Episode 314: Maximizing Email Marketing Conversion with Individualized Training

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:01:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am very excited to have Karen Gunther with me today. She is the owner of Stay Visible and is a brilliant digital marketer and sales trainer who runs email marketing management to drive leads and then teaches salespeople how to more effectively close those leads. That’s brilliant because usually these things are siloed and she has broken down the boundaries. What I  really love is that Karen, you are a brilliant marketer and a brilliant salesperson, and you have brought the two together. So Karen, welcome to the show.

0:01:50 – (Karen Gunther): Thank you so much, Brynne. I’m delighted to be here today.

0:01:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, so excited. I have so much fun talking with you and you know, you bring so much value to every conversation. You have incredible insights. Before we jump into those, we ask every one of our guests, what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:12 – (Karen Gunther): I love this question, and I think I have a slightly different take than many other people. My belief is that when you’re a salesperson, you’re running your own business. Either you’re actually running your own business or you’re running your own business within somebody else’s company because you’re really required to know so much. You have to understand the processes. You have to be diligent about taking care of yourself and moving yourself forward. You’re self-managing.

0:02:40 – (Karen Gunther): There are a lot of things that make you an entrepreneur within a company. And to me, making sales social means using social media to continue your education stay connected, and not be lonely because a sales role is a lonely role. Even though you’re on a competitive team, even though you’re on a sales team, it’s fairly competitive. It’s not. Let’s all work together in Kumbaya. So therefore, Making Sales Social to me is to use social platforms like group coaching, podcasts, LinkedIn articles, and YouTube, to stay connected to what’s happening right now and to increase your knowledge.

0:03:24 – (Karen Gunther): I particularly love your group coaching sessions that you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays because it feels like a peer group to me and I learn something every single time I attend and I absolutely love that. So using social platforms makes me a better salesperson and it’s just one more way to make sales social.

0:03:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, thank you. I’m so glad you get value from us, we get value from you. You have golden nuggets that you drop every time, too. But that’s really what it is, right? Like the high tide rises, all boats. We all are on a mission to help each other succeed. So I love that and thank you. So let’s first talk about at a high level, how you took your marketing business and implemented it, or let’s not say how. Let’s say why you took your marketing business and merged it with a sales business, a sales trading business.

0:04:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Like the birth of that.

0:04:26 – (Karen Gunther): What is the birth of that? Well, I’ve, for 30 years I’ve been in sales, so I understand the sales process. I’m not your typical marketing person. I’m actually a salesperson who’s really good with technology. And I was watching time after time because when I work with some of my clients, I see exactly how the salespeople are following up and I’m like, we’re missing the boat here. Something needs to be fixed. So I started offering sales training to my clients and saying, let me work with your sales rep, and then we’d fix some things. And boom.

0:04:53 – (Karen Gunther): And I started realizing that if we took technology as it is today and as it changes every day, literally every day, right now, as we’re talking, another app is being born and marrying that with really good habits, we could supercharge salespeople and we could support their weaknesses and supercharge their strengths. By doing that, it would take the marketing that I’m doing for them to the next level of sales.

0:05:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. And you’ve done a phenomenal job of doing that, which is amazing. So you talk a lot about the difference between, like mass training, whether it’s to teams or public, versus One-on-One training or group sessions versus individual sessions. Talk about why individual sessions are so important to you and the difference.

0:05:45 – (Karen Gunther): I think there’s a place for every type of training in this landscape. There’s a place for seminars, there’s a place for learning on, just individually on YouTube, there’s a place for group sessions, there’s a place for coaching. Coaching is a different type of form of individualized training. Coaching directs somebody to go and learn how to do something. It gives them the skill sets to go do it, whereas the individualized training that I do literally hand-walks the person through whatever their speed bump is.

0:06:17 – (Karen Gunther): So I will ask a salesperson or a business owner to share their screen with me and say, okay, show me. If you’re going to respond to a quote, what are you doing? And then they show me what they do. And they’re taking ten steps to do something that could be done in one, or they’re struggling to figure out how to come up with some words when we can create a template and put it on their outlook as a signature and let it go through. So, my job is to see what is that individual person’s speed bump to using technology to support their business practice.

0:06:51 – (Karen Gunther): So that’s why the individualized training is so smart. And sales managers can do that with their salespeople. They can say, let’s share, because many times people are, you know, in different locations, sharing your screen with me. Show me how you do this and just do it like a coaching call, but watch them do it. And then you’ll quickly see where they’re getting stuck. And if you can unstick from that spot, next thing you know, you’ve got a super highway going.

0:07:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. And I do clearly see the difference between a coaching and a training session. So in this case, you’re like, here’s your gap. I’m training you on what to do versus coaching. You’re trying to get them to figure it out  Right? You’re leading them. So I love that. This is really One-on-one training, not coaching. The coaching is more about just figuring out, and helping them to figure it out versus teaching them how to fix it.

0:07:45 – (Karen Gunther): Right.

0:07:46 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. So you know what I’m very fascinated with, and we have a 100,000-person email list that is opted in and pretty darn active. We have 10,000. We’re going to make an announcement soon, but 10,000 members to our library and we get engagement. But the conversion is never exactly where we would love it. And that’s generally.

0:08:14 – (Karen Gunther): It never is. Most people want one-to-one.

0:08:18 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, but, well, you do have some methodologies that improve that conversion rate in your email marketing. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

0:08:28 – (Karen Gunther): Sure, I can speak to that. So a couple of things have happened in the email world. When I first started my company, I focused all my attention on email marketing. It was the Wild West 13 years ago, and now it is very regulated and there’s a lot of boundaries around it specifically. So one of the things you have to know is that when you’re looking at your engagement when you’re looking at who opened the email, let’s say you had a 20. Anything over, and just for the record, anything over 20% is a fantastic open rate. So if you’re getting over 20%, you’re doing great. You’re not getting out of the park.

0:09:03 – (Karen Gunther): But Apple decided to make a thing where people can identify if they want their email opens to be private. A couple of years ago, a year and a half ago to be exact. And that was a huge, huge, seismic earthquake that happened in the email marketing world. Because what that did is that change the open rates. So instead of the open rates being 20%, now they’re 25%. And you’re like, wow, I’m doing great. It’s like, no, Apple’s just saying the person opened the email when they didn’t, and it’s very deceiving.

0:09:35 – (Karen Gunther): So your open rate now is actually higher than it used to be because of technology screening, whether or not the person actually opened the email. Number two, the other thing that really was big in 2020, and 2021, was not pandemic-related, but just computer technology related. There were so many malware and viruses coming through emails that servers started scanning and they started clicking every single link in an email to verify that there’s no spyware or malware or viruses or anything coming through the email.

0:10:11 – (Karen Gunther): So therefore, and what happened was that happened at the very highest level of the most expensive companies spending the most amount of money. And now it’s filtered down to just everyday servers doing that, and they’re picking and choosing what links they’re clicking. So you’re thinking, oh, my God, we’re getting all of this engagement. It’s amazing. We have this many click-throughs. We can see exactly who clicked through, but it’s false.

0:10:33 – (Karen Gunther): So you may think you’re getting a lot of conversions. So there has to be a different methodology. So the best way to go about in terms of rating true conversion and true traction is to lead them to a webpage where they have to fill out a form and ask them to reply to the email. So it’s a live thing because the actual numbers themselves are not. They may look great, but they’re not actually as good as you think they are because of all the technology that’s happened to intercept. The last thing that happened just February 1, 2024, is that more servers have enacted a requirement for a digital handshake between your server and their server.

0:11:17 – (Karen Gunther): And it requires changing DNS text records, which is a whole another language, and talking to your computer people about that. And by doing that, then you’ll land into more. By taking those steps, you land into more inboxes and without taking those steps, you won’t be in as many inboxes. So in terms of how do you get more conversion? You have to go down what’s called a customer journey, if you will, and continue to get to the point where they’re doing a form fill or a reply.

0:11:49 – (Brynne Tillman): Interesting. So talk to me a little bit about CTA’s in emails, and calls to action, you mentioned taking them to the webpage. What is a good call to action that will convert but not feel spammy?

0:12:09 – (Karen Gunther): You need to have one call to action. One if you have more than one, people get confused and then they feel overwhelmed and then they don’t know what to do. It’s amazing. We are so busy, we have so much information coming at us, that if you can make a very clear call to action of something that is of interest to the person and it is leading them exactly to a resource that you said it would lead them to. Like it was an ebook or a link to join a webinar or something like that, it actually needs to take them to that thing so that they have that cookie, you know, the carrot and stick. They have the carrot there waiting for them when they actually click the link. If it just takes them to a contact form a general contact form or a general page, then you’re not going to know what happens next.

0:12:57 – (Karen Gunther): So it’s the best call to action something that’s very simple, clearly defined, and won per email?

0:13:04 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, so now they get to our page, they download the ebook, the one call to action, and that alert goes to sales. What do we do?

0:13:16 – (Karen Gunther): What you do is then you pick up the phone, and leave a message. If you don’t have their phone number, then you send them an email. You connect with them on LinkedIn using the methodologies that you teach, you reach out, and you reach back to the person without being salesy but offering more information. My belief is that people don’t want to. People don’t want to be sold. They do want to buy. I think I’ve heard you say that about a thousand times.

0:13:44 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s Jeffrey Gittimer.

0:13:45 – (Karen Gunther): Yeah, so Jeffrey says that. So people do not want to sell, but they do want to buy. Right. So therefore, my belief system is that if you present yourself as a resource to people hey, I’m here to help you. I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m just here to help you. I’m here to provide value. I understand you click this link. You’re interested in learning. Is there something that I can provide to you right now that will help you with solving this problem, whatever the problem, is what your solution is, by doing that, you’re continuing to feed them little bits and continuing the conversation.

0:14:24 – (Brynne Tillman): I have a question. It’s something that I had heard years ago and I’ve never talked about it a whole lot, but I find it to be interesting I remember someone saying for every call to action piece of content that you have, you should have the second piece ready to follow up. So you create both. So I feel like you might have mentioned that and I, it triggered something in my head from hearing this talk about like how do you prepare for that?

0:14:53 – (Karen Gunther): You have to, again, it comes down to the customer journey. There are a lot of CRM platforms that utilize that languaging customer. We have this customer journey that people go through. Well, I hate it in terms of CRM platforms, but I love it in terms of the sales journey because what it is, you’re like okay, fine. So these are proof points that happen along the way. So if a client comes and does a form fill, they need to receive whatever it is you say they’re going to receive that minute. If it’s delayed by a day or a week, it’s not going to have as much information, it’s not going to have as much punch as it did, as if they filled up the form and boom, it’s waiting for them when they go back to their email 3 seconds later.

0:15:29 – (Karen Gunther): And then that email that goes back to them with that ebook or whatever, that link to wherever it needs to go to for the next thing, it needs to have another call to action with the next thing figured out. And you go through that whole piece until a human is involved. And the thing is, is that you want to make sure that you’re engaging. So you have to ask questions or you have to provide something for them to do.

0:15:54 – (Karen Gunther): You can’t just keep emailing somebody without them responding. You want them to respond. For every response they do, you have a reactionary, you know, a premeditated reactionary response. I train one of my salespeople for every lead he receives from the website to go through. And he was asking people like ten different questions, like what’s this? What’s this? What’s this? I’m like, No. stop. No. So what you need to do is just ask two questions that they can answer.

0:16:22 – (Karen Gunther): When they’re sitting there in line at Starbucks with their phone, they receive your response. They sent in the form, you know, half an hour later, they’re at Starbucks, they’re on their phone board, and this email floats in from you saying, hey, I heard that. You know, I appreciate that you understand this. We’re really great at providing the service. We’ve done it for this many years in this area.

0:16:42 – (Karen Gunther): Two quick questions for you and then we can continue to solve your problem. And then they’re quick questions that the person can actually answer just from their mobile device. But it proves that the person is still interested in having a conversation. It provides an opportunity for a response.

0:16:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, it’s a qualifier for sure. So I love that. I think that’s brilliant. And I love the big kind of mic drop moment is your emails need to be as mobile friendly and thinking as the user, as if they’re responding on mobile, and that’s going to get your biggest response. So I love that. And the other thing is, typically when you’re on mobile, even if you’re working, you’re not really, really. It’s not like the desktop is working.

0:17:28 – (Brynne Tillman): So you have a little flexibility to kind of do a little squirrel. Like you can leave to finish something and then come back. So I love this. My next question is something that when we decided we were going to do this podcast was the first question I wanted to ask, but I thought we would make our way there, which is we are so tech stack heavy. I can’t remember the number, but. And this is like, in 2017, the average company had, like 52 subscriptions to tech.

0:18:04 – (Karen Gunther): That’s it.

0:18:06 – (Brynne Tillman): I said it was 2017. So it’s probably doubled by then, right?

0:18:10 – (Karen Gunther): Or tripled.

0:18:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, or tripled. Right. When I look at, we, we took inventory of everything that we’re buying and, like, there are things like later that I’m paying, you know, $10 a month and canvas, $35 a month and we pay Zoom and us, and like, I’m like, my gosh, I’m probably paying $2,000 a month just in tech.

0:18:32 – (Karen Gunther): Right.

0:18:33 – (Brynne Tillman): With sales navigators in there, by the way. So, but it’s, it’s, it’s. So how does a sales and marketing professional decide which tech we pay for and which tech is not worth it? And how do we, I guess, identify which tech is going to get the best adoption? Like, how do you do that when you’re working with a client?

0:18:59 – (Karen Gunther): Let me approach this from two angles. The first angle is you’re a solopreneur and you’re out in the world and you’re trying to do what you need to do to run your business. The first thing you need to do is the things that are your weaknesses where you’re not strong. You need to send those out to be done either by technology or by other people, just, as a general rule. John Keel said to me a couple of weeks ago, that there’s a $ 10-an-hour job, a $ 100-an-hour job, and a $ 10,000-an-hour job.

0:19:27 – (Karen Gunther): Make sure you’re working on the right one.

0:19:29 – (Brynne Tillman): So he’s great.

0:19:32 – (Karen Gunther): He’s fabulous. Yeah. So I will give him all due credit for that quote, I think he quoted it from somebody else, but I’ll let him have the quote for today. And so you want to make sure that whatever your weaknesses are, those are supported by technology first and foremost so that those weaknesses don’t drag down your business. Then from there, you think of, okay, what can enhance what I’m good at, if I’m good at reaching, if I’m good at talking to people, what will get me to the point where I’m talking to more people verbally?

0:20:01 – (Karen Gunther): Does that mean I need to have a tech stack in there that does, you know, emails or something like that to get to the point where we can talk to people? Now let’s change hats. We’re a company and we’re trying to figure out what tech stock to bring in. What I find a majority of the time with the companies I work with is that the decisions are made by the upper management so that they can control and manage the enterprise.

0:20:26 – (Karen Gunther): So they need reporting around sales, they need reporting around product deliverability, they need reporting around operations. And then they take that reporting, and then they say, okay, now, salespeople, let’s just choose the sales aspect. You need to report to these different things. But then they stop at that point and they don’t build out the rest of the process to make it easy for the salesperson to do what they need them to do.

0:20:53 – (Karen Gunther): So the process then becomes very difficult for the salespeople to actually comply. Then the managers come to me and say, the sales reps aren’t complying with the CRM requirements, help us, and then I’ll go and see. Okay, fine. Well, the phones that you’re providing to your salespeople are blocking them from downloading the CRM. So now they’ve had it work with each salesperson to get the CRM downloaded to their phone so that while they’re at the appointment, as soon as they walk out and they’re in their car, they can do their talk to text, which makes it easier, or they can type out really quick what happened. And now the reporting is going better because we made the process simpler.

0:21:33 – (Karen Gunther): So for me, I would say that you have to think it all the way through and you need to have at least three different salespeople as part of the process. Somebody’s really good with technology, somebody’s okay with it and willing to learn, and another person that’s just can’t figure out how to turn on their laptop, literally. And that’s okay. There are people out there who just have different levels of technology comfortability.

0:21:57 – (Karen Gunther): And so you have to be able to speak to all three of those people and plan and provide a solution that takes care of that and that solves that problem. Then you will get adoption, then you will get the numbers you want. But people have to be involved in the process and it has to be thought all the way through. So whatever tech stack you’re bringing in needs to complement what the requirements are. I have a sales rep that I worked with just after watching him do his stuff on his screen. I asked if he was dyslexic, just had an intuition, and he said, yes, I am. I said, okay, we’re not piping any more emails, we’re done with that.

0:22:36 – (Karen Gunther): We installed a Chrome extension. I’m sure they have them on the other platforms as well for talk-to-text. Now he just does all of his stuff, talk-to-text. We implemented a lot of different types of outlook templates that he can just put, you know, certain things in that are very simple. And he doubled his income last year.

0:22:55 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow.

0:22:55 – (Karen Gunther): Just by changing the tech stack for him. We, no other person in the company have that Chrome extension for $40 a year, but he does. So the question is, what are the weaknesses how do we support them and how do we go down to the individual level so everybody can be successful?

0:23:14 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m going to add, if you decide to go down that route, which I think is phenomenal, make sure you have Grammarly as well.

0:23:20 – (Karen Gunther): Yes, exactly. Well, that’s another tech item. There’s a lot of stuff, and I’m doing a presentation on AI, two of them in fact, in May for some conferences I’m going to. And the level of stuff that’s out there that helps you. I have sales reps sending back to me, oh, I put together this email using chat GPT or some such thing like that, and it’s like, oh, that’s great, but it sounds like chat GPT, right?

0:23:43 – (Karen Gunther): And then I cut it down into like 10% and then it’s a good email to send.

0:23:49 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. I love it. It’s really fantastic. So what is one piece of advice you’d give a sales leader or a business leader who is responsible for marketing and sales?

0:24:06 – (Karen Gunther): I would say we’re all human and remember the humanity and remember that when you hire that person or you look at yourself, you have certain strengths and weaknesses. We keep going back to that. You want to make sure the strengths are absolutely supported and you want to triply make sure that the weaknesses are minimized through the use of technology or assistance to make sure that stuff gets done the way you want it to be done.

0:24:33 – (Karen Gunther): So if I were to say one thing that would be super helpful for a sales manager or a business owner is start-up one-on-one coaching with each of your salespeople, with each of your staff, once a month, once every two weeks, and literally do a screen share. And literally do a screen share. Even if you’re in the same office, do it from two different offices, because if you’re sitting over their shoulder, they’re going to be nervous and they’re going to make mistakes. But if they’re driving their own laptop or their own computer with you not sitting there and you’re just in the other office watching them, and they go through and they show you, exactly, oh, this is how I do this, you’ll be able to see now, instead of saying, oh, you’re not supposed to do it like that, be kind and say, oh, that’s a great way to do it, but let me show you another way and just be kind about it and provide them with a different tool and then ask them to use that tool for the next two weeks. And then when you speak to them again two weeks later, you ask them how the tool went and you show, ask them how it’s going. You have to be that one-on-one, individualized, understand that people are human, and help support their weaknesses so they can feel, the more confident they feel, the more they can sell your product.

0:25:45 – (Brynne Tillman): I love this. You’re just brilliant. You have such great insights. My last question, or really my second to last question, is what question did I not ask you that I should have?

0:26:03 – (Karen Gunther): I would say, as a solopreneur and you’re not good at tech, then what do you do, right? If you’re on your own and you’re not a good technology person, what do you do then? You get your sister, your cousin, a friend. You hire somebody to help you, to help you set things up so that it works for you. And I. Simple things, just the different things. Make a list as you’re going through your day. Oh, every time I go on Zoom, I’m having this problem.

0:26:39 – (Karen Gunther): Or every time. And when I switch over to teams from Zoom, then I have that problem. Right. Because I have that problem. My mic doesn’t work, so I have to. And my speakers don’t work, so I always have to double-check to make sure everything’s lined up correctly. So these are things that are problems that even I have. And I’m really good at tech. And if I’m having these problems, God knows everybody else is having these problems, too.

0:26:58 – (Karen Gunther): And so just keep a running list of what problems you’re having that keep you from just moving forward to the thing you’re actually trying to do, and then go find somebody, hire them or befriend them or be related to them and ask for their help to get through that one little thing. And you might end up, you have to go to ten different people for all the different types of problems you have, which is fine. Spreads the wealth, right?

0:27:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And then keep a really good documented place in one file somewhere on your drive with all of these answers, because you’ll go back to six months ago. I know I asked them and I know I got an answer, but I don’t remember what it was because that was me. So that’s awesome. So the last question is, where can people find you?

0:27:48 – (Karen Gunther): People can find me on LinkedIn. And if you could put the link in the show notes, that would be fantastic. That’s the best place to find me. They can also find me on my website, stayvisiblemarketing.com. You have to add the marketing on there.

0:28:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights. I know that there are some mic drop moments in here that will help transform both entrepreneurs and even marketing and sales teams in the way that they’re looking at things. I know the one thing I keep hearing and I have to really focus on is one call to action. Because one call to action, I love that.

0:28:24 – (Karen Gunther): And the second thing I would say is if your marketing team understands that you don’t do sales and that the salespeople don’t do marketing, but you must work together to help each other.

0:28:34 – (Brynne Tillman): Perfect way to end this. Thank you so much, Karen. What a pleasure. And to all of our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

0:28:43 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next. Register for free [email protected]. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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