344. From Inbox to Income: Enhancing Your Coworking Space with Effective Email Marketing with Tracy Beavers
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
344. From Inbox to Income: Enhancing Your Coworking Space with Effective Email Marketing with Tracy Beavers
00:00:00,"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 a thought provoking operator,"
00:00:26,"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. Thanks for joining me today. I am excited to be back to recording after a trip for spring Break and then a trip to Salt Lake City for the GCUC Conference."
00:00:59,"It has been a busy couple of weeks, but great to connect with some of you that were at the GCUC Conference. It's great to see everyone get some great content. Mostly really great conversations. And I'm looking forward to the GWA conference in Phoenix. I am also going to Phoenix at the end of May. I am hiking the Grand Canyon, only one side to one side,"
00:01:20,"which takes a whole day. I'm supposed to be training for it, but I'm having trouble motivating to train to hike that long, so it's not going very well. I'm hoping that adrenaline and you know, the shape I'm in will will do it for me. So we'll see. Okay, so a couple of quick things before we dive in. One,"
00:01:40,"if you're listening to this in April, it is Google Business Month inside of our membership. And our membership is for community managers. But you can join if you're not a Community Manager, if you're, if you're an owner operator or want to get your team involved in making sure that you're optimizing your Google Business profile every single month. This is not a set it and forget it."
00:02:03,"You need to manage that listing and make sure it's optimized. You're getting reviews every month and that you're posting to it every month that it's keyword optimized and that you add photos every month. This is because about probably 80% of your organic traffic is coming through that Google Business listing. We also have training on how to identify if there are invalid users using your address for their Google Business listing without officially registering that through you and a campaign to make sure you get those folks qualified and monetized."
00:02:41,"So it's good stuff. It'll be there even past April. But in April, we're also running a review contest, which are community managers love. So you can learn more at Everything Coworking dot com slash Community Manager. We also are talking today about email marketing. And for some of you, this comes really naturally. You come from some sort of background where,"
00:03:02,"you know, email marketing is a core part of your marketing mix, but I encounter a lot of operators for whom it's totally new. And I'm always kind of surprised at how many spaces don't have a marketing newsletter. So I think email marketing marketing's really critical. If you're on my email list, I try to email every Wednesday. I did miss last week 'cause I was GCUC."
00:03:24,"But you'll have an in email in your inbox this Wednesday if you're listening, hopefully, because you might be listening on on any week. But we try to be really consistent. It's really important for us to build relationships with you, build the know, like, and trust and get valuable content in your inbox every single week. You may not choose to produce a marketing newsletter every single week,"
00:03:47,"maybe you do it once a month, but you can create a really simple template that is compelling to your non-members. So you might choose to include your members. We recommend having two pretty similar versions, but one that's for members and has some members only stuff in it. And then one that's a marketing newsletter that goes to that email list that you're building and that hopefully you're gonna monetize."
00:04:10,"And that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode with our visibility expert, Tracy Beavers. And I just also wanna mention that we do also do training on how to set up your marketing newsletter step by step in our membership. So if this is something that's on your list, then get you or your team into that membership and step-by-step templates. We try to make it really simple for you to get these things done,"
00:04:36,"save time and save brain power. Okay. Without further ado, we're gonna jump right in. Okay. Welcome. I am here with Tracy Beavers, who is, well Tracy, I'll let you introduce yourself in a second, but she's not a Coworking space owner, so I think this will be fun. You, well, I'll let you tell us how you classify yourself."
00:04:58,"We are in a membership together, which is how I got to know you, a membership for mostly co course creators and lots of different kinds of course creators. So you know, I run for those listening know that I run the Coworking Startup School and a training and development membership for community managers of Coworking Spaces. So that group is like my professional development group."
00:05:22,"And so I've talked, chatted with Tracy before and she helps business owners grow through a number of ways, but through growing their email list. And I'm like a little bit passionate about this concept because I think a lot of Coworking space owners come into the business and maybe don't have a marketing background and it's not as natural for them as course creators. It's very important for us to grow our email list and it's one of the things we're thinking about all the time,"
00:05:51,"right. But I find that folks are slow to start sort of thinking about it as a marketing tool. So yeah, Tracy was willing to come on and chat about her expertise and you know, how this might apply to Coworking space owners. So Tracy, thank you for taking the time to do this. You bet. Thanks for having me, Jamie."
00:06:08,"I'm excited. Okay. And remind me where you're calling in from. I am in Little Rock, Arkansas. Okay. Arkansas is kind of a hot market for Coworking these days. Yes. Yeah. I was just at a Coworking conference and there was somebody from kind of northern Arkansas there and the woman who runs our industry association lives in Bentonville, I think,"
00:06:29,"or near Bentonville, which, I mean, Arkansas is a big place. But anyway. And you were just in Spain for, were you there for two weeks? We were there for 10 days, almost two weeks. Yeah. Yes. It was my first trip to Europe. We went to Madrid and we were there for three or four days and then we took a train to Barcelona and stayed there for a few days."
00:06:48,"And then we went back to Madrid and flew out. And our son is just so proud of the young man. He's become, he's a sophomore in college and he's studying at his college's campus in Madrid. They actually have a campus in Madrid. That's amazing. And so when he announced that he wanted to do that last summer, I immediately said, spring break 2024,"
00:07:10,"we're gonna Madrid. And my husband was like, what in the world? I was like, start saving our money now because we're gone. Totally. Okay. What was your favorite thing about Spain? Oh, well I, as I mentioned, hugging my son because Right. And I know, isn't that funny? I went all the way to Europe and my favorite part was the first hug I got because I hadn't see him in 10 weeks."
00:07:31,"And you know, for your baby, he is our youngest. Our oldest is, I don't worry about her quite as much. She's 25, she just bought a new house and she's a police officer so she's fine. But you know when your baby boards a plane for the other side of the world and you're like, oh my god, you know,"
00:07:49,"that I couldn't wait to get my hands on him. But the experience was amazing. Being in a completely different culture, not speaking the language, but the, my, the, the biggest takeaway I came from that the food was great, the culture was great. The everything we saw was great, but what I, what really solidified something I've known for a long time was this trip was that people are the same,"
00:08:16,"we're more alike than we are different regardless of the language we speak, the beliefs we have, the places we live. I mean it, you know, it didn't matter though, and I didn't speak the language fluently. We could still communicate because there's a whole lot of communication that happens with facial expressions and body language and you know, that was just really fun to be able to just,"
00:08:38,"you know, go to a different country and that they were really sweet and kind and they wanted us to have a good time and we were really sweet and kind and you know, it just, I think it just brings you, toge brings you together with people. Yeah. The and the desire for connection is yeah. Is such a universal truth. Truth."
00:08:55,"Yeah. And that resonates with my audience because that's really the why behind why a lot of people start Coworking spaces, is they wanna get people outta their house and connect and grow together and, you know, kind of like why we're in momentum together 'cause we wanna connect with, with other people. So yeah, it's All about community and building that connection and relationships and you know,"
00:09:16,"like I say, it's just, it was just fun. It was just fun to realize that I could go to the other side of the world and still make a connection. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Okay, can you tell us a little bit about kind of the broader work that you do and then we'll dive into the email piece For sure."
00:09:34,"So for your audience, I'll share a little bit more about my background because it pertains to what they're doing. So currently I'm a business and sales coach in the online space. And I teach, in large part, I'm a visibility and email list growth strategist, mainly now for coaches, course creators and online entrepreneurs. But when I started years ago, I came,"
00:09:55,"I come from a corporate environment and over 20 years of marketing, sales and business development for brick and mortar businesses, whether they were product-based or service-based. And so I can really resonate with your audience building, you know, opening up a Coworking space and wanting to market it effectively. Those are the kinds of companies that are represented and grew market share for them,"
00:10:15,"portfolio share, all the, all the things. And so moving into the online space, what's been interesting is that the conversations and the way you market and sell your business are the same whether you're brick and mortar and in person or online, it's just the location of the conversation that has changed. And so when you get into the online space, you have to do a few things a little bit differently,"
00:10:39,"but it's not that much different than building a brick and mortar business and being, you know, wanting to get those referrals from your clients and wanting to stay top of mind with your clients and, you know, wanting the, the public to know who you are and getting that great PR from news channels and, you know, all of that stuff. So it,"
00:10:56,"there's a lot of similarities. It is not, it's not quite that different, it's just a little bit different take on the marketing piece because they are local and brick and mortar versus online and global. But that's my background. I have, you know, I just got fully fed up with corporate. I I had been fed up with it for a while,"
00:11:12,"but it took me, you know, it took me till having that final last straw and I was like, I am hatching a plan to leave. I'm not doing this anymore. This the birds. And so it, and it took me a couple of years, but I did it. I fully exited and, and haven't looked back and it's been great."
00:11:29,"Yeah, I love it. Well, we have a lot of folks who might be hatching the same plan and thinking about opening a space and doing what they love and serving their community and, and building a sustainable business. Or they have a Coworking space and we'll kind of talk about email marketing for that audience. But they also, as I mentioned before we hit record,"
00:11:49,"we have lots of multi-passionate folks who may also be, you know, coaches and may also do some of their own work that isn't specifically related to their physical location. So I think this conversation will be really helpful. So I do find that a lot of operators that I work with are pretty new to the idea of email marketing, so it makes complete sense to them that they would have a customer list and that they're emailing their customers about space updates or,"
00:12:18,"you know, amenity updates or that kind of thing, but not necessarily thinking about it as a core marketing tool. So I think that's kind of like, we might start a little like 1, 1 0 1 on the value of, of using that and you know, maybe some approaches or, you know, benefits like what's the ROI of doing that? I even see people who I think should be kind of natural at this,"
00:12:44,"but they're kind of slow to get that going. Yeah. Do you have some initial, I'll, I'll kind of connect the dots a little bit, but I'd love to hear kind of how you think about the value of, of developing that relationship over email. Yeah, that email list is critical to any kind of business. No matter if it's brick and mortar,"
00:13:03,"no matter if it's a retail store, an online business, it doesn't matter. We have to have a way to stay top of mind with our clients relying on relying on social media only to promote our businesses or even relying on television ads or newspaper ad, you know, ads or whatever. Some of the things that radio spots, some of the things that your clients that are doing the Coworking space may be relying on,"
00:13:31,"relying on those things to get the word out is not bad, but it's not the only strategy you can have because that radio station may, may go dark, that radio ad may get glitchy. I mean, we just never know. We don't have any control over those things. And it's all about control. It's like when we talk about online entrepreneurs building in the online global space,"
00:13:55,"the same holds true. I don't own Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, those things could go dark anytime. And they have gone dark. There was a, was it about four months ago, Facebook was down for 24 hours or something and everybody was completely freaking out. Yeah. And then a year and a half, half ago, you know, it was down for 36 hours."
00:14:15,"And so as business owners, we have to careful, we have to ensure and shore up our businesses by creating what I call one the best asset you have, which is your email list of your clients and potential clients. Because if all that went dark, you could still send an email to your people and if you're a brick and mortar local, you could even send snail mail to those people."
00:14:42,"Yeah, Right. You know? Yeah. I mean we, I, I love it when I get something in the mail that's not a bill. And so, you know, we, but we have to think to ourselves, okay, this is my business. I have got to protect my revenue, I've got to protect my investment. How can I do that in the best way?"
00:15:00,"And the best way you can do that is by making sure you know how to attract your ideal clients to your list so you can nurture them into buyers. But then also everybody that's purchased from you are interested in what you're doing, that they're on your list and you are communicating with them regularly so that when they think of a Coworking space, they think of you first."
00:15:20,"Or when they think of a course creator, they think of you first and then, then they start to refer you because they remember you. Yeah. I, you know, it's funny you think about the, the radio example and we do, we have, I dunno how many people advertise on radio, but I had someone go through our Startup school program recently who does,"
00:15:39,"she's in a smaller market and she uses radio and I was just thinking, you know, the radio ad or even the Google ad, you get them to see something that you're doing or learn about you. But if you have that, oh, but I wanna tell them this, you can't, you know, go back, you don't have their email address."
00:15:55,"Right. Unless the campaign really is designed to build that. Right. You can't continue that conversation. So it's like a one way dialogue and you, to your point, you don't own it. You have to keep paying to get in front of them. Right. Or I think this always surprises folks is organic social media. I think people think this is just an automatic thing we do."
00:16:17,"And of course you're gonna invest, you know, a lot of time and resources into that. And I'm constantly reminding folks, your organic reach is 10% of your following. So if you have a thousand people, they're gonna see following your Instagram account, a hundred of them are gonna see any given post. It's, it's, I don't even know. It's depressing."
00:16:40,"It's depressing. I'm not even sure it's as high as 10% anymore. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a Coworking space? I often emphasize how important the planning stage is. You've heard me say most unrecoverable issues happen well before you open your doors and they are related to the size of your space, your real estate deal, and a few other things."
00:17:09,"If you think you are going to pick your favorite Coworking space and reverse engineer what you think you see happening in there and then pick your own paint colors and your favorite furniture, you are in for a surprise. This business is really about making the right fundamental decisions that align with your individual personal and financial goals. So we wanna help you avoid the mistakes that a lot of operators make in planning and launching that can really set you back in terms of time and finances."
00:17:44,"So we have got your back, we have created a free training To help you really get behind the three key decisions that we think are the most critical for you to get right when you're designing your Coworking business. The model, not the colors, the model. And these insights come from years of operating, designing the model for two different locations and then my work with hundreds of operators as they work on their businesses."
00:18:16,"So grab your spot in our training class, you can watch it anytime it's totally on demand and start your Coworking journey with confidence and the right strategies in place. You can grab that training at Everything Coworking dot com slash masterclass. It may not be. I know. Yeah. But Yeah, you're exactly right. And, and so my students and clients will get frustrated."
00:18:40,"They're like, well, I've been posting and nothing's happening. And I'm like, okay, hold on, wait a minute. Yeah. How many times are you posting? What formats are you using on social media? We have to use lots of posts. We have to get out there, we have to use reels, stories, posts, carousels, all the formats that they give us going live."
00:19:00,"Oh my gosh. Nothing reaches an audience like going live. So if there's somebody in your audience that has a brick and mortar, get your cell phone out, go out into your Coworking space, go live and show everybody how awesome it is. Yeah. And then use the appropriate hashtags for your local market. But we, we can't just try one thing and,"
00:19:18,"and think that everybody saw it. It feels like everybody sees it. Yeah. I gave this, I gave this description in one of my live q and a calls with the students and they died laughing. But it feels like we are standing naked on the interstate with a big sign that says, look at me, look at me, look at me."
00:19:36,"Right. When we're posting on social media or we're going live or we're doing something, we feel like we are literally, everybody can see us, they can see everything we're doing. And that's not true. It's just a few people are gonna see you in what you're doing on social media. No. For everybody stand a better chance of getting everybody to see you and know what you're doing if you get into their inbox."
00:19:59,"Yeah. And you don't have to stand with naked with a sign. Right. Don't do that. Don't be naked with a sign. And it's also one way to get, get better reach on. So on social is paid ads, right? Which is, they're complicated. You have to learn them or you have to outsource them. I always encourage people to learn them first."
00:20:17,"Just lots of our momentum folks. So, but that's pay to play, right? So you have to keep paying. So that's not, I mean, the beautiful thing about an email list is that you're paying for MailChimp or Active Campaign or Flow Desk or whatever. And that's my cap out at a hundred bucks a month-ish. It's really inexpensive. And then you own that list and you can email them as much as you want."
00:20:38,"And even with email, people probably feel that way about email too. Maybe you're inter you're standing naked On the interstate analogy, I think I, I certainly go through that every time I send my weekly email. I think everybody, you know, just saw that maybe I feel, but they don't. No, you look at the open rates and they don't,"
00:20:55,"and even on email, they need to see things multiple times. And I think that's an important, even if you are active on social and doing the reels and you're posting stuff in your space and you're doing your, your CRM follow up and all the things that we do as part of our sales funnel is probably really never enough. Because people need to see things seven,"
00:21:14,"eight times before it's really starting to, to click with them. I'll let you kind of jump in and I also wanna make sure we talk about your masterclass 'cause you have a free training coming up and I wanna hear, you know, what you're covering and encourage folks to attend. And we'll put the links to those classes in the show notes so that,"
00:21:31,"so that everybody can find those and grab that. 'cause this is, I think a tremendous just learning opportunity. We teach email marketing in our Community Manager University. And it's really, I, most folks are just really getting introduced to it and I'm sure we kind of scratch the surface on what you are teaching. But I wanna give one like really fun example."
00:21:54,"We have a member in Connecticut and she runs a space that hosts a lot of events. She's a lot of people that come through the space. She's really diligent about capturing email addresses and building her email list. So she has thousands of people on her email list, which is unusual for especially a Coworking space operator, maybe a, I don't know, a retail store might have like high volumes of people coming through and they get the stripe data."
00:22:21,"It does take effort for Coworking space operators to build that email list. But events is a great way to do it. Well she has started hosting and she's gonna be on the podcast, but she's a couple weeks out. So I just wanna mention this. She's started hosting holiday popup events or health fairs. So she has vendors who pay for booths in her space and they pay partly because she brings traffic and not just the people who are already in her space."
00:22:54,"It's really from her email list. Yep. So she's helping them to sell tickets and or she's selling tickets to the event and getting traffic to the event. This is really hard to do if you're only sending your members to the event. Right? Because that's a a hundred people, 200 people, she's got a thou, you know, thousands of people on that list."
00:23:13,"And so she can charge for the booth, which you can't do if you can't get people to the event. And she's selling tickets. So she's running those once a quarter now because they've become such a nice way to give a little, you know, revenue pop and you know, get people through the space and it's just like kind of a great ecosystem."
00:23:31,"But if you don't have that, you know, that's not an opportunity and that's a, you know, maybe not something everybody wants to think about doing, but that is like one fun example of something you could do and a way to monetize that list. Sure. If you build it, you know, and if you build it and you nurture it,"
00:23:49,"to your point, other benefits, I think for Coworking space operators, you have an office that opens up and you wanna let people know that's available to your point. Because if you're, if you're close to occupancy then being almost full, you may not be running Google ads on a regular basis. And so this is one of those levers that you can pull to let people know what you have available."
00:24:15,"Some event space, meeting space, like to your point, like staying top of mind with folks even if they're not ready to book right now. I think one thing about email marketing, and I'd love to have your perspective on this, is that sometimes we feel like maybe it's like a little bit of a long game. Like for Coworking space operators, it may not be as apparent that someone's like taking a purchase action from an email."
00:24:40,"But it's such a good lever to keep things, keep meeting room space, event space and other memberships top of mind. I also think for people who, Coworking is still new in a lot of markets, so people who are like fence sitters, I'm not sure if coworkings for me, I'm not sure if I'm ready to carve out that budget for a membership."
00:25:02,"Building that note and trust and showing member stories and testimonials, you know, can sort of erode those objections over time. So I think it, it can be a little bit of, bit of a longer play, but I still, I think it's really still an important strategy. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about, about the benefits and how you think about it."
00:25:22,"Well, for sure, I completely agree with everything you said. As business owners we need to look at, as you're saying levers, what are all of the ways you could market this business? And we need to take advantage of all of those. So email is just one part of that. Not only adding people to that list and thinking of creative ways to get them on your list,"
00:25:44,"but then emailing them regularly. Because the last thing we wanna do is get a whole bunch of people on our email list and then never say anything to them again. And then Let it sit there. Yes. 'cause what happens is if you let it sit there and then you email them, they go, who is this? I didn't sign up for this email,"
00:26:00,"I don't remember this. And then the next thing you know, they've marked you a spam and they've unsubscribed and it's a mess. So if you're gonna build the email list, get into the regular habit at least once a month, preferably my, I teach my clients and students once a week to email that list something. And it doesn't have to be this massive newsletter with fireworks and sparklers attached to it and you know,"
00:26:23,"all of this gobbledygook in it. Nobody actually wants that. What they want is simple text, maybe a couple of graphics, keep it simple, keep it skimmable, but keep and keep it fun. I don't know, you could tell 'em something wild and crazy that happened at the Coworking space or Everybody has those stories. They Have those stories. Yeah."
00:26:41,"So you do that, but then you, you put that in your repertoire of marketing. We we're talking about, we've talked about being present on social media, making sure you've got your reels and going live and doing your posts and all that. We've talked about paid ads, Google and Facebook and all that jazz and television or radio. And then email is a part of that as well."
00:27:02,"And I would add on for brick and mortar local networking, being visible at the rotary, being visible at the chamber and doing collaborations with people that have your same audience where you could host a vendor event like you're saying. I think that's a brilliant idea. So with the email, it just fits in with the various categories of marketing that every business owner should be doing."
00:27:28,"Yeah, a hundred percent. And, and consistently, I know I email, I try to email once a week and if not, I was outta town for a conference last week and I missed last week and I wake up like sweating, like I know I missed this week. So. Right. We take it very seriously and if you're listening and you're on the email list,"
00:27:47,"hopefully you kinda see that consistency and you feel we show up in your inbox frequently and so you know what's going on with us and we build that kind of ongoing relationship. Yeah. Okay. Well te yeah, tell us what else, what else do you cover in your masterclass that we haven't talked about yet? So the masterclasses are free and we're having several different sessions."
00:28:11,"So go to the, the link that Jamie's gonna give you, find a date and time that works for you. This is how to create an email list of your ideal clients without paid ads. And I'm teaching four simple strategies that everybody can take away that same day and consider for their visibility and their list growth, whether actually whether they are in the brick and mortar space or the online space."
00:28:35,"Because what I'm gonna teach pertains to both, there's just different nuances for each one. It's kind of like we talked about, the conversation is the same, the tactics and marketing are kind of the same. It's just there's, there's a little bit different nuance to it if you've got a brick and mortar versus an online. But just one example that I'm gonna teach and,"
00:28:53,"and this is something that your audience I would highly recommend for them, is to make sure their Facebook personal profile reflects that they are a business owner and it leads to their email list in some way. So if they've got a Coworking space, when I go, if I meet them at a rotary event, a chamber event, or I meet them by seeing them in a Facebook group,"
00:29:17,"because we have local Facebook groups, we have Little Rock power women, we have Arkansas Women networking, and there are local Facebook groups to each of your brick and mortar businesses. And so if they're networking and being visible in those groups, somebody sees what they post and they think, oh, well that sounds really cool. They go click on their name because their Facebook personal profile shows up in that group."
00:29:41,"Yeah. They go to that personal profile. If there is no information about who they are, who they serve, how they serve them about their Coworking space, about, and, and a cover photo that showcases that Coworking space and a way to land on their email list to get more information about it, that is where the connection ends. That is a disconnect for everybody."
00:30:01,"Either they meet them in person or they meet them in online, they're gonna wanna know more about them. And we've gotta make sure that we keep that going. That, that when somebody sees our Facebook personal profile, they don't go, oh, well I thought Tracy had a business. I thought she was a business coach. There's a picture of her dog here."
00:30:19,"I don't, you know, I can't, she doesn't have a website, she doesn't have, she, you know, she, she, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know about this. And then they're gonna go, Nope, she's not the one I wanna hire, or Nope, that's not the Coworking space I wanna go to."
00:30:32,"You know what I mean? So that's just one simple strategy that I teach about visibility that's just super important. Be after having spent over 20 years building businesses. It's little things like that. Totally. That can add up when you, what I, I like to call it, we've gotta plug the holes that you have in your visibility so that your marketing machine,"
00:30:56,"all of your marketing efforts are cohesive. There's no leaks in any of it. And it all starts to gel and feed off of the next thing. Okay. I think I might be guilty of not having that in place. I love that. And, and also people know my name from the podcast, right. People probably do look and then Yeah."
00:31:16,"Can't, you know, they might be thinking about my Facebook group or trying to find whatever, and I'm not sure what you can find from my personal profile. I gotta work on that. And it's really same thing on LinkedIn, right? Like where do you work and, and what's the opt-in? Yeah, yeah. Is there a resource? Is there for Coworking spaces?"
00:31:36,"I mean, it could be really as simple as a free day pass. You don't have really, don't have to overthink it. And I think that's what you were just saying about what you publish every week or twice a month is don't overthink it, just try to try to get consistent. Exactly. I mean, a free day pass is a great idea."
00:31:53,"What about a free PDF about the benefits of a Coworking space? Yeah. Why this is a better option for you than going and leasing a a long-term. A hundred percent Yep. Office, You know, that kind of thing. Yep. You know, what do you look for in a Coworking space? The top five questions to ask when you go On a tour."
00:32:12,"Yes, that's a great one. You, what's funny is we actually sometimes struggle with, we try to make recommendations on what's a good opt-in to have as a popup on your, you just had some good ones, I'm gonna have to take notes. Sometimes we need to be like outside, outside of it to come up with those ideas really quickly. It's,"
00:32:29,"It's really hard to see your own stuff. It really is. I can spit all this stuff all day long for other people and then I sit here and I go, okay, I need to think of something. And I'm going, Hmm, Yeah, What shall it be? And it's, but what's nice is when I'm communicating, like I have a,"
00:32:44,"I have one of my business besties Shannon, I was telling her about a training that I was doing and she goes, oh my gosh, that has to be a lead magnet then. And I'm like, what? How can I make that a lead a freebie? She goes, okay, you can do da, da da. And I was like,"
00:32:56,"that's brilliant. And I'm over here going, I'm a coach. Why the heck did I figure that out for myself? But it's just, it's, you're in it and you can't see it. And we forget. We forget what it's like to be the person that is thinking, okay, first of all, what's a Coworking space? Why do I need one?"
00:33:12,"Yeah. How does it benefit me? Why, why is that the best choice? And then, okay, I've, you've convinced me, well how do I know that I'm gonna get in the right one and it's not gonna be a fricking nightmare. And it's, you know, you know what I mean? It's not gonna be more stress Yeah. For me when I'm trying to work."
00:33:30,"Yeah, Right. Just get stuff done and it's right. And we, because we know all of that so deeply, it's hard to back up and remind ourselves what are those questions and feelings that of, of like apprehension that folks can have when they're new. No, those are actually really, really helpful. I, I think the other thing about email marketing,"
00:33:50,"when you're talking about sort of all the, you know, tactics that we should use is there, there's not that many levers to pull in terms of marketing. And so to your point, you gotta use the, you have to use the ones that you can pull and some spaces won't even have a budget for paid ads. Or maybe they're in a market that's too small and it doesn't,"
00:34:11,"it just doesn't make sense. So then I, I often will brainstorm with operators on, on marketing and it's, well, what lever can you pull? And email marketing is just such a good one and it's, it's great for education, it's great. I was pulling some stats. I'd be curious to hear what you think about these stats. Okay,"
00:34:30,"so return on investment, $36 for every $1 spent. Are you talking about marketing? Yeah, I mean it probably depends on what you're selling. Yeah, I think it Does, yeah. Track that conversion and that ROI for for a specific business. But I think their point is like if you build the list and you can get a conver, you know,"
00:34:53,"get conversions from your list in terms of members. Because if a member joins a Coworking space, the lifetime value of that is quite high. If they take an office, you know, that could be $10,000, you know, right there. Or if they book a big meeting or event space or they book anything that's recurring you and customer preference. Right."
00:35:13,"I think some customers, lots of customers are spending time on social, but they're not seeing everything you post. So, oh, this was a good one. Over 50% of people check in the US check their personal email account more than 10 times a day. I bet I check mine 600 times a day too much. But also remembering that most of them are,"
00:35:36,"are about half of them are on mobile, so making sure all you know, your emails are, are mobile optimized. So. Right. I was just kinda pulling, you know, pulling some email marketing stats besides our Yeah. You know, sort of qualitative and the, the examples. But Yeah, it's definitely a higher ROI than a paid ad or using social media for sure,"
00:35:55,"because you're right there, front and center in front of them. And there's some tricks to being more visible in the inbox. I'm sure you already know this, but if you'll, if you'll put an emoji as the first character in your subject line, you are more likely that's gonna be more likely to be seen if you think about the lineup in your inbox."
00:36:12,"And if my email that comes to you has a little yellow smiley face on it or something, you're gonna be like, oh, what's that? You know, and you're gonna wanna open it. And then depending, you know, there's different ways to write your subject line. Subject line.com is a great free resource that can score your subject line based on the chances of somebody actually opening it."
00:36:33,"And you know, if you put Coworking 1 0 1, if you put 1 0 1 or you put the truth about, that's another popular subject line, if you, if you use the word actual or like you could say actual footage from a Coworking space, I mean that would be hilarious and I would open it. Right, right. Or like we have lots Of actual footage from co."
00:36:57,"Exactly. And it could be, it doesn't have to be anybody, it doesn't have to be the actual footage. It could be a funny gif of somebody blowing through a Coworking space and you know, dropping popcorn, spilling coffee all over everybody or whatever. And that would be absolutely hysterical. And the more you can entertain your list, the more that likely they are to open the,"
00:37:16,"the email. And then if you use the word real, you know, you could say real life stories from, you know, real housewives of the Coworking space. I don't know, I'm just spit balling stuff here. That would be, and then the make the, don't overthink the email. I can't stress this enough. They are skimming your email."
00:37:36,"We have got to use bullet points. We've gotta use a lot of white space writing. The email goes against every grammatically correct thing I ever learned in college. Ignore It. Turn Grammarly off while you're writing. Exactly. This is not a five point essay. This is write like you talk, use some humor. I will write a sentence, white space,"
00:37:57,"another sentence, white space. And literally my mom got some of my emails early on and she was like, she's an English teacher. And she goes, oh no. She goes, we need to talk about this. This is just really not okay. And I was like, well mom, this is the way you market in the online space. So it was really funny."
00:38:14,"And then remember that not only the subject line is one of the most read things in your email, but your Ps and your Ps are the most read things in the email. So don't lose that, that that great real estate at the bottom of the email. Don't forget about that, that PS and sometimes I'll get my little sassy pants on and sometimes my PS is for the skimmers."
00:38:38,"This is what my email said. And it, and it'll basically just summarize it because we all know they're all just going straight down to the bottom, like what's in the ps? Do you know what's so funny? I feel like this is, this is like your naked on the interstate analogy is, I'm pretty sure when I'm writing these emails, I've convinced myself that people are reading every line and you're,"
00:38:57,"I'm, I'm gonna take your masterclass because you're, you're full of so many little nuggets and I feel like even if you've been doing something for a while, it's like just getting a new perspective and refreshers. I, I've think, I don't, I don't leverage the PS often enough and I've heard subject line.com referenced and I haven't ever used it. So check that out."
00:39:18,"That's A good one. And there's another one, and I think it's called, I haven't used it in a while, but I think it's called Headline Analyzer or something like that. That's another good one. Okay. Yeah. And You can get ideas from chat GPT, so I like get ideas, but run it through subject line.com who probably knows what it's doing even more than chat GPT in terms of Yeah."
00:39:38,"And just, and you can tell if an email's been written by chat GPT, at least I can because they use the same words over and over again, you know, but Delve let's delve into or the big exciting news. Yeah. I've always kind stop delete that line. We all know that's what chat GPT says Skyrocket your results. That's another one."
00:39:57,"Yeah. Skyrocket, explode, explosive growth, you know, that kind thing. But, but I did use chat GPT recently for one of my Facebook Live trainings because I was just so tired and I was like, I cannot come up with anything good. And so I hopped in there and I just said, here's what I'm talking about. Here's the impact I'm making with this training."
00:40:15,"I need a subject line. And I ended up taking the first part of one and the second part of another one that it recommended and piecing it together. And it's been one of the most popular ones I've done. People are like, oh that sounds fascinating. And I'm like, well I didn't, I I just covered It. I do that for podcast titles sometimes same thing."
00:40:33,"You're just like, okay, I've spent too much time on this and now somebody else's brain and I won't always take. Right. But it gives you some ideas. Yeah, It does give you some ideas. Yeah. Okay. I have to share one other example. There's a group in Atlanta and I don't think that they use this section anymore, maybe they'll bring it back."
00:40:51,"It's Thrive Coworking and they had a section in their newsletter called Shower Thoughts. Yeah, totally Unrelated to Coworking mostly, but it was literally like whoever was writing it would be like this, these are my shower thoughts from this morning. And they're always hilarious. So to your point, yes, I would open the email 'cause I knew there was something funny in there,"
00:41:12,"but they would also use it to talk about new location openings or whatever else they were promoting and member features. I always love reading member features too. I teach that as a really easy core, you know, content piece in your template. Yeah. Because you know, you kind of talked about it in your, like you people wanna connect, they wanna know what are other people up to,"
00:41:33,"especially business owners. We always wanna know a little behind the scenes of, of other business owners and I think that can be really compelling and entertaining. Right? It's like sort of story, you know, story format. But the shower thoughts is brilliant. You know, the member feature is great because everybody likes to be recognized, everybody likes to be seen and heard and validated."
00:41:52,"And if you are putting your, featuring your members in your email and I'm one of the members, I'm gonna be like, I gotta open this and see if it's me this time. You know? Yeah. Or, or opening it and seeing who it isn't going. They featured her. No, I'm just kidding. I know, but I mean,"
00:42:08,"speaking of open rates though, that's, I think that's an yes anyway, another benefit. It's really simple things. We don't have to overthink it. Get 'em to open it. Make sure you have a good PS or a PPS. Okay. Anything you wanna share before we wrap up and make sure we send people over, including myself, over to your upcoming And your master classes are live in the next couple weeks,"
00:42:32,"right? Yes. They're, they're live and they're, yep. Awesome. And, and when you show up live with me, I give you two exclusive bonuses you won't find anywhere else. One is the Facebook growth toolkit to learn all of my best practices for the platform. And the other one is one called New Clients in 30 Days. And it is a,"
00:42:53,"a new guide that we put together with some mindset stuff and some quick strategies that can get you on the road to having more new clients in just 30 days time. I'm really excited about both of those bonuses. Okay. I love it. Okay, thanks. Thanks. Okay. Thank you for coming on and sharing your perspective and most importantly, getting folks to just start thinking about how important building your email list is and the ROI that it might have."
00:43:20,"Yeah. And so look at the show notes and I'm gonna put it in our weekly newsletter to you, the link to your upcoming live masterclasses. And I'm gonna make sure I'm in one of those as well because I've been taking notes and I'm sure, pardon? I will get my notebook out and ready for the masterclass. So Awesome. And I know you've been super busy and just coming back from your trip,"
00:43:42,"so thanks for making the time to do this. We really appreciate it. You, I appreciate it. I love any opportunity I can have to help and I just appreciate the opportunity to come to your audience and see if I can make a difference. Awesome. Thank you Tracy. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard,"
00:43:59,"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, head over to Everything Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week."
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