265. Why Newsletters Should be a Part of your Marketing Mix for your Coworking Space
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TRANSCRIPTION
265. Why Newsletters Should be a Part of your Marketing Mix for your Coworking Space
00:00:03 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how tos in Coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years, and then served as the executive director of the global workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator,
00:00:29 case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. So glad to have you with me. I am guessing some of you are on summer trips road, tripping, flying,
00:00:56 whatever it may be. Everyone is out and about. I feel like everyone I know has gone to Europe for the summer. We are going to Canada. I'm actually leaving. After I record this, we are going to bam Jasper and we're staying in the town of Canmore. So thank you to Amber who from, I think it's lighthouse co-work gave me some awesome tips for our trip.
00:01:20 Looking forward to that. And Mark, I know you're listening and I am dying to stop by, but we're driving through on Saturday and I don't want to drag you out of your home on Saturday. And can I talk my husband and daughter into stopping at a coworking space? I'm not sure, but, but I would love to stop by. Speaking of stopping by.
00:01:39 I was visiting family in upstate New York last week. So I got to visit Christie in Glens falls and Dorothy in Saratoga Springs and Jeff in Schenectady, which was awesome. So Dorothy has Saratoga Co-works. Christie has WorkSmart and Jeff has Urban Co-works and it was amazing to see people in person and see their beautiful spaces. So that was fun. So I love visiting spaces.
00:02:10 So when I can, I do, and thank you to all of them, each of them, for their hospitality and for spending a little time with me and for breaking up the week with the family, which was also a huge win. So I want to give a couple of shoutouts to our community managers who are working through their certifications, Ashley Raftery from Hone Co-works congrats,
00:02:34 Sarah Campbell from Crawfordsville, Indiana. And I am afraid I don't have her space name, correct there, but Sarah, we might have to update your shout-out next week. They just finished their certifications, which is fairly rigorous. So it's a lot of work and it's basically, they kind of go through the boot camp content of our Community Manager University. We did some sales training yesterday.
00:02:58 A huge thank you to Adam Xeno from Pacific workplaces who I don't think he's a listener, but I'm gonna thank him. Anyway. He was an excellent presenter. He made me realize I need to up my game and be much more entertaining. He's very entertaining. And the sales training was really helpful, made us realize we need to do more sales training.
00:03:15 It was great. So I love bringing in other experts to help us with content and that's all recorded. So if you want to jump in and have your Community Manager, do their certification, or have access to our enormous library of training content, they can go to Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. So today we're doing a series on your online presence.
00:03:38 So last week we talked about social media and being careful about how much time you spend on organic social. So this week we're going to talk about newsletters and I have to mention, we're going to post a case study probably next week, an interview we just did with the post workspaces and they are great examples of content marketing. They do paid Facebook ads.
00:04:03 They have a great newsletter. They have a blog that gets updated. We have to give a shout-out to Taylor Mason who helps them with their content marketing. He's going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks as well. So we'll have a kind of a case study. They talk a little bit about their content marketing and our interviews. So that will probably go up this week kind of in our theme of online presence because they do a lot of things well,
00:04:22 but they definitely do that well. So, okay. Newsletter, we do newsletter training for community managers as well. It's one of my favorite topics. I would say if you're listening, just a couple of context notes here. If you already do a newsletter awesome high five, because it's an important thing to get going. Maybe you could be more consistent, but good for you for having that done.
00:04:49 I hope I maybe can provide a couple of thoughts for folks who already have newsletters. If you have a marketing background, I think the newsletter is just like a really natural marketing tactic. And if you don't have a marketing background, it's one of those things you don't get to for a long time and feels maybe a little bit overwhelming or it's just not kind of something you're comfortable with.
00:05:13 So email marketing has an enormous ROI. It may take you a while to see that for the newsletter. So, you know, it kind of depends. It's probably a higher ROI for e-commerce companies. How many of you have bought items on sale? Because you're on, you know, the J crew email list or that happens to me all the time.
00:05:33 So I had been, you know, I write a weekly newsletter, it's an investment. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of planning. It just takes real commitment and discipline, but you can really, really simplify your newsletter by creating a template and having your Community Manager do the newsletter and just keeping the content really simple. I suspect if you don't have a newsletter yet,
00:05:57 you're A. not comfortable with the technology. And the newsletter technology is so easy these days to get started with. And if you need a template, you can get one on Upwork or just use a template that exists in MailChimp or active campaign or whatever it is that you use. I need to update my template, but I'm not going to let it stop me from sending out my newsletter.
00:06:19 So the most important thing is to send something, even if it's not amazing, we track our open rates and our click-through rates and, you know, try to figure out what resonates with people. I get anxious. If that open rate goes down, sometimes it, you know, deliverability issue I've been, I was ending up in people's spam boxes,
00:06:37 which is a real problem. So I had to have an IT guy help with that. But anyway, if you're not sending a newsletter, it's probably because you're afraid of the tech or don't know what to send. And so we're going to really just kind of simplify that. I'm just going to do an overview here. Cause like I said, we do full training on sending newsletters in our Community Manager University.
00:06:55 But I just want to get you thinking about why it's important to send a newsletter. So couple of, kind of high-level points, it takes six to eight touch points to make a sale. So we did sales training for our Community Manager yesterday. And we talked about the fact that like once in a blue moon, you know, you might have somebody come in,
00:07:14 who signs up right away. It's not overly common. You know, some people, as Adam said, you know, we'll come in and it doesn't really matter what you say. They're going to join, but others need multiple touchpoints. So last week we talked about social media. Social media absolutely can be a touch point. The challenge is that organic social media has a 10% reach.
00:07:35 So if you have a thousand followers and you post something, only a hundred of them will see it. So 900 of your followers never saw what you posted. So we have to have a multi-channel approach. So social can be one of them. The great thing about email is that your open rate should be at least double your social media reach. So your open rates should be 20% at a minimum.
00:07:57 And if it's not clean up your list, just Google, how to clean your list. I use Active Campaign and I actually have an automation running. It has, I think it's called an engagement automation. And so it basically tracks who opens and clicks emails. And so every six months I can go through and say, run a report that says,
00:08:19 tell me who hasn't opened anything in six months and just get them off the list. Obviously, they're not, they're not that into me. So we just take them off the list. So then the open rate stays really high. We used to have in our coworking space, you know, a very high open rate probably for our marketing newsletter, north of 40 and for internal newsletter,
00:08:41 north of 50. So it should be pretty high if you're low, clean up the list. Cause you got people on there who are not paying attention to you and they're hurting your ego and your open rates. So back to the comparison to social 10% on social, you should be, you know, well, well above that maybe four times above that on your marketing newsletter.
00:09:00 So marketing your newsletter is just email is a great way to reach people. So I have a stat from our training that says the ROI on email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent. I'm not sure if we can apply that to Coworking, but I just thought I would throw it out there. In terms of email marketing is still considered to be a very,
00:09:20 very effective way to build a relationship with your customers and to let them know when you have something for them to take action on like a membership and open office, open dedicated desk event space, that kind of things, Hey, we'll be right back. I just want to share a couple of opportunities from our show sponsors as a co-working space owner, you are always looking to provide more resources and programming for your members,
00:09:55 right? How about access to financial education and even investment opportunities? Well noumena is the number one community for freelancers and founders looking to grow their businesses. So noumena and coworking spaces go together like, you know, butter and jelly. We found that over 75% of our community already work in or are seeking out a coworking space. We'd like to help our members connect with you and find your space anywhere in the world.
00:10:28 So join our coworking space directory to be featured in our community and give your members access to a whole library of entrepreneurial resources and financial education programming all at no cost to you, by the way, visit noumena.pro/coworking to fill out an interest form that's noumena.pro/coworking. We will include that link in the show notes for anybody who's walking around and doesn't have time to write it down.
00:11:05 You can find it in the show notes for this episode at Everything Coworking dot com, noumena financing. The future of work. The amount of opportunity in the Coworking industry is absolutely mindblowing. It's projected to grow by $13 billion in the next five years, just staggering numbers. Now you've probably seen success magazine it's hugely popular and focuses on professional development, personal development and business coaching.
00:11:38 Well they're branching out with their own franchised Coworking business called success space. It's actually a brilliant franchise model with three revenue streams recurring and on-demand revenue from Coworking memberships, a full-service cafe and success-certified business coaching for small business owners to executives to learn more about this exciting new Coworking business opportunity. Check it out at success. Co-work dot space. That's success,
00:12:11 co-work dot space. We will link that up in the show notes as well. So let's just talk about really quickly, your newsletter audiences. I think this is super important. You have your members and you have your potential members. And so you want to have two separate newsletters and one can just be a simple copy of the other one. So, you know,
00:12:33 usually maybe your member newsletter is probably going to be a little beefier because you're including things like member events and space announcements to maybe create that first and then just make a copy of it and delete the non-member things. Or we used to not delete it and just include a members-only section. So if we had member events coming up members, only that way we give a little bit of FOMO.
00:12:58 So your first audience is, well, let's talk about potential members. You know, email can be a long game. And one of the great ways to use email is especially if you're in a smaller market where people don't really understand Coworking, or we have all these remote workers who are sort of interested in, how do I use a coworking space? I don't totally get it.
00:13:19 I'm not going to not ready to try it yet, but I'll get on the email list. So use it as a way to help people learn how they can use your space. And this is my favorite reason for doing a newsletter. I think that your audience that hasn't joined yet, they really want to know who's in the space. They want that like behind the scenes on the Maya fit,
00:13:43 do people like me do Coworking? I think it's Seth Godin. He says like, you know, you have to help people understand, like, people like us do things like this. Do people like me use a coworking space for meetings? Do people like me go to member events? Do people like me get an office at a coworking space? So use your newsletter to show your subscribers.
00:14:03 People like us, you know, use Coworking. And by us, I don't mean broader like mindset, not, you know, sort of demographics and whatnot. Okay. So your marketing newsletter is for potential members that aren't sure about Coworking potential members that aren't sure about your space and potential members that go someplace else, but they aren't sure yet that that's where they're going to stay.
00:14:30 So when you're thinking about who you're talking to just think about these are for the people who have not committed yet, but they're interested, they have raised their hand and it's pretty big hand raise to get on someone's email list, right? So, so treat them with respect and send them what will be useful to them. I'm going to share a couple of,
00:14:51 of newsletters letters that I think are super well done. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind-the-scenes secrets to opening a coworking space. If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business.
00:15:19 The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour and includes some Q and a. If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com forward slash masterclass. If you already have a coworking space, I want to make sure you know, about Community Manager, University, Community Manager, University is a training and development platform for community managers.
00:15:42 And it can be for owner-operators. It has content training resources templates from day one to general manager. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management, operations, sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path. So the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them,
00:16:09 depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group. We also host a live Q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network. We also have a private slack group for the group.
00:16:35 So if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. So the I'm not sure yet crowd, I'm still trying to understand Coworking. So if you think those folks are on your email list, or even not assume they are, you know, put in blurbs, have a section that talks about Coworking and how people use it.
00:16:57 And you know what the benefits that people get out of Coworking. This is where like testimonials and reviews can kind of cover that topic. Some might be debating the ROI like I want to join. Is it worth it for my business and expense that I'm not sure I'm ready for yet. So that's where the testimonials might fit in that you would include in your newsletter.
00:17:16 I'm not sure which space is a fit for me. So help them decide whether your space is a fit or not. I like to think about email marketing for your marketing newsletter, as you know, for people that are on the fence. It may also be because you run a lot of events and you're trying to get people to sign up for them.
00:17:33 You may definitely have different reasons to do a newsletter, but when we're thinking about, you know, getting people engaged in helping them join, and again, remember it takes six to eight touches to make a sale. And that sale might even just be getting people to sign up for an event that hosting that you want them to pay for much less a membership.
00:17:52 So get in front of them on social. Get an although with limited with ads is what I would suggest and limited resources spent on organic and then newsletter website, Google business profile, and other marketing that you do in your community. Your second audience is your members and why do your members want a newsletter? It's a great retention tool. So you might have a slack channel.
00:18:14 Slack is often challenging to get folks to use. Not everyone uses it. It can be hard to engage folks. I always recommend giving it a try. And that's probably another topic we could do is how do you get a community engaged on slack, but sending it to members. Look, you have members that don't come in that often, right? I know you do.
00:18:33 Cause we talk about it all the time. Like why do these people stay? We certainly had them, well, they want to be a part of something. And they want the, the optionality of having this membership. So keep them engaged even when they're not coming in, they want the FOMO. They want to know that that things are happening, that they could be participating in member event or member appreciation days or just new members that they could be interacting with.
00:18:56 Give them FOMO. When they missed events event, photos are great to include and then get them interested in meeting new members by doing member features. So that kind of draws us into what to send. So don't overthink it, you know, do your two versions. One is just kind of a paired down version of the other or send the same and just make it clear which content is for members only,
00:19:19 not everyone does two different versions and that simplifies it even more. Try to keep it simple, keep the same sections each month so that you're not starting from scratch. There's no need to reinvent the newsletter wheel each week or month. And how often do you send it? It's really up to you if you weren't sending one yet. And you're just kind of getting into the rhythm of it.
00:19:39 Maybe you do it every month, maybe every other week. Some folks do weekly. Those folks tend to have more events, tend to have lots of new members. So they have plenty of content. If you're struggling a little bit with content, here's what I'd say, though, if you are just starting your newsletter, then every member is new and has never been featured in the newsletter.
00:19:56 So you have plenty content and it might be challenging to get your members to get you the info you need for your member feature. But if you have a good community manager, who's building relationships with those folks, he or she should be able to use a little personal capital to get them to provide a picture and a little an answer to your questions for the newsletter.
00:20:16 And we have a sample of the questions and a template in our Community Manager University. So same sections each month create a template, you know, in MailChimp or active campaign or whatever it is that you use and just customize the template each month in three simple things to include member feature. That is if you're going to send one thing in that newsletter, I think that's it again,
00:20:38 if they're thinking about joining or understanding Coworking, seeing the amazing people that are members of our spaces, aren't you all proud, proud might be a strange word, but just so I can't think of another word. We love our members, right? We love the diversity of our members and how unique they are and how interesting they all are and how they do so many different things.
00:21:01 And maybe have some connection in some way, like their kids all go to the school next door, or they live in the same town where they live in the same neighborhood and they walk over. But the people that your members are so compelling to you and to people on the outside. So if that's the one thing you share, do that. So photo and some images forge work@forge.com
00:21:21 is their website. I talk about forge in their newsletter, probably a lot. So some of you may be on their newsletter and they need to clean you up, but please open the newsletters. If you're getting them or unsubscribe, they do great member features. I'm dying to visit Birmingham because every time I read a member feature, the questions are really about like how they spend their weekend.
00:21:41 And what's your favorite thing to do in Birmingham and all that, like hiking and brunch options. I need a Birmingham trip and also you can never get enough Kym lead time event. Calendar is another thing. If you're doing member events or hosting events in your space, and you're trying to market them, then you have to have a newsletter. So event calendar would be another thing.
00:22:00 If you don't have member events and you don't host external events, don't not do a newsletter because you don't have events. No problem. Leave it out, linked to a blog post. If you should be doing blog posts, SEO is super important. We talked about that last week on the social media section, your website needs to be optimized for search,
00:22:19 and it helps a lot to have updated content. So get some help with that. If you need it. Taylor, Mason's a great resource@tailmaker.ca because his website or your rate, local happenings are what we love this month. I pulled up. I have to find it again. So here's another one. They're going to get an influx of subscriptions, but thrive.
00:22:43 Coworking in Alpharetta has an awesome newsletter. So they have two sections that I love. And I love these. I'm trying to remember if they do member features. I'm not sure if I see member features, I would love to see a member feature, but you know, I opened this newsletter. It's not because I'm curious about their members. Although I always interested in,
00:23:05 in members is that they have these two sections that are super entertaining, shower thoughts. And if you know, you know, and they're hilarious. So take a look at thrive newsletter I'm on the Alpharetta one. They have a bunch of locations though. It's work@thrive.com. Hannah has been sending the newsletter, Hannah. Those two sections are awesome. So that's a kind of a unique take on what to include in newsletters.
00:23:33 And that's something that their team is comfortable with. And that's awesome. I have to give a shout out to two 20 has an awesome newsletter. Medford co-work collective has a great newsletter mentioned forge. Las Suprema has a great newsletter Haven. Okay. And so many events. I think lots of folks are on their newsletters. I have lots of folks who do amazing newsletters back to how often should you send monthly might be enough.
00:24:00 A lot of our Community Manager members send monthly or sorry, weekly. So they're super consistent. It gives you the opportunity to talk about promotions. Boards does a buy one, get one every summer and they use their newsletter to promote it. And they do really well with that. It gives you a chance to announce when you have open offices. And again,
00:24:22 you might not see, you know, sort of immediate results, but it's a longterm play, especially if you're a smaller market where people are trying to understand Coworking and what happens there and who goes there. So it can be super, super simple and does not have to be a major undertaking for you to take on every single month. So if you're not doing it,
00:24:44 consider it. And if you are do it, doing it, do a little, what's the word I'm looking for. Totally blanking benchmarking, do a little benchmarking. See what other people are up to. If there's anything you can do to improve yours and also just look at your numbers. So if you, hopefully you have a KPI tracker, look at your open rates and your click-through rates and see what you're getting there.
00:25:07 And if your click through rates are going to be really low, we're talking like one to 3%, maybe a little higher. If you send something wildly interesting, although your member newsletter. So that's more for a marketing newsletter. And if you're trying to sell something or, but generally click-through rates can be pretty low. So be careful how much clicking you make people do.
00:25:27 You should have some valuable content that they can just read without clicking because you're clicking is going to be super low. So be prepared for that. It is much, much, much lower than your open rate. That being said, I bet if you look at the click-through on your member features, we used to link to our members, LinkedIn profiles that click through rate would be through the roof.
00:25:46 That's why we could tell people, love the member feature. Cause they click on it and they want to know who are these people? What do you know, what do they do for work? All the things. So open rate, take a look at your open rates, take a look at your click through rates and figure out, you know, does it seem to be working?
00:26:00 Should we use a slightly different format? What can we tweak? You know, but, but keep doing it. If you're doing a newsletter, think about how you might get a higher ROI, maybe driving people to your website. Anytime people go to our website, it sends Google a signal that we have authority, which helps with SEO. So your newsletter can help to do that.
00:26:19 So, okay. That's our discussion on newsletters for this week. So our next two topics are going to be Google business profile. We have an expert cutting on website auditing. We have an ex an expert coming on for that. And we have a case study on a group that is doing awesome work with their online presence. So we're going to air that in the next few weeks.
00:26:41 So if you haven't hit that button hit subscribe and we will see you next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like, what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. It makes a huge difference in helping others. Like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs,
00:27:08 head over to Everything. Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week.
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