Episode 209 - Natural Orders and Author Email with Matt Treacey
October 24, 2023
Matt Treacey discusses NATURAL ORDERS AND AUTHOR EMAIL, including the parallels Matt sees between email marketing and systems in the natural world; the importance of using email to educate, inspire, and entertain (not just sell); the challenge of writing effective emails if you're not an enthusiastic email subscriber; dealing with what can seem like a one-way relationship with your email recipients; the power of awareness automation; how constructing an email sequence is both like writing a story and like writing a business plan; and, related to the cover of Matt’s book NATURAL ORDERS, the pros and cons of bucking cover genre conventions.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
"I've gone so deep into this over the years and I still find people are like, 'Well, I'm doing email, like basic stuff, but why am I doing it? And what does advanced email look like? And what comes next? What does real proper email marketing look like?' And my book is meant to answer that question." —Matt Treacey
Matt Treacey is an Author and Email Marketing Strategist. Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, Matt is an expert at building systems designed for growth. His uniquely designed framework currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the US and Oceania. In his best-selling book NATURAL ORDERS, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and profitable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world.
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Links
Matt's Links:
Author website: naturalordersbook.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-symbios/
Other social media platforms: https://twitter.com/matt_treacey
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Author website: naturalordersbook.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-symbios/
Other social media platforms: https://twitter.com/matt_treacey
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Matt! What has your experience been with email marketing—newsletters or otherwise—and what’s a tip you’d like to share with your fellow creative voyagers? That might be something that worked especially well for you, or something you’d like to warn others against.
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Matt Treacey. Hey, Matt, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Matt: Good. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Matt Treacey
[00:00:10] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Matt Treacey is an author and email marketing strategist. Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, Matt is an expert at building systems designed for growth. His uniquely designed framework currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the U.S. and Oceania. In his best-selling book, Natural Orders, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and profitable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world. So, we are going to be talking about how authors can build a business with email marketing.
What parallels did Matt see between email marketing and systems in the natural world?
[00:00:45] Matty: And I was immediately grabbed by this idea of using systems in the natural world as a basis for email marketing, because just on the surface, they're not two things that I can imagine being more different than the natural world and email marketing. So I'm very curious about the parallels you saw that made it a good metaphor for this.
[00:01:06] Matt: Interesting. I guess, at a surface level, it doesn't seem like an immediate match. However, like you said, my background is in ecology. I studied ecology, worked in the field very briefly before getting into marketing. And it was quite apparent to me when I got into marketing. I guess I was already looking through that lens. I noticed a lot of similarities between marketing more broadly as a discipline and some of these ecological elements of it. So some of this stuff, like, you have niches in an ecosystem, you have niches in the market that you choose, right? Or even some things like your total addressable market being similar to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. There are a lot of these similarities that I noticed straight away.
But I noticed them particularly when I got into email marketing, that there are some really strong parallels that justified the idea behind the book. So without delving too deeply into it, the idea is that your email marketing list, your email marketing database should be managed and approached as though it were a little ecosystem, right? The number one reason for that, that I talk about is when you take that approach, you avoid some of the common mistakes people make when they first get started with the channel, such as getting really low open rates, high unsubscribes, and having what I call your list dynamics end up being poor. It's kind of like the mortalities and the births in an ecosystem, right? Getting those dynamics correct. There are some similarities there.
And I mean, the end result of that is poor deliverability, and it collapses in on itself a bit, a little bit like an ecosystem, right? But the second thing, and probably the more powerful thing, is that when you start looking at your email database and email list as an ecosystem, you avoid some of the risks of relying on other platforms that a lot of authors typically do. So if you've got a big audience on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, that can be taken away from you at a moment's notice; it's a platform risk, right? And when you build your email list, you're avoiding that. You're mitigating it to some degree.
And I kind of refer to this in the book as building your own walled garden. So the analogy has two sides to it. One is that really strict, yeah, look at it like an ecosystem because it is a little ecosystem, but more powerfully, it's a little walled garden that you need to have your own. And I think just taking that whole view of it helps you avoid some of these tactics that sometimes come to mind when you think about email marketing as well. Like spamming people or sending some of these tactics that you sometimes associate with email marketing. If you think there's this little ecosystem you have to nurture and grow, you instinctually.
[00:03:52] Matty: Yeah, I really like the term "nurturing," and I think that this idea of thinking of it as a meta, having the natural word to be a metaphor for email marketing is really nice because it also gets past that idea of people just feeling creepy about it. You know, I think people find it hard to accept that sending an email into someone's inbox can be and should be a desirable thing, not a spammy thing. So, in that sense, about getting people over the hump of wanting to show up in people's email boxes and feeling good about that, is there some metaphor from the natural world that is a good analogy for that?
[00:04:33] Matt: Yeah, with that, going straight into the natural metaphor for it. I just have to say that is definitely something that I deal with. I mean, I've built my career around email marketing, and even now today, when you tell some people that I do email, people really do have this knee-jerk reaction of, "Oh, it's like you're sending spam to people." And look, that still exists. I mean, even in some high-profile industries like e-commerce, there are still spammy tactics going on.
What I've really come to the conclusion of is that doesn't get you anywhere, and that's the whole impetus behind this book. The whole idea of natural orders is it's like the system collapses in on itself as soon as you start doing it. So, once you shift the metaphor, that helps you kind of avoid some of that stuff and makes it really more about value. And to answer your question, that's really the shift that has to happen. I say it over and over again in my book. Every time you communicate with someone on your email list, it has to be valuable. I've got this kind of framework that I use in the book for the early stages when you're building the foundations, the list, the health of it all, for how you can segment people into different groups to make sure that no matter what stage you're at, they're always getting a valuable experience. It's like you should. It's just good business practice, right? Underpromise, overdeliver.
[00:05:54] Matty: I used to work at QVC, and that was like the battle cry at QVC: underpromise and overdeliver.
[00:06:01] Matt: Right.
Avoiding falling into the spam trap
[00:06:02] Matty: So, I think it's apparent, I mean, it's obvious on the surface that one shouldn't be sending out spammy emails. But can you offer guidelines if someone is trying to step back and read their emails as a recipient is going to read them? Are there red flags that you can call out that would say, this is something that might actually catch the email in a technical spam filter, or it's just going to feel spammy to the person who receives it?
[00:06:27] Matt: Okay. Yeah, two parts of that. So the first part is the spam filters. It's pretty easy to bypass in the sense that don't do anything spammy. Don't send anything like "Make big bucks today" or anything that the spam filters are built to detect. And I mean, that's a great initial filter because if you're talking about that sort of stuff anyway, you're probably sending spam.
Aim to educate, inspire, and entertain
[00:06:49] Matt: The second thing is, again, I always say educate, inspire, entertain. If you're doing at least one of those things with every email that you send, you're probably going to be sending a valuable email. So if every time you go to send an email, think, "Am I educating, inspiring, or entertaining, or ideally doing two or more of those things?" then send the email. If not, then take a look at yourself.
[00:07:15] Matty: Yeah, we had talked a little bit earlier, and you were saying that your clients are nonfiction authors. You were focusing on the nonfiction world, not the fiction author world. But I said that as someone with email lists in both worlds, I would try to tease out the learnings that fiction authors can take from this.
And it's my perennial question. I could probably create a playlist of people I've spoken to on the podcast with this very issue, but I have no idea. I send a weekly email to my non-fiction platform for the Indy Author, and it's basically, you know, a summary of that week's podcast episode and recommended resources that I, as a writer, feel good about recommending to other writers. It's very heavily focused on the informative part, but it's always difficult to figure out how to translate that into the fiction world and not have it be "buy this, buy this, buy this."
When you're advising your clients on how to determine the content that they're going to put in their emails, what are some of the guidance you give them to make sure that it is compliant with "educate, inspire, entertain"? Did I remember that correctly?
[00:08:24] Matt: "Educate, inspire, entertain," but yeah,
[00:08:26] Matty: "Educate, inspire, entertain."
An author's product is their writing.
[00:08:28] Matt: I would, to be honest, I haven't done a lot of work with fiction authors, but I would suspect that the principles translate directly. So, if I've found a fiction author, and I enjoy their writing, and I've signed up for their email list, and they send me emails about their writing that contain their writing, that's hugely valuable.
So then I would imagine that their newsletter doesn't look so much like if they were doing a newsletter, or their sequence, or however they choose to go about it. It wouldn't be so much about, "hey, buy my book, my book's on sale, promotion, promotion." There would be a time for that, but the majority of the emails that they send should be content, their writing.
The thing that I've signed up for, their product, I mean, if they're thinking of themselves as a business, their product is their writing, so if they're giving that away for free, or they're writing unique content for people who are on their email list, that suddenly becomes quite a value proposition to be on that list in the first place, right?
And I'll start to look forward to the writing of that author. The exact same thing applies to content in a business context for non-fiction authors, for example, right? Like I've got guys where they'll just publish a really long article every two weeks. And people love it. They wait for it because they know it's going to be really valuable, and they know they're going to enjoy reading it. And there's no spam in that relationship at all, right? It's like, "Wow, I can't wait for this next email I'm going to get from this author." The same thing applies to fiction people, I'd say.
Being a better email writer, even if you're not an enthusiastic email recipient.
[00:09:57] Matty: I think the difficult thing for me certainly is that I'm not someone who enjoys receiving any kind of email, even from people that I really like. For example, I'm a podcast listener, so the people that I follow, that I look forward to in the same way that the recipients of that email newsletter probably look forward to getting that very long article from the person they're following, I'd much prefer to listen to that content than I would to read that content. So, it's very difficult when you're trying to produce content for people who have a different preference. You know, you're accommodating the people who want to read that, and you almost, by definition, have to write an email that's not the email that you yourself would want to get. Do you have any advice on how to get over that hump?
[00:10:41] Matt: That's very interesting. I suppose you could... And I have done this before. You can send emails with links to different formats of content, right? So if you're predominantly a YouTube person, then every email you send out can be a link to a different YouTube video, right? Structured in a way that introduces your ideas and progresses awareness and builds engagement and all these other things I talk about in the book. Yeah, you can link out to any type of content. My personal affinity for email is the fact that it is a written medium, and the type of audience that you're engaging with are typically readers. I think that's a strength to the channel among the myriad of others.
[00:11:22] Matt: I mean, just going back to what we were saying before about why email marketing? I mean, once you get over the whole spammy perception of it, it's the largest and most active group of people on the internet. It's the highest engagement. They're the most ready to buy. It's the highest ROI channel. It's the only one that allows you to own the data of your audience.
[00:11:43] Matty: Yeah. And as you're saying, you know, the idea that it's the audience you own, you're not having a social media platform mediate it for you. I think that one thing that's more specific to nonfiction authors, although this is true of fiction authors too, but you're ideally meeting a need, right? If you're sending out a newsletter marketing for a service you're offering, for example, then you're hopefully, by definition, doing it because there's a problem that your audience may have that you can help them solve.
Now for fiction authors, maybe that issue is finding entertaining reading, and you could approach it that way. But if I'm sending out a newsletter, for example, to people who are writers, probably earlier in their writing career, and could be either independently published authors or traditionally published authors or pre-published authors that are pursuing either one of those. Is there a way that I can figure out what that problem is that my audience is solving that I would be able to help them with that would make my newsletter educational for them, for example?
[00:12:46] Matt: Yeah, I guess, like anything in business, there's a little bit of testing involved. You have your initial assumptions about it. And then you kind of refine it over time. You learn more about your audience and you refine your messaging based on what your audience responds to, right? That's what it's all about.
[00:13:02] Matt: And really, I mean, one of the other good things about email is it's all timeless marketing principles, right? And there's nothing more timeless than the fact that your marketing is going to be stronger the better you know and understand your audience, right? I also talk about that in the book. I think that very much applies to fiction authors.
So you could look at it from the top-level lens of, okay, I'm entertaining people, I'm providing an escape. Okay, that's probably true for every fiction author, but then you can probably be a bit more granular in that. I mean, someone writing romance novels is fulfilling a very different need within that entertainment umbrella than someone, compared to someone writing a thriller novel or a sci-fi novel, right? They're fulfilling a different need, so it changes the way that you go about that.
The challenges of a one-way relationship via email
[00:13:51] Matty: I think one of the things that's tough about email marketing is that, and I'm picturing this playing out in the natural world, that if you do something in the natural world, you can kind of see the impact it has on your surroundings. But with email, it feels, at least initially, very one-way. I mean, I think that maybe ideally it becomes more interactive, but unlike social media, where you can immediately see the things that people like, the things that people don't like, and the things they respond to or don't respond to, with email, you can send it out there, send it out there. For example, I very rarely have people unsubscribe from my email lists. I'm super careful about how I go about adding people to the list. And when I add them, I'm strategizing in a way that I think what I'm sending them is what they want, and that they're going to stick with me, and that has proved to be the case.
But I also very rarely get any feedback, even when I put an invitation in an email to just hit reply to get back to me. Do you have any advice on how to collect data in what seems, on the surface, like a one-way communication?
[00:14:58] Matt: That's interesting. Yeah. So I suppose there you're thinking about the ecosystem dynamic in terms of the interaction between the audience and yourself. I tend to think of it more about the dynamics of the system itself. The same thing could apply to a degree with your social media audience, but I think it is stronger in email marketing.
So in your case, if you're sending emails out regularly and you're not getting any unsubscribes, I mean, there's, it means there's no deaths in your system, you're just having a very slow birth rate, and no one's ever dying. So what does that mean? And they're not responding to your emails, so it means that your engagement is probably, there's probably something interesting going on with your engagement. That's how I'd think about it.
Alternatives to inaccurate open rate stats
[00:15:44] Matt: And that's how I'd use the ecosystem lens to look at it, especially. I think this sort of stuff is more important than ever, and you have to be more critical than ever because, I'm not sure if your audience is aware of this, but open rates and click rates are becoming increasingly unreliable. In fact, open rates, you basically cannot rely on at all anymore. As of about this time last year, with the Apple Mail privacy updates, which are getting more and more strict.
So I think it's something like, I saw a thing from Litmus, which does email deliverability stuff, something like 50 percent of opens are misattributed at the moment. So your open rates aren't a good measure of your engagement anymore. You really need to start looking at these things like what you're speaking about: are people replying? Are people interacting with your emails? Are people going from the email that you've sent to the landing page you've specified on your site? Does the traffic add up to what the email marketing system is saying? You really need to look at that now. And unsubscribes are a really big one. That's a huge marker of whether people like it. I would argue that it is actually healthy to have some turnover in the system. You want some people, you know, I'm sure you do have a very small unsubscribe rate.
[00:16:56] Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I have not done a good job of is poking around in my email service stats. So, you know, I have just a general sense of how many people I'm sending out to, but the idea of going in periodically and looking at people who are inactive in whatever way the system is defining that and clearing out people who maybe are skewing your deliverability by not opening, like not unsubscribing but not opening, does that happen?
[00:17:27] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually quite a complex dynamic. There's deliverability on the side of making sure your technical deliverability stuff is set up - DKIM and all of that, on the domain side. Then there's something called sender score inside your email marketing system itself. Which is this interplay between what servers they decide to put you on and how much that's going to reach people. That's not exactly like that. That's a crude oversimplification, but that kind of gets us somewhere the way there. And then, yeah, this idea of the top-level engagement, how many people are actually opening your emails and clicking them and interacting with them at all those different stages, right? The funnel analysis of it. So, yeah, there is a bit to that.
[00:18:14] Matty: I'm sure a lot of people are in the same situation I'm in, that they have an email list they're sending out at some to be determined intervals, like for my non-fiction platform, it's weekly, but for my fiction platform, I just send something out when I have something to say. Like, oh, I'm going to be at this bookstore signing books, or, you know, one of my books is on sale. It's very much event-driven.
Matt's guidelines for target email performance
[00:18:32] Matty: Are there statistics or other factors people should be looking at? Like people always say you should look at open rate. Now we've found out that maybe that isn't true after all, but I never hear numbers like your open rate should be over this amount or you should have a certain amount of good subscriber churn. What should people be looking at to see if they need to make tweaks in how they're approaching their email?
[00:18:56] Matt: Oh yeah, I can give you stats. That's no problem. I can't link you to anything or I'll mention anything regarding your sending schedule, which is what you referred to earlier, but that's definitely a good idea. In fact, that's one of the first things you should really cement in place. Say, okay, I'm just going to commit to something. If you're going the newsletter route, and newsletters are trendy at the moment, there are some other ways you can go about this. I talk about all of this stuff in my writing, but let's just say you only have time to send one email every so often. Just say, okay, I'm going to send it on every second Wednesday, and commit to that. Then you can build up the system around that, have an automated email go out every week, every first Friday, right? And then put in slots for everything, and that avoids a lot of headaches down the track. So you should have a sending schedule to answer that first part of your question.
But in terms of just some offhand best practice metrics, look, open rates are fraught with danger these days. They are still a good lagging indicator, so if you have above a 25 percent open rate, you're probably okay. But you should be getting a lot more than that, especially now that Apple Mail and mail privacy stuff, which is extended to other mail servers, is triggering opens. So a lot of people saw their opens just jump dramatically recently.
So look, the rule always was like, okay, above 25 percent, you're doing okay. 35 percent plus, you're probably, it's probably good engagement. That's not as reliable anymore, but it's still a lag indicator. So if you are sitting at 35 percent engagement, and that drops down to 15 percent, you know something's gone wrong. Whereas if it goes up to 65 percent, you know something's probably gone right, right? So it's a good lagging indicator, but not gospel truth. So that's how I approach open rates.
Unsubscribes, I typically say it does depend on the audience and your turnover and a lot of other factors that you have to look at individually. But below 0.35 percent unsubscribe rate, if you can achieve that, that's probably good because you don't want it to be zero because that would suggest to me there's probably some problem with engagement that has not yet been uncovered, right? People should naturally opt out of the system to some degree. But if you keep it below 0.35, that's good.
Email marketing beyond the newsletter
[00:21:11]
Matty: Well, you made an interesting comment, which is, I think that whenever an author hears email, we always think of an email newsletter. But I'm realizing that that's just one small niche of email marketing more generally. Can you talk about other ways that authors should be using email that aren't specific to newsletters?
[00:21:32] Matt: Yeah, I mean, that's really my specialty, right? I run newsletters for people. Newsletters are hot, and for a good reason. There are some incredible businesses built off newsletters that are sent once a week, generating multi-million-dollar businesses. They're great and provide a lot of value. They're also relatively simple. If you're just sending one email, it makes the whole system a lot easier to manage, right?
But some of the power of email, one of the other benefits I didn't really go into is the fact that you can automate the entire subscriber journey, the customer journey from when they come onto your site and join your email list, everything after that, you control in email. It allows you to do really interesting things like building up a narrative, progress awareness, which I've touched on briefly since we've been talking, but I haven't gone into it in depth.
So you can nurture someone from the point where they don't really know much about you, your value proposition, or what you're all about to the point where they're really into it. I use something called Schwartz's five stages of awareness, which is really helpful and ensures that you're sending value all the time. They go from being vaguely aware of the problem you're solving for themselves to understanding the solutions available and the products that can help them. You can build on this over time, right?
The power of awareness automation
[00:22:57] Matt: And you can only do that with automation. So I really recommend to people that one of the foundation pieces of their system is something I call an awareness automation or something similar, where you take people on a subscriber journey and introduce the ideas from your books or your work or your business over time in a very structured way. That's when you tend to get the best results.
The email sequence as a story
[00:23:56] Matty: So that might be a good introduction to the other thing we were going to talk about, which is the idea of an email sequence as a story. Is this what you were talking about, this journey that you take the subscriber through?
[00:24:07] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah, this is something I haven't explored in too much depth, but I really nerd out on this. I think it's one of the underlooked benefits of email. Let's compare it to having an audience on, let's say, Instagram. I don't know what the post reach is like on Instagram now, but if I've got a series of 10 posts that all build on each other to create a narrative and convey a series of ideas, you might see only five or three of those posts over the whole two or three weeks that I'm putting them out, right?"
Whereas with email, I know every time that those emails are going into their inbox. And if my engagement and my list health fundamentals are in place, I can be quite sure that they're going to see every email, at least the subject line, right? So the actual visibility of every message, every point in the story is there and it's there in perpetuity. So if they read the last email and they want to go back to the first one, it's still in their inbox, right?
So the ability to build a narrative and construct a story, like you're saying, is something unique, I think, to the channel in the way that you can deliver it. This is not a new concept. One of the old OG email marketing guys is Jeff Walker. He wrote this book called "Launch: The Product Launch Formula." I mean, I don't know when that came out, but it's an absolute classic, still works today.
But one of the things he talks about is the power of narrative and it's just the arc that you create. With the emails you send, I mean, we've all heard of Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey and that, that's one side to it. I actually think we're moving into a stage where it's less like this very linear journey with the reader as the hero and more like this kind of episodic sequence, a serial on TV, right, where you dip in and out at different stages. If you structure the story that way, that can be a lot more interesting, where it's like, it's like watching Friends or Seinfeld or something, right? Everything is a piece in itself, but it's part of this larger whole. You're creating a world that people enter into, and each one is its own little mini narrative that kind of ties to a larger narrative but doesn't at the same time.
I think there's a lot to this; it's not just "Hey, hit all of these points in the Circular Hero's journey in the email sequence you're sending." It's okay, what world are you building? What are the ideas that this world is based on? And how does that relate to the problem you're solving and your value proposition, all of that? I think that can be really powerful when you get into that stuff.
Matty: That's so interesting. I mean, it does suggest that that sequence has to be planned out in a way that's much different than I have thought about it in the past. So my email sequence, and I just want to preface this by saying I'm not recommending this, just saying this is what it is, is when someone signs up, I think they get two or three follow-up emails, and each of them is a very short email, and it's a link to a different resource. So I think it's something like, the first one is a link to my website, the second one is a link to a playlist on my YouTube channel, and the third one is a link to a different playlist on my YouTube channel. You know, three different resources that I think will be useful to people, mainly just as a way of continuing that engagement and pointing out to them that I have more things than just the way they found me. If they found me in the podcast, then they should be aware that I also have a website and YouTube channel.
But that isn't a story arc in any sense. It's just three, it's not even Seinfeld episodes. It's just like three pieces of information. When you're counseling your nonfiction author clients on how to create that story, are there guidelines you give them? Do you have your own, uh, hero's journey sort of structure that you recommend they use?
Matt: I'm working on it, and it's very much not The Hero's Journey. I mean, it's more like, uh, The Odyssey. Very much. It's like a Homeric form. No doubt on
Matty: This is sounding more alarming with each passing moment. I mean, that sounds difficult.
[00:28:15] Matt: No, I mean, it's just a different narrative form, but I think if we're looking at your particular case, right, what I would immediately think is that I see the way you're going about it. It's very logical, but you probably have a huge backlog of content, right? Both on YouTube and your podcast, and you've probably repurposed it in multiple different ways. I would think about where the audience is intercepting you in their journey. Are they aware of the problem they're dealing with? How far along in that problem recognition are they? It's that classic Robert Collier line of entering the conversation going on in the prospect's mind, right? So meet them exactly where they are when they join your email list, and then send them that piece of content. Then begin their entrance into your world with that piece of content and build on that over time. So over the subsequent weeks, you drip out other pieces of content that slowly start to piece together this puzzle, a picture of what you're all about, and what your brand's all about. If they skip one or two, it doesn't matter because they're dipping in and out.
How to segment an audience
[00:29:14] Matty: Right. So, I'm realizing that I think one of the things I linked to, and if I haven't yet, I'm going to, is that episodes 101 through 107 were with Orna Ross on the seven processes of publishing, and that's a great entry for people who are new to publishing, especially the indie publishing world. But not every person who joins my list is going to be part of a homogeneous group of people with a similar skill set. They're going to be people who haven't even started writing their first book, and they're going to be people who are traditionally published and now they're thinking of changing to indie, or they're indie published and they're thinking of pursuing a traditional deal or something like that. So if you don't have enough information to segment it so that you're creating that journey specific to different people's levels of experience, is there a way around that?
[00:30:04] Matt: Yeah. So the first level of segmentation would depend on where people are coming into your list, right? So you probably have opt-in lead magnets at different points. I mean, either you've got CTAs that you've got at the end of this podcast or if I go to your site, there's probably different places where I can give you my email address, right?
[00:30:25] Matty: Yes, but not as much as I could, for sure.
[00:30:29] Matt: Okay, sure. Yeah. Oh, just as a side note, that's one of the highest leverage areas when it comes to email. I mean, it's very hard to double your traffic, but it's very, very easy to double what I call your traffic-to-subscribe conversion. There's a lot you can do there. You can rapidly grow your list by improving that level. So anyway, that's the first level of segmentation. Look at the traffic coming to your site, tailor your opt-ins to possible different segments of your audience. You mentioned one of those segments, people who are just starting out, right?
[00:31:00] Matty: Yeah, like people who are just, let's say, just finishing their first book.
[00:31:04] Matt: Okay. Yeah. So say you've got a lot of organic traffic coming to a page, like "How to Finally Get Your Book Out the Door." And then you're offering them something really valuable. It has to be actually valuable. Again, under-promise, over-deliver. It can't be a PDF with the top 10 tips on how to finish that book, although that would be helpful, I'm sure.
[00:31:27] Matty: Sure, I think I could get a lot of people signed up for that one.
[00:31:31] Matt: Yeah, but I mean, you've got to think bigger than that. You've got to think of something like, I don't know what you're doing in that specific case, but it has to be something really valuable, something they'd probably pay money for, right? So when I do give you my email address, I'm like, okay, well, I've got something really good right off the bat. And then by the time I get your first email, I'm going to think, "Wow, this is just value on value on value," right? And I'm more inclined to enter that world you're building up, right? Exploring the value of email marketing for an author
[00:31:55] Matty: So here's my anathema question. Is, what is the value of me doing that? Because, if I think about the Indie author world, for example, I have thought about my email list in a very admittedly limited way, as a way for me to build a relationship so that I'm retaining podcast listeners. And, you know, sometimes I'm pointing them to resources I have that I actually earn money from, like a book about podcasting. If you're interested in podcasting, buy my book on podcasting. So, there's that opportunity. There's the opportunity to maybe introduce them to my fiction work, and there could be opportunities to. You know, certainly pay it forward to the community and things like that, but I'm not getting any intrinsic payback for each person who subscribes to my email. It's only paving the way to something else. Am I just looking at it in too limited a way?
[00:32:51] Matt: Yeah, yeah. In short, yes. So let's go with the podcasting thing as an example, so that you said there's a podcasting course that you offer?
[00:33:07] Matty: I have a book on podcasting for authors, and I offer consulting services.
[00:33:11] Matt: Okay, yeah, so this whole podcasting thing is a sub-story within the whole wider narrative, right? There's going to be a point where you start talking about podcasting, and you're going to receive a certain level of engagement from that. What you can then do is if you've already built a product around it and you know that it's a need and something that's a problem that your audience faces, then you can justify saying, "Okay, I'm going to build this whole subsequence for people who engage with those emails that I'm kind of seeding throughout the broader narrative." And when they engage with those emails, it'll trigger this subsequence that's dedicated to just talking about podcasting stuff. And then you could really focus on that part of the journey.
So the next, say you send me an email about podcasting adjacent stuff, and I interact with it. And then two weeks later, you send me another one. I interact with that. You can use that to flag something in your email automation system that says, "Okay, send Matt the podcast sequence." And then I'll be in that for the next, let's say two to three weeks, and then you're going to really start taking me on that journey from talking about the problem that I might be facing regarding podcasting, introducing various solutions to that problem, and then finally talking about your product as one of those solutions among many. That's going to be a way to introduce that series of ideas in a way that's not spammy and creates value the whole time.
How constructing an email sequence is like writing a business plan
[00:34:30] Matty: So, if people are putting together an email sequence that is following kind of a story arc, it seems to me that thinking through that would be quite a deep dive into making sure you understand your business to the extent that you're almost writing like a business plan for yourself.
Like, I would think that if somebody can successfully walk a potential client through that kind of story about the solution they have to offer, they need to have a very sophisticated understanding of their own business. Do you find that you have to advise clients to understand their business better before trying to write that description of it for other people?
[00:35:10] Matt: Understand their business in the sense of understanding what they're offering. Yeah, I mean, you have to know what your core value proposition is and what problem you're really solving and think about that quite deeply. I mean, taking it back to the fiction author's thing, yeah, why are you writing? Why are people reading what you write? How are you being valuable to other people? I mean, that's how I look at business, right? Yeah, you have to be aware of those things.
The psychology of marketing
[00:35:34] Matt: I mean, marketing is numbers and psychology. With email, you get the numbers, right? You see how people are reacting to each set of emails. Like, I'll run experiments where there are three different variations of positioning running against one another. And you can start to see trends in which one is being responded to the best just in terms of engagement, right? And unsubscribes and all those other things we were talking about before. So there's a numbers side of it. The psychology side of it is coming up with those ideas in the first place for the positioning.
[00:36:07] Matty: Yeah, this episode title is going to be like the gestalt of email marketing or something like that. Because whenever I talk about email marketing with anyone, I always get kind of stuck on the "why am I doing this" thing. I think it's because I don't have a clear enough understanding in my mind between "I'm communicating with this person because I want to help them start up a podcast" or "I want to help them think through whether they should even think about starting up a podcast." I think thinking through the exact scenario where that is going to be exactly the book somebody needs and then creating the story that leads up to that, I think, quite a sophisticated business exercise. It feels kind of tricky to me to understand what you're trying to achieve at that level.
[00:37:00] Matt: It can be a lot of fun.
The pros and cons of bucking cover genre conventions
[00:37:03] Matty: It could be a lot of fun! It could just make me pull my hair out, but that's so interesting, such interesting food for thought. I'm going to have to noodle on all that. But before I let you go, I had another topic I wanted to hit pretty quickly, and that is the cover of your book, "Natural Orders." So I have to say, I never thought I would say this about a book about email marketing, but it is a gorgeous cover. It's just beautiful to look at. I might just have to order the print copy so that I can just look at the cover.
But if I saw that in a bookstore, I would not say, "Oh, look, a book on email marketing," because it has beautiful botanical drawings. And I think there's like a peacock there or something. I'm seeing it quite small, so I'm not exactly sure. But I'm very curious about the thought that went into the design of the book, and I mean, you're making a sale because I just want to have a print copy of this book to look at the cover in more detail. But I'm sure you're acknowledging that you're probably losing people, too, because they kind of breeze through it. They don't even realize what the topic is. Can you talk a little bit about the thought that went into choosing that cover for "Natural Orders"?
[00:38:12] Matt: Yeah. First of all, thank you very much. I did put some thought into it. Here it is for the YouTube people watching. I definitely didn't follow the advice for "Here's how to create a book cover that sells really well on Amazon." I mean, it goes basically against all of those rules, and yeah, it doesn't look like a business book, let alone an email marketing book, but I thought, yeah, the people who love it, love it. And you want to attract those people. I've found that in the reviews as well; some people really resonate with the whole perspective I've taken with it. Yeah, that's what it's all about. I think there's a huge branding premium in writing a book that sometimes... undirected knowledge. And I think you should lean into that as much as possible. I've probably really gone down the natural orders route and everything that entails. And yeah, it might get passed over. My click-through rate from Amazon ads might suffer a little bit, but whatever. It's alright. The people who want to read it and find it and resonate with it, they still find it. So I think it's absolutely fine.
Also, with a business book, you're not trying to sell a million copies. You're trying to sell a certain amount and get those people who really have that burning problem. And, you know, talking about what you were just. That is the reason I wrote the book, so this whole idea of why I bother with email marketing. That's where people really seem to trip up. I mean, I've gone so deep into this over the years, and I still find people are really at that point. They're like, "Well, I'm doing email. Like basic stuff, but why am I doing it? And what does advanced email look like? And what comes next, right? What does real proper email marketing look like? And it's meant to answer that question. It's meant to be like, here's exactly what it looks like. Here's why you're doing it. Here's what you're trying to achieve with it. Here's where it fits in with your broader marketing mix. And here's how to do it without falling into all these traps that people tend to fall into.
[00:40:03] Matty: Well, I think that's a great insight to offer to people because I realized that I, and I'm sure a lot of other authors fall into this as well, but we hear the very valid and understandable advice that says you need to have a list of people that you want to connect with, that you own, and they are not beholden to Facebook or whatever to stay in touch with those people. It totally makes sense to me, and I'm willing to spend a certain amount of time in order to do that. But then I think that's all a lot of writers are looking for. They're looking for that group of people that they own so that if their Facebook account gets shut down, they can still tell people about their latest book.
But as we're talking, I'm realizing that's kind of like the nursery school version of email marketing, and that a better understanding of all the other ways that email can serve us would be a good tool to add to the toolkit.
[00:40:52] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think so. I think there's a lot of people out there that are kind of clued into it. They think, "Okay, there's more to this email thing." There's not a lot of information out there, especially not packaged together in an easy way where it's like, I can just sit down and read this book in a day, and I'll have a whole new view of this channel and what it can do for me. So that's the value proposition.
[00:41:14] Matty: So if people are reading "Natural Orders," is it the kind of thing that you feel that they would read through at once and they would have a better sense of it, or is it the kind of book that you have to sort of work your way through gradually? Is the approach something that you need to work your way through gradually rather than trying to absorb it all in one big chunk?
[00:41:31] Matt: That's interesting, you say that, actually, because I hate these business books that are a hundred pages just to say one thing. Some of the feedback I've gotten, which is great, I guess, is that it's a very dense book. So a lot of people will buy the physical copy, write notes in it, highlight things, and keep going back to it over and over again, which is. It's great. That's fantastic. I did put a lot of work into this book, even though it's only 200 pages. I think it is quite dense. Yeah, so you'll probably come back to it again and again and get ideas out of it, and there are things that you'll probably realize that you skimmed over the first time that you'll go back to and get something out of when you read it again. Which is great. That's the type of book I wanted to read. When I think of all the best business books, my favorite business books, they're all like that. They're relatively short, but they're just packed with stuff. It's like every line you get something out of. I don't know if mine's achieved that same goal, but I've tried. I've aimed towards.
[00:42:24] Matty: That's great. Well, I appreciate you being so generous with following my meandering set of questions. But it is true that this was, you know, less about the tactics of email marketing and more about the value of thinking of it in a bit more holistic way than I think a lot of authors naturally do. But, Matt, it's been so nice talking to you. Please let listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:42:51] Matt: So the best place to find out more about me is naturalordersbook.com. So that's naturalordersbook.com.
[00:43:01] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:43:03] Matt: Thank you.
[00:00:06] Matt: Good. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Matt Treacey
[00:00:10] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Matt Treacey is an author and email marketing strategist. Combining a decade in email marketing automation with a background in ecology, Matt is an expert at building systems designed for growth. His uniquely designed framework currently generates millions of dollars in email revenue for dozens of small online businesses across the U.S. and Oceania. In his best-selling book, Natural Orders, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and profitable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world. So, we are going to be talking about how authors can build a business with email marketing.
What parallels did Matt see between email marketing and systems in the natural world?
[00:00:45] Matty: And I was immediately grabbed by this idea of using systems in the natural world as a basis for email marketing, because just on the surface, they're not two things that I can imagine being more different than the natural world and email marketing. So I'm very curious about the parallels you saw that made it a good metaphor for this.
[00:01:06] Matt: Interesting. I guess, at a surface level, it doesn't seem like an immediate match. However, like you said, my background is in ecology. I studied ecology, worked in the field very briefly before getting into marketing. And it was quite apparent to me when I got into marketing. I guess I was already looking through that lens. I noticed a lot of similarities between marketing more broadly as a discipline and some of these ecological elements of it. So some of this stuff, like, you have niches in an ecosystem, you have niches in the market that you choose, right? Or even some things like your total addressable market being similar to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. There are a lot of these similarities that I noticed straight away.
But I noticed them particularly when I got into email marketing, that there are some really strong parallels that justified the idea behind the book. So without delving too deeply into it, the idea is that your email marketing list, your email marketing database should be managed and approached as though it were a little ecosystem, right? The number one reason for that, that I talk about is when you take that approach, you avoid some of the common mistakes people make when they first get started with the channel, such as getting really low open rates, high unsubscribes, and having what I call your list dynamics end up being poor. It's kind of like the mortalities and the births in an ecosystem, right? Getting those dynamics correct. There are some similarities there.
And I mean, the end result of that is poor deliverability, and it collapses in on itself a bit, a little bit like an ecosystem, right? But the second thing, and probably the more powerful thing, is that when you start looking at your email database and email list as an ecosystem, you avoid some of the risks of relying on other platforms that a lot of authors typically do. So if you've got a big audience on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, that can be taken away from you at a moment's notice; it's a platform risk, right? And when you build your email list, you're avoiding that. You're mitigating it to some degree.
And I kind of refer to this in the book as building your own walled garden. So the analogy has two sides to it. One is that really strict, yeah, look at it like an ecosystem because it is a little ecosystem, but more powerfully, it's a little walled garden that you need to have your own. And I think just taking that whole view of it helps you avoid some of these tactics that sometimes come to mind when you think about email marketing as well. Like spamming people or sending some of these tactics that you sometimes associate with email marketing. If you think there's this little ecosystem you have to nurture and grow, you instinctually.
[00:03:52] Matty: Yeah, I really like the term "nurturing," and I think that this idea of thinking of it as a meta, having the natural word to be a metaphor for email marketing is really nice because it also gets past that idea of people just feeling creepy about it. You know, I think people find it hard to accept that sending an email into someone's inbox can be and should be a desirable thing, not a spammy thing. So, in that sense, about getting people over the hump of wanting to show up in people's email boxes and feeling good about that, is there some metaphor from the natural world that is a good analogy for that?
[00:04:33] Matt: Yeah, with that, going straight into the natural metaphor for it. I just have to say that is definitely something that I deal with. I mean, I've built my career around email marketing, and even now today, when you tell some people that I do email, people really do have this knee-jerk reaction of, "Oh, it's like you're sending spam to people." And look, that still exists. I mean, even in some high-profile industries like e-commerce, there are still spammy tactics going on.
What I've really come to the conclusion of is that doesn't get you anywhere, and that's the whole impetus behind this book. The whole idea of natural orders is it's like the system collapses in on itself as soon as you start doing it. So, once you shift the metaphor, that helps you kind of avoid some of that stuff and makes it really more about value. And to answer your question, that's really the shift that has to happen. I say it over and over again in my book. Every time you communicate with someone on your email list, it has to be valuable. I've got this kind of framework that I use in the book for the early stages when you're building the foundations, the list, the health of it all, for how you can segment people into different groups to make sure that no matter what stage you're at, they're always getting a valuable experience. It's like you should. It's just good business practice, right? Underpromise, overdeliver.
[00:05:54] Matty: I used to work at QVC, and that was like the battle cry at QVC: underpromise and overdeliver.
[00:06:01] Matt: Right.
Avoiding falling into the spam trap
[00:06:02] Matty: So, I think it's apparent, I mean, it's obvious on the surface that one shouldn't be sending out spammy emails. But can you offer guidelines if someone is trying to step back and read their emails as a recipient is going to read them? Are there red flags that you can call out that would say, this is something that might actually catch the email in a technical spam filter, or it's just going to feel spammy to the person who receives it?
[00:06:27] Matt: Okay. Yeah, two parts of that. So the first part is the spam filters. It's pretty easy to bypass in the sense that don't do anything spammy. Don't send anything like "Make big bucks today" or anything that the spam filters are built to detect. And I mean, that's a great initial filter because if you're talking about that sort of stuff anyway, you're probably sending spam.
Aim to educate, inspire, and entertain
[00:06:49] Matt: The second thing is, again, I always say educate, inspire, entertain. If you're doing at least one of those things with every email that you send, you're probably going to be sending a valuable email. So if every time you go to send an email, think, "Am I educating, inspiring, or entertaining, or ideally doing two or more of those things?" then send the email. If not, then take a look at yourself.
[00:07:15] Matty: Yeah, we had talked a little bit earlier, and you were saying that your clients are nonfiction authors. You were focusing on the nonfiction world, not the fiction author world. But I said that as someone with email lists in both worlds, I would try to tease out the learnings that fiction authors can take from this.
And it's my perennial question. I could probably create a playlist of people I've spoken to on the podcast with this very issue, but I have no idea. I send a weekly email to my non-fiction platform for the Indy Author, and it's basically, you know, a summary of that week's podcast episode and recommended resources that I, as a writer, feel good about recommending to other writers. It's very heavily focused on the informative part, but it's always difficult to figure out how to translate that into the fiction world and not have it be "buy this, buy this, buy this."
When you're advising your clients on how to determine the content that they're going to put in their emails, what are some of the guidance you give them to make sure that it is compliant with "educate, inspire, entertain"? Did I remember that correctly?
[00:08:24] Matt: "Educate, inspire, entertain," but yeah,
[00:08:26] Matty: "Educate, inspire, entertain."
An author's product is their writing.
[00:08:28] Matt: I would, to be honest, I haven't done a lot of work with fiction authors, but I would suspect that the principles translate directly. So, if I've found a fiction author, and I enjoy their writing, and I've signed up for their email list, and they send me emails about their writing that contain their writing, that's hugely valuable.
So then I would imagine that their newsletter doesn't look so much like if they were doing a newsletter, or their sequence, or however they choose to go about it. It wouldn't be so much about, "hey, buy my book, my book's on sale, promotion, promotion." There would be a time for that, but the majority of the emails that they send should be content, their writing.
The thing that I've signed up for, their product, I mean, if they're thinking of themselves as a business, their product is their writing, so if they're giving that away for free, or they're writing unique content for people who are on their email list, that suddenly becomes quite a value proposition to be on that list in the first place, right?
And I'll start to look forward to the writing of that author. The exact same thing applies to content in a business context for non-fiction authors, for example, right? Like I've got guys where they'll just publish a really long article every two weeks. And people love it. They wait for it because they know it's going to be really valuable, and they know they're going to enjoy reading it. And there's no spam in that relationship at all, right? It's like, "Wow, I can't wait for this next email I'm going to get from this author." The same thing applies to fiction people, I'd say.
Being a better email writer, even if you're not an enthusiastic email recipient.
[00:09:57] Matty: I think the difficult thing for me certainly is that I'm not someone who enjoys receiving any kind of email, even from people that I really like. For example, I'm a podcast listener, so the people that I follow, that I look forward to in the same way that the recipients of that email newsletter probably look forward to getting that very long article from the person they're following, I'd much prefer to listen to that content than I would to read that content. So, it's very difficult when you're trying to produce content for people who have a different preference. You know, you're accommodating the people who want to read that, and you almost, by definition, have to write an email that's not the email that you yourself would want to get. Do you have any advice on how to get over that hump?
[00:10:41] Matt: That's very interesting. I suppose you could... And I have done this before. You can send emails with links to different formats of content, right? So if you're predominantly a YouTube person, then every email you send out can be a link to a different YouTube video, right? Structured in a way that introduces your ideas and progresses awareness and builds engagement and all these other things I talk about in the book. Yeah, you can link out to any type of content. My personal affinity for email is the fact that it is a written medium, and the type of audience that you're engaging with are typically readers. I think that's a strength to the channel among the myriad of others.
[00:11:22] Matt: I mean, just going back to what we were saying before about why email marketing? I mean, once you get over the whole spammy perception of it, it's the largest and most active group of people on the internet. It's the highest engagement. They're the most ready to buy. It's the highest ROI channel. It's the only one that allows you to own the data of your audience.
[00:11:43] Matty: Yeah. And as you're saying, you know, the idea that it's the audience you own, you're not having a social media platform mediate it for you. I think that one thing that's more specific to nonfiction authors, although this is true of fiction authors too, but you're ideally meeting a need, right? If you're sending out a newsletter marketing for a service you're offering, for example, then you're hopefully, by definition, doing it because there's a problem that your audience may have that you can help them solve.
Now for fiction authors, maybe that issue is finding entertaining reading, and you could approach it that way. But if I'm sending out a newsletter, for example, to people who are writers, probably earlier in their writing career, and could be either independently published authors or traditionally published authors or pre-published authors that are pursuing either one of those. Is there a way that I can figure out what that problem is that my audience is solving that I would be able to help them with that would make my newsletter educational for them, for example?
[00:12:46] Matt: Yeah, I guess, like anything in business, there's a little bit of testing involved. You have your initial assumptions about it. And then you kind of refine it over time. You learn more about your audience and you refine your messaging based on what your audience responds to, right? That's what it's all about.
[00:13:02] Matt: And really, I mean, one of the other good things about email is it's all timeless marketing principles, right? And there's nothing more timeless than the fact that your marketing is going to be stronger the better you know and understand your audience, right? I also talk about that in the book. I think that very much applies to fiction authors.
So you could look at it from the top-level lens of, okay, I'm entertaining people, I'm providing an escape. Okay, that's probably true for every fiction author, but then you can probably be a bit more granular in that. I mean, someone writing romance novels is fulfilling a very different need within that entertainment umbrella than someone, compared to someone writing a thriller novel or a sci-fi novel, right? They're fulfilling a different need, so it changes the way that you go about that.
The challenges of a one-way relationship via email
[00:13:51] Matty: I think one of the things that's tough about email marketing is that, and I'm picturing this playing out in the natural world, that if you do something in the natural world, you can kind of see the impact it has on your surroundings. But with email, it feels, at least initially, very one-way. I mean, I think that maybe ideally it becomes more interactive, but unlike social media, where you can immediately see the things that people like, the things that people don't like, and the things they respond to or don't respond to, with email, you can send it out there, send it out there. For example, I very rarely have people unsubscribe from my email lists. I'm super careful about how I go about adding people to the list. And when I add them, I'm strategizing in a way that I think what I'm sending them is what they want, and that they're going to stick with me, and that has proved to be the case.
But I also very rarely get any feedback, even when I put an invitation in an email to just hit reply to get back to me. Do you have any advice on how to collect data in what seems, on the surface, like a one-way communication?
[00:14:58] Matt: That's interesting. Yeah. So I suppose there you're thinking about the ecosystem dynamic in terms of the interaction between the audience and yourself. I tend to think of it more about the dynamics of the system itself. The same thing could apply to a degree with your social media audience, but I think it is stronger in email marketing.
So in your case, if you're sending emails out regularly and you're not getting any unsubscribes, I mean, there's, it means there's no deaths in your system, you're just having a very slow birth rate, and no one's ever dying. So what does that mean? And they're not responding to your emails, so it means that your engagement is probably, there's probably something interesting going on with your engagement. That's how I'd think about it.
Alternatives to inaccurate open rate stats
[00:15:44] Matt: And that's how I'd use the ecosystem lens to look at it, especially. I think this sort of stuff is more important than ever, and you have to be more critical than ever because, I'm not sure if your audience is aware of this, but open rates and click rates are becoming increasingly unreliable. In fact, open rates, you basically cannot rely on at all anymore. As of about this time last year, with the Apple Mail privacy updates, which are getting more and more strict.
So I think it's something like, I saw a thing from Litmus, which does email deliverability stuff, something like 50 percent of opens are misattributed at the moment. So your open rates aren't a good measure of your engagement anymore. You really need to start looking at these things like what you're speaking about: are people replying? Are people interacting with your emails? Are people going from the email that you've sent to the landing page you've specified on your site? Does the traffic add up to what the email marketing system is saying? You really need to look at that now. And unsubscribes are a really big one. That's a huge marker of whether people like it. I would argue that it is actually healthy to have some turnover in the system. You want some people, you know, I'm sure you do have a very small unsubscribe rate.
[00:16:56] Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I have not done a good job of is poking around in my email service stats. So, you know, I have just a general sense of how many people I'm sending out to, but the idea of going in periodically and looking at people who are inactive in whatever way the system is defining that and clearing out people who maybe are skewing your deliverability by not opening, like not unsubscribing but not opening, does that happen?
[00:17:27] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually quite a complex dynamic. There's deliverability on the side of making sure your technical deliverability stuff is set up - DKIM and all of that, on the domain side. Then there's something called sender score inside your email marketing system itself. Which is this interplay between what servers they decide to put you on and how much that's going to reach people. That's not exactly like that. That's a crude oversimplification, but that kind of gets us somewhere the way there. And then, yeah, this idea of the top-level engagement, how many people are actually opening your emails and clicking them and interacting with them at all those different stages, right? The funnel analysis of it. So, yeah, there is a bit to that.
[00:18:14] Matty: I'm sure a lot of people are in the same situation I'm in, that they have an email list they're sending out at some to be determined intervals, like for my non-fiction platform, it's weekly, but for my fiction platform, I just send something out when I have something to say. Like, oh, I'm going to be at this bookstore signing books, or, you know, one of my books is on sale. It's very much event-driven.
Matt's guidelines for target email performance
[00:18:32] Matty: Are there statistics or other factors people should be looking at? Like people always say you should look at open rate. Now we've found out that maybe that isn't true after all, but I never hear numbers like your open rate should be over this amount or you should have a certain amount of good subscriber churn. What should people be looking at to see if they need to make tweaks in how they're approaching their email?
[00:18:56] Matt: Oh yeah, I can give you stats. That's no problem. I can't link you to anything or I'll mention anything regarding your sending schedule, which is what you referred to earlier, but that's definitely a good idea. In fact, that's one of the first things you should really cement in place. Say, okay, I'm just going to commit to something. If you're going the newsletter route, and newsletters are trendy at the moment, there are some other ways you can go about this. I talk about all of this stuff in my writing, but let's just say you only have time to send one email every so often. Just say, okay, I'm going to send it on every second Wednesday, and commit to that. Then you can build up the system around that, have an automated email go out every week, every first Friday, right? And then put in slots for everything, and that avoids a lot of headaches down the track. So you should have a sending schedule to answer that first part of your question.
But in terms of just some offhand best practice metrics, look, open rates are fraught with danger these days. They are still a good lagging indicator, so if you have above a 25 percent open rate, you're probably okay. But you should be getting a lot more than that, especially now that Apple Mail and mail privacy stuff, which is extended to other mail servers, is triggering opens. So a lot of people saw their opens just jump dramatically recently.
So look, the rule always was like, okay, above 25 percent, you're doing okay. 35 percent plus, you're probably, it's probably good engagement. That's not as reliable anymore, but it's still a lag indicator. So if you are sitting at 35 percent engagement, and that drops down to 15 percent, you know something's gone wrong. Whereas if it goes up to 65 percent, you know something's probably gone right, right? So it's a good lagging indicator, but not gospel truth. So that's how I approach open rates.
Unsubscribes, I typically say it does depend on the audience and your turnover and a lot of other factors that you have to look at individually. But below 0.35 percent unsubscribe rate, if you can achieve that, that's probably good because you don't want it to be zero because that would suggest to me there's probably some problem with engagement that has not yet been uncovered, right? People should naturally opt out of the system to some degree. But if you keep it below 0.35, that's good.
Email marketing beyond the newsletter
[00:21:11]
Matty: Well, you made an interesting comment, which is, I think that whenever an author hears email, we always think of an email newsletter. But I'm realizing that that's just one small niche of email marketing more generally. Can you talk about other ways that authors should be using email that aren't specific to newsletters?
[00:21:32] Matt: Yeah, I mean, that's really my specialty, right? I run newsletters for people. Newsletters are hot, and for a good reason. There are some incredible businesses built off newsletters that are sent once a week, generating multi-million-dollar businesses. They're great and provide a lot of value. They're also relatively simple. If you're just sending one email, it makes the whole system a lot easier to manage, right?
But some of the power of email, one of the other benefits I didn't really go into is the fact that you can automate the entire subscriber journey, the customer journey from when they come onto your site and join your email list, everything after that, you control in email. It allows you to do really interesting things like building up a narrative, progress awareness, which I've touched on briefly since we've been talking, but I haven't gone into it in depth.
So you can nurture someone from the point where they don't really know much about you, your value proposition, or what you're all about to the point where they're really into it. I use something called Schwartz's five stages of awareness, which is really helpful and ensures that you're sending value all the time. They go from being vaguely aware of the problem you're solving for themselves to understanding the solutions available and the products that can help them. You can build on this over time, right?
The power of awareness automation
[00:22:57] Matt: And you can only do that with automation. So I really recommend to people that one of the foundation pieces of their system is something I call an awareness automation or something similar, where you take people on a subscriber journey and introduce the ideas from your books or your work or your business over time in a very structured way. That's when you tend to get the best results.
The email sequence as a story
[00:23:56] Matty: So that might be a good introduction to the other thing we were going to talk about, which is the idea of an email sequence as a story. Is this what you were talking about, this journey that you take the subscriber through?
[00:24:07] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah, this is something I haven't explored in too much depth, but I really nerd out on this. I think it's one of the underlooked benefits of email. Let's compare it to having an audience on, let's say, Instagram. I don't know what the post reach is like on Instagram now, but if I've got a series of 10 posts that all build on each other to create a narrative and convey a series of ideas, you might see only five or three of those posts over the whole two or three weeks that I'm putting them out, right?"
Whereas with email, I know every time that those emails are going into their inbox. And if my engagement and my list health fundamentals are in place, I can be quite sure that they're going to see every email, at least the subject line, right? So the actual visibility of every message, every point in the story is there and it's there in perpetuity. So if they read the last email and they want to go back to the first one, it's still in their inbox, right?
So the ability to build a narrative and construct a story, like you're saying, is something unique, I think, to the channel in the way that you can deliver it. This is not a new concept. One of the old OG email marketing guys is Jeff Walker. He wrote this book called "Launch: The Product Launch Formula." I mean, I don't know when that came out, but it's an absolute classic, still works today.
But one of the things he talks about is the power of narrative and it's just the arc that you create. With the emails you send, I mean, we've all heard of Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey and that, that's one side to it. I actually think we're moving into a stage where it's less like this very linear journey with the reader as the hero and more like this kind of episodic sequence, a serial on TV, right, where you dip in and out at different stages. If you structure the story that way, that can be a lot more interesting, where it's like, it's like watching Friends or Seinfeld or something, right? Everything is a piece in itself, but it's part of this larger whole. You're creating a world that people enter into, and each one is its own little mini narrative that kind of ties to a larger narrative but doesn't at the same time.
I think there's a lot to this; it's not just "Hey, hit all of these points in the Circular Hero's journey in the email sequence you're sending." It's okay, what world are you building? What are the ideas that this world is based on? And how does that relate to the problem you're solving and your value proposition, all of that? I think that can be really powerful when you get into that stuff.
Matty: That's so interesting. I mean, it does suggest that that sequence has to be planned out in a way that's much different than I have thought about it in the past. So my email sequence, and I just want to preface this by saying I'm not recommending this, just saying this is what it is, is when someone signs up, I think they get two or three follow-up emails, and each of them is a very short email, and it's a link to a different resource. So I think it's something like, the first one is a link to my website, the second one is a link to a playlist on my YouTube channel, and the third one is a link to a different playlist on my YouTube channel. You know, three different resources that I think will be useful to people, mainly just as a way of continuing that engagement and pointing out to them that I have more things than just the way they found me. If they found me in the podcast, then they should be aware that I also have a website and YouTube channel.
But that isn't a story arc in any sense. It's just three, it's not even Seinfeld episodes. It's just like three pieces of information. When you're counseling your nonfiction author clients on how to create that story, are there guidelines you give them? Do you have your own, uh, hero's journey sort of structure that you recommend they use?
Matt: I'm working on it, and it's very much not The Hero's Journey. I mean, it's more like, uh, The Odyssey. Very much. It's like a Homeric form. No doubt on
Matty: This is sounding more alarming with each passing moment. I mean, that sounds difficult.
[00:28:15] Matt: No, I mean, it's just a different narrative form, but I think if we're looking at your particular case, right, what I would immediately think is that I see the way you're going about it. It's very logical, but you probably have a huge backlog of content, right? Both on YouTube and your podcast, and you've probably repurposed it in multiple different ways. I would think about where the audience is intercepting you in their journey. Are they aware of the problem they're dealing with? How far along in that problem recognition are they? It's that classic Robert Collier line of entering the conversation going on in the prospect's mind, right? So meet them exactly where they are when they join your email list, and then send them that piece of content. Then begin their entrance into your world with that piece of content and build on that over time. So over the subsequent weeks, you drip out other pieces of content that slowly start to piece together this puzzle, a picture of what you're all about, and what your brand's all about. If they skip one or two, it doesn't matter because they're dipping in and out.
How to segment an audience
[00:29:14] Matty: Right. So, I'm realizing that I think one of the things I linked to, and if I haven't yet, I'm going to, is that episodes 101 through 107 were with Orna Ross on the seven processes of publishing, and that's a great entry for people who are new to publishing, especially the indie publishing world. But not every person who joins my list is going to be part of a homogeneous group of people with a similar skill set. They're going to be people who haven't even started writing their first book, and they're going to be people who are traditionally published and now they're thinking of changing to indie, or they're indie published and they're thinking of pursuing a traditional deal or something like that. So if you don't have enough information to segment it so that you're creating that journey specific to different people's levels of experience, is there a way around that?
[00:30:04] Matt: Yeah. So the first level of segmentation would depend on where people are coming into your list, right? So you probably have opt-in lead magnets at different points. I mean, either you've got CTAs that you've got at the end of this podcast or if I go to your site, there's probably different places where I can give you my email address, right?
[00:30:25] Matty: Yes, but not as much as I could, for sure.
[00:30:29] Matt: Okay, sure. Yeah. Oh, just as a side note, that's one of the highest leverage areas when it comes to email. I mean, it's very hard to double your traffic, but it's very, very easy to double what I call your traffic-to-subscribe conversion. There's a lot you can do there. You can rapidly grow your list by improving that level. So anyway, that's the first level of segmentation. Look at the traffic coming to your site, tailor your opt-ins to possible different segments of your audience. You mentioned one of those segments, people who are just starting out, right?
[00:31:00] Matty: Yeah, like people who are just, let's say, just finishing their first book.
[00:31:04] Matt: Okay. Yeah. So say you've got a lot of organic traffic coming to a page, like "How to Finally Get Your Book Out the Door." And then you're offering them something really valuable. It has to be actually valuable. Again, under-promise, over-deliver. It can't be a PDF with the top 10 tips on how to finish that book, although that would be helpful, I'm sure.
[00:31:27] Matty: Sure, I think I could get a lot of people signed up for that one.
[00:31:31] Matt: Yeah, but I mean, you've got to think bigger than that. You've got to think of something like, I don't know what you're doing in that specific case, but it has to be something really valuable, something they'd probably pay money for, right? So when I do give you my email address, I'm like, okay, well, I've got something really good right off the bat. And then by the time I get your first email, I'm going to think, "Wow, this is just value on value on value," right? And I'm more inclined to enter that world you're building up, right? Exploring the value of email marketing for an author
[00:31:55] Matty: So here's my anathema question. Is, what is the value of me doing that? Because, if I think about the Indie author world, for example, I have thought about my email list in a very admittedly limited way, as a way for me to build a relationship so that I'm retaining podcast listeners. And, you know, sometimes I'm pointing them to resources I have that I actually earn money from, like a book about podcasting. If you're interested in podcasting, buy my book on podcasting. So, there's that opportunity. There's the opportunity to maybe introduce them to my fiction work, and there could be opportunities to. You know, certainly pay it forward to the community and things like that, but I'm not getting any intrinsic payback for each person who subscribes to my email. It's only paving the way to something else. Am I just looking at it in too limited a way?
[00:32:51] Matt: Yeah, yeah. In short, yes. So let's go with the podcasting thing as an example, so that you said there's a podcasting course that you offer?
[00:33:07] Matty: I have a book on podcasting for authors, and I offer consulting services.
[00:33:11] Matt: Okay, yeah, so this whole podcasting thing is a sub-story within the whole wider narrative, right? There's going to be a point where you start talking about podcasting, and you're going to receive a certain level of engagement from that. What you can then do is if you've already built a product around it and you know that it's a need and something that's a problem that your audience faces, then you can justify saying, "Okay, I'm going to build this whole subsequence for people who engage with those emails that I'm kind of seeding throughout the broader narrative." And when they engage with those emails, it'll trigger this subsequence that's dedicated to just talking about podcasting stuff. And then you could really focus on that part of the journey.
So the next, say you send me an email about podcasting adjacent stuff, and I interact with it. And then two weeks later, you send me another one. I interact with that. You can use that to flag something in your email automation system that says, "Okay, send Matt the podcast sequence." And then I'll be in that for the next, let's say two to three weeks, and then you're going to really start taking me on that journey from talking about the problem that I might be facing regarding podcasting, introducing various solutions to that problem, and then finally talking about your product as one of those solutions among many. That's going to be a way to introduce that series of ideas in a way that's not spammy and creates value the whole time.
How constructing an email sequence is like writing a business plan
[00:34:30] Matty: So, if people are putting together an email sequence that is following kind of a story arc, it seems to me that thinking through that would be quite a deep dive into making sure you understand your business to the extent that you're almost writing like a business plan for yourself.
Like, I would think that if somebody can successfully walk a potential client through that kind of story about the solution they have to offer, they need to have a very sophisticated understanding of their own business. Do you find that you have to advise clients to understand their business better before trying to write that description of it for other people?
[00:35:10] Matt: Understand their business in the sense of understanding what they're offering. Yeah, I mean, you have to know what your core value proposition is and what problem you're really solving and think about that quite deeply. I mean, taking it back to the fiction author's thing, yeah, why are you writing? Why are people reading what you write? How are you being valuable to other people? I mean, that's how I look at business, right? Yeah, you have to be aware of those things.
The psychology of marketing
[00:35:34] Matt: I mean, marketing is numbers and psychology. With email, you get the numbers, right? You see how people are reacting to each set of emails. Like, I'll run experiments where there are three different variations of positioning running against one another. And you can start to see trends in which one is being responded to the best just in terms of engagement, right? And unsubscribes and all those other things we were talking about before. So there's a numbers side of it. The psychology side of it is coming up with those ideas in the first place for the positioning.
[00:36:07] Matty: Yeah, this episode title is going to be like the gestalt of email marketing or something like that. Because whenever I talk about email marketing with anyone, I always get kind of stuck on the "why am I doing this" thing. I think it's because I don't have a clear enough understanding in my mind between "I'm communicating with this person because I want to help them start up a podcast" or "I want to help them think through whether they should even think about starting up a podcast." I think thinking through the exact scenario where that is going to be exactly the book somebody needs and then creating the story that leads up to that, I think, quite a sophisticated business exercise. It feels kind of tricky to me to understand what you're trying to achieve at that level.
[00:37:00] Matt: It can be a lot of fun.
The pros and cons of bucking cover genre conventions
[00:37:03] Matty: It could be a lot of fun! It could just make me pull my hair out, but that's so interesting, such interesting food for thought. I'm going to have to noodle on all that. But before I let you go, I had another topic I wanted to hit pretty quickly, and that is the cover of your book, "Natural Orders." So I have to say, I never thought I would say this about a book about email marketing, but it is a gorgeous cover. It's just beautiful to look at. I might just have to order the print copy so that I can just look at the cover.
But if I saw that in a bookstore, I would not say, "Oh, look, a book on email marketing," because it has beautiful botanical drawings. And I think there's like a peacock there or something. I'm seeing it quite small, so I'm not exactly sure. But I'm very curious about the thought that went into the design of the book, and I mean, you're making a sale because I just want to have a print copy of this book to look at the cover in more detail. But I'm sure you're acknowledging that you're probably losing people, too, because they kind of breeze through it. They don't even realize what the topic is. Can you talk a little bit about the thought that went into choosing that cover for "Natural Orders"?
[00:38:12] Matt: Yeah. First of all, thank you very much. I did put some thought into it. Here it is for the YouTube people watching. I definitely didn't follow the advice for "Here's how to create a book cover that sells really well on Amazon." I mean, it goes basically against all of those rules, and yeah, it doesn't look like a business book, let alone an email marketing book, but I thought, yeah, the people who love it, love it. And you want to attract those people. I've found that in the reviews as well; some people really resonate with the whole perspective I've taken with it. Yeah, that's what it's all about. I think there's a huge branding premium in writing a book that sometimes... undirected knowledge. And I think you should lean into that as much as possible. I've probably really gone down the natural orders route and everything that entails. And yeah, it might get passed over. My click-through rate from Amazon ads might suffer a little bit, but whatever. It's alright. The people who want to read it and find it and resonate with it, they still find it. So I think it's absolutely fine.
Also, with a business book, you're not trying to sell a million copies. You're trying to sell a certain amount and get those people who really have that burning problem. And, you know, talking about what you were just. That is the reason I wrote the book, so this whole idea of why I bother with email marketing. That's where people really seem to trip up. I mean, I've gone so deep into this over the years, and I still find people are really at that point. They're like, "Well, I'm doing email. Like basic stuff, but why am I doing it? And what does advanced email look like? And what comes next, right? What does real proper email marketing look like? And it's meant to answer that question. It's meant to be like, here's exactly what it looks like. Here's why you're doing it. Here's what you're trying to achieve with it. Here's where it fits in with your broader marketing mix. And here's how to do it without falling into all these traps that people tend to fall into.
[00:40:03] Matty: Well, I think that's a great insight to offer to people because I realized that I, and I'm sure a lot of other authors fall into this as well, but we hear the very valid and understandable advice that says you need to have a list of people that you want to connect with, that you own, and they are not beholden to Facebook or whatever to stay in touch with those people. It totally makes sense to me, and I'm willing to spend a certain amount of time in order to do that. But then I think that's all a lot of writers are looking for. They're looking for that group of people that they own so that if their Facebook account gets shut down, they can still tell people about their latest book.
But as we're talking, I'm realizing that's kind of like the nursery school version of email marketing, and that a better understanding of all the other ways that email can serve us would be a good tool to add to the toolkit.
[00:40:52] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think so. I think there's a lot of people out there that are kind of clued into it. They think, "Okay, there's more to this email thing." There's not a lot of information out there, especially not packaged together in an easy way where it's like, I can just sit down and read this book in a day, and I'll have a whole new view of this channel and what it can do for me. So that's the value proposition.
[00:41:14] Matty: So if people are reading "Natural Orders," is it the kind of thing that you feel that they would read through at once and they would have a better sense of it, or is it the kind of book that you have to sort of work your way through gradually? Is the approach something that you need to work your way through gradually rather than trying to absorb it all in one big chunk?
[00:41:31] Matt: That's interesting, you say that, actually, because I hate these business books that are a hundred pages just to say one thing. Some of the feedback I've gotten, which is great, I guess, is that it's a very dense book. So a lot of people will buy the physical copy, write notes in it, highlight things, and keep going back to it over and over again, which is. It's great. That's fantastic. I did put a lot of work into this book, even though it's only 200 pages. I think it is quite dense. Yeah, so you'll probably come back to it again and again and get ideas out of it, and there are things that you'll probably realize that you skimmed over the first time that you'll go back to and get something out of when you read it again. Which is great. That's the type of book I wanted to read. When I think of all the best business books, my favorite business books, they're all like that. They're relatively short, but they're just packed with stuff. It's like every line you get something out of. I don't know if mine's achieved that same goal, but I've tried. I've aimed towards.
[00:42:24] Matty: That's great. Well, I appreciate you being so generous with following my meandering set of questions. But it is true that this was, you know, less about the tactics of email marketing and more about the value of thinking of it in a bit more holistic way than I think a lot of authors naturally do. But, Matt, it's been so nice talking to you. Please let listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:42:51] Matt: So the best place to find out more about me is naturalordersbook.com. So that's naturalordersbook.com.
[00:43:01] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:43:03] Matt: Thank you.
