to be there to help us because I don't know how long she's going to be able to do this. She's going through chemo and radiation and all the things. And so I took a position at a small startup as a director of marketing, which was kind of a mistake because it sounded great and it had a great salary attached to it, but it was a startup

and a startup. I basically was the director of marketing or I basically was the marketing team, I should say. And so there was a lot of demand on my time, a lot of things I needed to do as well as helping her through her treatment. She at one point fell and broke her elbow and kneecap at the same time. So there was a lot of extra help that needed to happen there. And yeah, it's just kind of overwhelming time. I always finish the story and never give the ending. And she is in remission. She's fine. She's doing well. I'm so glad that you said that because I'm like, please, please, please have this be a happy ending. Yeah, I always go through it and I know she's fine.

And then I forget to say like, yeah. Important part of the story. Yes. So 2021 was the year that we went through most of that. And near the end of the year, I got a message from a coworker from ConvertKit, somebody who had joined the team full time. And he said, Hey, there's a position open that I think you'd be good for. And at the time, we called it account management. And we've since changed it to creator growth managers, mostly because that's what we're doing. We're trying to help people grow. And I think account management has like, a lot of, I don't know, different companies

have those and they have different implications to them. And we're just trying to help creators grow their lists and use ConvertKit the best way they can. And so I applied for that. Of course, the rest is history. I'm working with ConvertKit now. But email has just been a huge part of any success I've seen as a creator. And I know success for many others, email has been a very significant thing. And so when I joined ConvertKit, I was helping these, and still am, helping some of our larger accounts like 60,000, 100,000, 500,000 subscriber lists. And it's great, but I realized that I really want to share that knowledge with other people. I don't want to just keep that for myself or like only help these large accounts because

they've already got a lot of things figured out. I'm more so learning from them in some ways. And they're kind of learning how to use ConvertKit to do the things they need to do. And so I'm taking a lot of that knowledge and putting that into Creator Glue that you mentioned earlier. I launched that earlier this year. And it's done really well so far. So that's a summary of where I'm at today and how I got there. I love your story because there are so many different paths that you took. And I think that a commonality with somebody listening to this and you and Jennifer and I is that as an entrepreneur, that's what it looks like, quite honestly.

And I love that you said, well, that startup might have been a mistake, but you learned something there. You learned that that's not how you wanted to spend your time or how you wanted to support your family. And I think that just as an entrepreneur, we're going to have instances like that. And then we're going to have other instances that light us up. And we're like, that's what I'm supposed to be doing more of. And so you found that with newsletters and helping these larger accounts. But what I really love about ConvertKit is you're not just about helping the big guys. You're also about helping the little guys too. And that's really what we want to make sure that we discuss today is a lot of people who are listening are beginner to intermediate. So they might have 100 people on our list, 200 people. They might have a couple thousand. Some might have even more than that. But those big guys who have 60, 100, 500,000, whatever, they all started with

just one subscriber. We all did. We all started with that just one subscriber. And each and every subscriber is really, really important. And I want you to tell the story of why a subscriber is so important. What does that mean for a business? Not just a blogging business, but any business. What does email really provide? Because I think that that is something that is lost right now because there's such a heavy focus on social media. Yeah. It's funny because email, I remember maybe, I don't know, maybe five, six years ago, even email, people started saying, especially in the technology field, it was like, emails, this outdated old thing, social is the new way to go. And now you see all these newsletters popping up. And emails become the hot new thing again. But I would argue that it, you know, unless

something majorly changes, and email is no longer a thing, email will always be relevant. It just depends on what the trends are of what you're hearing about the most. But email really cuts through the noise of social. I think that's important to think about is how many things you see when you get onto social, when you get onto Instagram, for example, how many things do you see? And how often do you really see one person? Because we get caught up in this idea of we create content, we put it out there, and everyone that's following us is going to see it. And that's just not the case. Very few people.

If only that were. If only that were the case. Yeah, exactly. And that's the assumption is everyone's going to see this. And everyone who's following me is a real person who will actually engage with everything that I do. And it's just not the case. But with email, you have this chance to get into somebody's inbox. And yes, there may be more noise in the inbox right now, which is part of what I hope we talked through today is like cutting through that noise a little bit, but there's a little bit of noise in the inbox, but you've, you've had somebody give you access to something that they don't give everyone access to. They're not as, I'll say, follow happy as they are on social media with email lists.

You're coming to their inbox, you're cluttering up their inbox, quote unquote, and they're not going to just let anyone in there. And so you have this deep connection opportunity. And it also removes your reliance with others, with other platforms, I should say, because you, I really don't like the term like own your audience. I hear people saying that like you don't own the audience, but you do own the ability to move that audience wherever you want to. So if you're not happy with the platform that you're on, where you're sharing emails, you

can move that somewhere else. You have full rights to send emails to those subscribers anytime you want. If you're on Instagram or YouTube or X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it now, they make their own rules. They decide what to do. They decide who gets to see your content, when they get to see your content, and how often they see your content. Whereas with email, you set those boundaries and you land in the inbox when you want to land in the inbox. And you have control over moving that to different platforms. If the platform you're on doesn't do something you want it to do or changes the rules on you, you have the freedom to move. And the last thing I want to mention is that it's converts much better than any other channel,

partially because it's that, like, like I said, it's a little bit more of an intimate thing. You're in their inbox. They've given you access to that. And you can write these emails one-to-one rather than on social where you're kind of trying to appeal to a mass audience. You still have kind of a mass audience in email, but you can be a little bit more direct and like, it doesn't feel as weird for you to seem personable. Like, it's me to you type thing. And it converts a whole lot better than social for many of the reasons we talked about as well. And so what I wanted to ask you was, these people are voluntarily, they're having to take an action to be able to put on your email list. And you've worked with lots of different creators, you've had your own email list, etc. What do you see as being the biggest incentive that gets somebody to take that action to sign up for an email list? And is it easier from like one platform or another? Or can you have like a strategy from basically social media or a blog or all these other things? And is that the ultimate goal is to get them on that email list if at all possible? Yeah, from from my perspective, it's get them on the email list. Like that is your should be your number one goal. Even if you run a blog and that's your thing that you're focused on as a blog, or I would say almost anything, if you have them on

an email list, it's so much easier to get awareness of things that you're doing. And as far as getting them over there, I hate to say it depends, but in some ways, I think it does depend to a degree. but in some ways, I think it does depend to a degree. I know that incentives have been a thing for a while of like offering a free download or a free checklist or something like that. But I think I would take into consideration what your audience is really needing and what they'll actually use as well. Like you can offer a free PDF file. To be honest, most people are probably going to think that sounds great. They're going to sign up, they're going to download it, and it's going to sit in a folder for the next five years.

And eventually they'll delete it because they don't remember where they got that from. That's probably what's going to happen with most of those things. So I would say a really good incentive if you're going to go that route of offering something free is to look for something that's useful. Like I know checklists are really cool, especially with things like I don't know if you're familiar with notion, having a notion checklist or something that's actually interactive, I can use that and actually check them off. And it's not just a static image that they're downloading or something like that. Those sorts of things,

anything that's really actionable videos, stuff like that. But I've also seen a lot of success with just simply having the right proposition of what your content is going to be all about. And I think that's especially true with newsletters. And honestly, I I've learned the lines a little bit, because there's email marketing, and there's newsletters. And honestly, I think they're very similar. in many ways. I know some people have distinctions between those two things. But I love what Caitlin Burgoyne, she has an amazing newsletter called Why We Buy. It's one of my favorite newsletters ever. But she made the distinction between newsletters and email marketing. And she said, I loved her analogy,

that a newsletter is like a TV show. It's a constant thing that comes out. So if you're a blogger, for example, your articles could be your newsletter. That's the content that's flowing out. Your email marketing is the commercials. It's the things that kind of pull you to the side a little bit and try to connect you with a product or an idea or a service or something like that. But those can happen within your newsletter. So really, the two things can coexist and probably should to some degree. But yeah, that's kind of like, I guess, knowing what your audience really wants is the most important thing. And if you can connect them to your newsletter, I see a lot of success. For example, if you post on social, share something that will

be in your newsletter or is in your newsletter, and then link to it and say, Hey, I'd love for you to sign up for this if you've and sometimes like, to a degree that can be annoying. Don't do that every time you post something. But sometimes just say, Hey, by the way, I have this thing, just raising the awareness and letting people know. I think too often we focus on an incentive or something that somebody will see when they go to a website, but we forget to mention that the thing exists when we're sharing on other channels, like on social networks and stuff. We forget that we should mention this because people don't know about it. They don't just automatically know that you have this thing, even though you feel like you've talked about it a lot. Yes. I think that goes back to what you said towards the beginning was we have this assumption

that if we're on social, that everybody's seeing everything that we're doing and they're just not. Or all the people that come to your blog in a day are seeing exactly every single thing that you're doing and they're not. So it might feel like you're talking about it a lot. And I think that goes for what we include in our emails to our subscribers as well. Some subscribers, yes, they might read every single email and they might see every single thing that you've put out. And that is amazing. I mean, those are like our prized possessions, truly, if somebody is reading every single email. But it's that reminder that it's okay to say something more than once. And it's also okay to tell our community exactly what we want them to do. Do we want them to open this email?

Do we want them to go to a blog post? Do we want them to listen to this podcast? A lot of times people just need directed. So we'll use Spark as an example. You're on this email list because we teach people how to blog. We'll use Spark as an example. You're on this email list because we teach people how to blog. So we shouldn't feel guilty sending out something that is going to help people learn to start a blog. And I think oftentimes people have this kind of like, Oh, I don't want to bother them. I'm going to send too many emails and I'm going to bother them. And I think that we have to

connect back to our why and say, Who am I and who am I helping? And those people who have chosen, like you've mentioned, to enter into that kind of a relationship with you in your email list, they want the information that you're providing. And the best part is, is if they don't, then there's an unsubscribe button that there shouldn't be any emotion attached to. They can leave if they want to leave, but you can still provide the knowledge that they originally signed up for. Because if it's not helping them at that given time, it's still helping all the other people who are there to gather that information unapologetically. Yeah, I think that's so important to remember they chose where they're at.

Thinking of a newsletter or an email list like a store is interesting. Because if you think of it, let's just use a shoe store as an example. Like you go into a shoe store, you've voluntarily gone there, you said this looks interesting, you go into it, you know exactly what they're about. They're about shoes. If all of the employees in there saw you, or the owner, maybe it's just an owner. It's one person. And they say, well, I don't want to bother them. Just let them look at the shoes. I don't want to bother them. The person's going to leave and be like, well, I came in there to get advice about shoes,

but it seems like they didn't even want me in there. Like, that's such a good analogy. I've never heard it put that way before. Yeah, that really helps you reframe that. We do that all the time, right? People voluntarily come into this experience and then we say, well, I don't want to sell to them or I don't want to bother them. It's like, well, they're there because they need what you have to offer.

Right. If there's something that can help them, if there's something that you've made that can help them with something, why not offer that to them? If you don't, I argue that you're robbing them from that opportunity. at least say hi. I worked in retail in college and growing up and that was always just really important to me. Or if the cashier doesn't engage or... That's kind of a turnoff to me. It kind of leaves me feeling a little icky. And I have never thought of that in regards to your email list. So thank you for that analogy. I'm going to think about that a lot because I think that that's really important. Something I want to ask is this difference in like an RSS feed or an actual newsletter. So what is the difference in like

an RSS feed and then a newsletter? And are RSS feeds like outdated? Should we not be doing those? And do you encourage people to just go in this newsletter format? I really think the newsletter format is important because there's another component to people signing up to your email list. And that's that they assume, and rightfully so, that they're going to get something that they don't get elsewhere. And maybe to a degree they don't. Maybe you're sharing the same topics, you're sharing the same kind of content. In fact, I would say you probably should be. You don't have to reinvent the wheel with your newsletter, but there should be some feeling of uniqueness to it. And RSS feeds

to me just feel like the least effort way to create a newsletter. And yeah, I guess I'm taking a harsh stance on that, but it's just like, you're making a blog post, you're putting the blog post out there. And then it's just turning into an email and being sent to somebody. And to me, that feels a little too passive. It's a little too like, I don't really care that you're on my email list. I just want you to see the thing I made. And you also have to take into account the difference in those two formats. And it depends on what you're writing and how long you're writing is.

But if you have longer blog posts, people probably aren't going to read the entire blog posts in an email. They're probably going to read a short version of it, maybe. And so I like to suggest for blogs, especially, is to take the content you've made and write kind of why you made that content. So think about why did I write this thing? What do I think it's really significant for? And share that with your email list and then link to the blog post and say, here's where you can read about all these things. And that's sort of this behind the scenes thing that doesn't take you a lot of extra effort. You're just kind of journaling.

Here's why I made this post and why I think it's really helpful for you. And here's a link to it. And to me, that's much more of a connection. And in the past, when I was doing more of a blog-focused approach, that's how I started sending them. And that's when I saw the most engagement

from people saying, well, this is really interesting. I'm glad you shared that. It gives even more context to this post. I was really interested. And they feel like they got something that wasn't just a link to a page somewhere. And I think what I like about that is instead of having your email subscribers be an afterthought, you're actually putting them to the forefront because you're giving them a little bit of like insider information or a little background that you're not necessarily putting into your blog posts. And it might just even push them over

that edge of feeling just a little bit more connected with you in that circumstance. And then again, more likely, even if you gave them some good information, they're probably even more likely to click over and take a look at the full blog posts because they want to know even more about it. Yeah, I would say your star best readers of your blog should be on your newsletter or subscribe to your email list. And so if they're there and they're getting this info, that's who you should be focused on the most, even beyond your blog, which might feel weird, because if your blog is a big focus for you, it's like, well, this is my thing. But if your top, most engaged audience is an email, and that's how you're pushing traffic to your blog as well. Because every time you publish

a new email to this group of people who are your star audience over there, then they go and they bring traffic to your blog. They improve SEO and all these other things that you might be working on. They give you that boost. It's your own little club of the people who connect with you the most. And so always put email top priority, even though it feels like maybe the blog is the thing that you're putting the most work into? Well, I think the beautiful thing about blogging is that you can repurpose content in your email. You're once again going back to not everybody in your community sees everything that you create the second that you create it. And the second that you create a new

blog post and share it, hopefully you have new email subscribers who are just coming in. And the second that you create a new blog post and share it, hopefully you have new email subscribers who are just coming in. And if they're not in a welcome series or a nurture series or something yet, which we have other podcasts about those, but they want to be introduced to your content. So they want to know what is she doing or what is he doing right now, right away. And so getting them in the groove of what you are doing and what you're about and all of that, And so getting them in the groove of what you are doing and what you're about and all of that, there's nothing wrong with sending them something right away. So just reminding yourself once again, like you said, is they chose to be there. And so how can you get them engaged as quickly as possible? I think my biggest question and probably a question that people are asking

right now listening to is, how often should a newsletter go out? Is that something that it should be a weekly thing? It should be a monthly thing? Is it just when they create new content? I have an idea what you might say, but I kind of want to hear your take on it. Yeah, I personally recommend weekly as the most effective way to do it. Because let's go back to the analogy of a show, a TV show that you watch often. I know things are changing their streaming platforms. Now you can binge watch the entire season of something, but I'm old enough to remember TV when you had to wait each week, something new came out and there are still streaming platforms that do that. And so people are on this weekly rhythm. Like every Wednesday, I go to yoga or whatever.

Every Wednesday, I do this thing. Every Monday, I do this other thing. And people are on this weekly cadence. And so if you're doing monthly, it can work, okay. But people aren't going to remember, okay, it's the second week of the month. And on Wednesday, this thing's going to come from this person that I subscribed to five weeks ago or whatever. It's just probably not as likely to be something that's on the forefront of their mind. And part of the beauty of an email list is that you can stay top of mind

for people because they're even if they don't fully read what you send them, they still go through their inbox, they still clean out emails. They still see you. They see that you've shown up. And there's some significance to that. There's also some people who post daily stuff. It depends on your audience. Some people like that.

Some people don't. I personally am not a huge fan of that. Me neither. But I would say weekly is kind of the sweet spot of when you should post. In some cases, like biweekly, I've seen some people be really successful with that. A friend of mine actually started having this, like he'll post some blogs or stuff like that, and he'll share that once a week. But then on Fridays, he'll do this, like things, I forgot what he titled it, but like things that I'm enjoying right now, things that I love right now.

And he'll just, it's more of a short thing. And it's a list of stuff that he's seen that's relevant to his audience. It's products that are similar to the products he sells. And hey, these are really cool. You should check this out. And so it's just kind of a nice little Friday check-in thing that's exclusive for his list and isn't part of his blog. So it's something you can only get if you're on the list.

Email marketing is an essential piece of blogging. Growing your email list is just as important as SEO and keyword research in our opinion. And in order to grow your list, you need a reliable platform that will allow you to connect with your community and turn them into email subscribers. That's where ConvertKit comes in. ConvertKit is the go-to marketing hub for creators like you that helps you grow and monetize your audience with ease. ConvertKit allows you to grow your audience and reach, put your funnels on autopilot and earn an income with your email list, all with an easy to use platform that is approachable, even for beginners. Click the link in our show notes to learn more about the different

plans that ConvertKit has and how it can help you propel your business to the next level. I think that you're spot on there. And I think that we can overcomplicate it a lot. And I think that's a really simple way to think about it. And don't forget to repurpose that content for your newsletter. Think about how your audience and how your community can continue to learn from you with the content that you've already created, which just continues to give that content juice as well, because it's showing Google that it's still relevant. Yeah. In fact, I would say you should send things more than one time, which feels weird because you feel like I wrote this blog post, it's already been out there. But there's a few ways to tackle it. You could rewrite that post and make it a whole new post, but the same topic, or you can even share the exact same post again, because the truth is people aren't going to remember, you know, even a month from now that you wrote this thing that

you sent it. And for the ones who do remember that, they probably remember it because it was significant to them in some way. So seeing it again, is not this eye rolling thing. It's like, Oh, yeah, I loved this post. Like this was an amazing, I want to read it again. And they may not even remember they read it. They just remember the concept of what they read. So I definitely wouldn't be afraid to reshare things. Yeah, we've found that we're testing some things out just seeing if we can repackage some of our content as well. You know, now that we have a lot of blog posts and podcast episodes, we can find the ones that are more similarly related to each other and send those out as a list of here are three things you can

listen to this week, It will take you about an hour and here's what you'll learn. And so it takes things that were shared randomly and puts them in order and sends them back out. So we're going to test that out and see if that provides some value to our audience without having to do a ton of extra work other than just writing the email and thinking about what would really work well together for them. Yeah, we get on those content, the content hamster wheel, right? Like, just constantly making new things. And it doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of ways to repurpose to reuse things. I know this is getting this is getting a little into social, but I do think it's significant. I've started, I'll write a tweet

or something. I'm mostly on whatever we're calling it. I don't know, Twitter X, people are calling it different things. I'm mostly over there at the moment and I'll write something. And it's something that I actually want to eventually make into a newsletter. And that's why I think it's significant here. It's kind of testing an idea. It's like a, I think of social as my testing ground for what actually resonates with people and what can I write about in a longer form piece of valuable content. And so I'll write about something. And then I'll rewrite that three more times in the same sitting. That's four posts in one sitting. And it's also made me think through that concept four different times and rewrite it and rethink about it in that

moment. And then I scheduled those out. So a little behind the scenes, I have like on Twitter, I have things scheduled out through the end of the year into like next year. So the next three months are pretty well covered because I've just done this rewriting thing and I'm testing things out and seeing what works and what sticks. But the same thing can be true for more of a value piece of content, like a blog post, an email you sent out, repurpose that, rewrite it another time and send it out again because nobody notices and the people who do only notice because they loved it the first time. Yeah. I think this topic of repurposing content is just so valid and so relevant to any creator, quite honestly, because we do spend a lot of time creating this content. And however,

we can get somebody to see it, who it might impact, I think is important. And knowing that that might look different each and every time, it might just need to be packaged a little bit different. Like you've said, it might, you know know they might come in on a social media post they might come in from an email they might come in from the blog they might come in from pinterest that's the beautiful thing about blogging that that we think is that you write this long-form content and then you take a look at that and ask yourself okay like how else can i utilize this like what can i do to get more eyes on it and you know all these ways that we've mentioned, I think are really great ways to not have to reinvent the wheel and be able to keep you being creative. Because that's the whole point of this job that we've chosen.

And this passion that we have is in order to just stay passionate about what we're doing. Instead of... A lot of us who are creators don't want to be bogged down by all the details. We want to be creative. We want to be creative. We want to continue using these gifts and things. We don't want to be bogged down with all the details of it. So how can we keep this exciting? And I think that what we've talked about has been really, really helpful. I want to ask you one more thing before we go, Kyle. And that is, what is the number one piece of advice that you would offer to somebody who's looking to improve the experience that their email subscribers have? We've talked about how

important they are. But part of getting them there is only part of that equation. Keeping in there is the bigger thing, I think, because we really want these people to stick like you've talked about. So what is the one piece of advice that you would offer to somebody who's wanting to strengthen that relationship with their email subscribers? I would say it's get to know them. Actually, focus on the people, not just the number. Because you can look at stats all day, like my newsletter currently has an average 62% open rate and 2% click rate, which is high. average 62% open rate and 2% click rate, which is high. Excellent. But like what I gauge the true success of my newsletter off of is how are people responding to things? Do I get replies? Do I get people excited? Do people share it in different places? Are people talking about it? Because at the end of the day, yeah, people might open it. And that's great. That means my subject line is working, right? What's happening after that? Do they read it and actually

say, wow, this was amazing. I would love to get more of this. Or did they say, okay, the Yeah, that was not what I expected, or that it wasn't really relevant for me. So getting that feedback is super helpful. So I'm looking for replies. We don't often enough ask our email list to reply to things. And I think you can overdo that a little bit. So I wouldn't do every single email, but occasionally ask for replies, ask for some feedback, ask them to share something about themselves and let them, you know, like talk to you. The idea is just to get an email in your inbox from them is the ultimate goal. And also testimonials, like asking people to share their feedback. What have you felt about

this specific piece of content? So yeah, I would say looking at the people. And if you want to improve that experience, understand them, understand what they want and what they need. And put that through the entire experience, including your experience when they subscribe. Because I think a lot of the times we think about that signup box that's in a blog post or on a page somewhere. And if they just go there and they just put in their email address and they subscribe, we won. There's so much more to it, right?

There's the experience after you subscribe to that list. What happens? Do you go to a thank you page? Is that thank you page interesting? Does it share something valuable? Do they get something valuable? What's the email they get? Do they get an email first thing? You talked about a welcome email series earlier, even just having a welcome email that's like, here's what I'm all about. Here's what you can expect, how often you'll expect things from me. And I have a question for you. I really want to find out why you're here and learn more from you. Just having those few things creates such a great experience. I think that's all fantastic advice. Because in this online world, it can be so easy to lose

connection with people and think of them as a number and not the actual face. So when you really make those connections, you can start to understand the problem that you're trying to solve with your content. And when I say problem, it doesn't necessarily... We always talk about it doesn't have to be a big problem. It could be something really, really simple as what to make for dinner today. But just being able to connect with those people on that level, that are on your email list, in turn gives you so much back because it fuels your the feelings that you have that you're wanting to help people and then you find out you actually are helping people then it just fuels your own creativity as well. Yeah, absolutely. Coming from the design and

illustration space. There were a lot of people kind of in that art side of things. And maybe some of your listeners are in this space of just, they want to share something that's more entertainment, more what they feel is like a nice to have sort of thing. And so it's hard to think that somebody is going to reply and say, oh, this was amazing, or this changed my life or whatever. But I've seen plenty of examples of people just they're publishing like comedy entertainment, for example, and they get replies that are like, this helps me through. I was in the hospital. I was like on my deathbed and you helped me through and like get back to health. And I laughed for the first time. These little

things that you can still have as feedback. There's value in everything that you're sharing. And so don't assume that you're not helping people in some tangible way. I love that. I love all of that so much. And I think also something to just remember that we have talked about a couple times is telling your audience that it's okay to email you. Telling that reader who took the time to open that email that day that it's okay to email you. Telling that reader who took the time to open that email that day that it's okay to email you back. Because we don't necessarily think to hit reply when Old Navy tells us about their sale. So they might not know that they even can reply to you. And so I think it's important to just let them know that. And maybe in that welcome email, you tell them right away, it's always okay to hit reply. I always want to hear from you and

talk to you. And sometimes people just need that invitation to say, okay, they actually do care about what I'm thinking and feeling. And we should care about what our community is thinking and feeling because they are a really integral part of our success as creators. And I think that you've done a really beautiful job today of explaining that. And it makes me even more excited about email. Anytime we have somebody who's on talking about email, I get more excited about email. So that's a plus. Well, I'm glad I was able to share that. I have such a passion for the experience of things. I think that's why for a while I was in the design space because I just want people to have a good experience.

And I think it's so important to overall like, I mean, your business in general relies on people having a good experience. Yeah. Well, it shows them what you do and it shows the ConvertKit. That is the only email marketing platform that we recommend to our students and the people here on the podcast and our blog. So we just, we love ConvertKit. We love everybody that we've met from ConvertKit. So thank you. Thank you for sharing today what you know and what you've learned in your own creator journey and working for ConvertKit. And I think that people are going to want to connect with you, Kyle. So can you please let them know how they can do that? to connect with you, Kyle. So can you please let them know how they can do that? Yeah, you can find me and my own work at creatorglue.com. And you can also find me on again, I don't know what to call it Twitter or X at it's Kyle Adams. That's ITS Kyle Adams. Thanks so much, Kyle. Thank you.

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