Inside the Duett Process: From Guessing at Email to a Confident Strategy

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

[00:00] Introduction to Email Marketing Strategies

Allea Grummert (00:12)
Hey there, welcome to Happy Subscribers, a podcast that explores how bloggers and content creators can create more purposeful relationships with your audience through email marketing. I’m Allie Grimmert, email marketing strategist, copywriter, email platform expert, and founder of the done for you email marketing agency, Duet. I started as a personal finance blogger in 2016 and have since helped hundreds of bloggers and creators like you maximize your email marketing for more impact, more traffic, and a better connection with your subscribers.

Be prepared for some advanced email talk, as well as tactical tips to help get your valuable content into the hands of your audience faster and easier. I’m excited you’re here, so let’s do it. We can create a deeper, more meaningful connection with the community you love and serve through email.

[01:28] Understanding Client Needs and Desired Outcomes

Okay, so people work with Duvet for a variety of reasons and they have all sorts of desired outcomes and plans and hopes. Most of what they come to us for is strategy. Yes, we write emails and we set up emails on the technical side and we send emails on behalf of our clients, but it all comes to the original point that they search for us or reach out to me is saying like, ⁓

I don’t know what’s actually going on with my email marketing and I need a plan. Like I need something actually strategic or updated from a previous strategy that’s just no longer working or doesn’t feel accurate. We provide those things for our clients, right? So we get results that look like peace of mind that you know that all of your subscribers know about your cookbook or they know about your services or they know about your top content and we’re giving them these amazing resources that you have or could create.

to send to new subscribers. And we also see our clients get really improved opening click rates, especially to their welcome sequence. Like our average welcome sequence click rate is over 9%, which is really awesome. And those are those automated emails that welcome new subscribers as soon as they join your list to introduce them to who you are and all these wonderful things that you have available to them that lucky for them, they now know about you and you get to slowly introduce those things. Now, in order for us to…

[03:24] The Duet Debut Process Overview

do all of this work, I have been following the same process since 2019. And while processes are not like sexy to the average person, I love a good process. And I’m gonna walk you through the duet process today, because I think that there’s a certain curiosity of like, okay, but like, how do my emails end up sounding like me? Or like, how do you end up making all these decisions and clients before they work with us? But at first wondering like, okay, how often am I gonna be on a lot of calls?

And so I’m hoping to answer some of those questions for you today and walking through what our process is for our signature service called the Duet Debut. Now, first things first, you should know that every time I talk about the Duet Debut, it comes with jazz hands. So I know you’re probably driving, but like you can do it with me if you really want for the Duet Debut. And it’s this debut to your new subscriber. That’s where the name comes from. But in order for us to create a really great email sequence and automation,

or send emails like your newsletter for you on a regular basis. One of our guiding principles, I say our because it was mine, and now my team has adopted this as well. We are really good listeners. And I’ve made it a point since the very beginning, even when it was just a team of just me, to ask good questions, but also not to ask questions again if we already have the answers for them. And so we’re just really resourceful with what our clients have told us in their new project questionnaire or through feedback.

[04:50] Email Strategy Playbook and Audience Research

or on calls with me or one of my team members to be able to take good notes and consolidate all of those and make sure that we are hitting on all of the high points and the questions that a client might have. Now, the first phase of the duet debut is something I call the email strategy playbook. This is an audit, but it’s also like more than an audit, which is why it’s not called that. So it’s your email strategy playbook. And we look at these.

high level kind of pillars of your email marketing that are really important. We look at how your email service platform is organized, or if you’re curious about moving to a new platform, we’ll answer questions about that. We look at your new subscriber journey. How are people getting on your list? Are they getting added to your actual email service platform? Are they just hanging out in a WordPress form, not integrated to your email service platform? So we look at the technical side of that. We also look at the messaging side of that. What are your forms promoting?

What’s your call to action? Do you have an image? Should you trust out an image? Like we’re looking at that just as part of your new subscriber journey. And then what do they start getting on your email list? Then we go through and we look at the specific emails that you’re already sending. So if you have automations or if you don’t have automations and you’re sending newsletters, whether it’s, you know, a daily newsletter or they’re far and few between, we look at the data of what you are already sending and how your list is engaging with that.

And we weigh it against what we know as our kind of own benchmarks, especially like in the food blogging space, I see enough of those clients, we kind of know what to hope for and what to expect. We look at how clean your list is, or if it’s cold and it needs to be re-engaged, we’ll make those recommendations. And we also lastly provide recommended sequences. So it could be a sequence that’s automated or could be a campaign, but based on the goals you told us in the new project questionnaire and what we’ve seen in your actual setup and system,

we will make these recommendations based on helping you reach that goal that you came to us with. And from there, we do audience research, which is probably not what you had in mind. You’re like, I’m sorry, don’t you just get into strategy? ⁓ contrary. Before we can dive into strategy, I want to know about your audience. And the way that we do that, because our clients usually have large audiences, we actually end up sending out a survey to their subscribers asking for their input.

We usually include some sort of incentive that gets us a really good reply rate. And based on how many subscribers actually end up completing the survey, we just look for a minimum number. And then we have plenty of data. The data tends to repeat itself after 100 subscribers or 100 responses. So we go through and we look at that and we pull out the data based on a framework that I learned in 2019 called jobs to be done. And it’s really

common in product development. So like tech companies? Question mark. I think that’s where it originally came from. But the idea is defining what role do you play in your readers lives beyond I write recipes or I write inspiring content. Like what purpose do you serve in their life? But this jobs to be done is the idea that like your content serves a job or your services.

provide a job and what is it? It’s not like for me, it’s not just email marketing is our job, because it’s literally our job. My job to be done is to take email marketing off of your plate, know that it’s effective and supporting your overall business goals. Like that’s what people come to me for. So we gather all this research, we gather like actual quotes from your survey respondents and we put this into a voice of customer.

document. It’s a dirty doc. It’s one that the clients never see. But then we turn it into a really nice presentation so you only see the pretty stuff and it’s formatted beautifully. From there, then we create the strategy. And with the Duet Debut, you get 15 emails. You can always add on more if you have additional ideas that you want us to tackle all at the same time. Or I also have clients who come back and do just like another pack of 15, if you will. But what we get to do at this point, this is like

[08:06] Creating Effective Email Sequences

This is my favorite part. I say that about basically every phase. I really love the research. But this is where we get to bring in a few different goals. We want to look at what is the audience coming to you looking for? What big questions do they have? What’s their desired outcome of being on your email list or being part of your community? And we want to make sure that that’s accounted for in this email strategy, as well as your business goals. What products do we need to talk about?

Are there massive affiliates that you’re just like, no, everybody needs to know about this affiliate, whether it’s ButcherBox or something like that. ⁓ And then we also get to bring in the person behind the brand. We get to bring in you because it’s not just about your content. It’s about why you created the content to begin with. Chances are you created your blog because you wanted to write about this topic or you wanted to create products around this topic. And so the same reasons why it was interesting to you.

are going to resonate with the right people in your audience. And so we want to tell them your origin story, but we also want to make sure that they know about your background and your credibility and your legitimacy. So they’re not just like, who’s this person? By telling your story, by telling a little bit about your background and what makes you tick and what makes the website that you’ve created or the services you’ve created be what they are, that they came into existence, you’re building credibility with that new subscriber. So they’re like, I see you.

I say this is a real person pioneer and that’s what we want them to see, especially in a world with AI swap. And I don’t hate on an RSS feed, but if that’s all you were sending, it could really feel robotic. creating a welcome sequence, which is like the first five emails that we send your audience. Those are just precious to me that we get to put all these puzzle pieces together to support your audience, to support your business and to support you personally. Up until now, we’ve done one call with our client. We do an audit.

review session, a playbook review session, and we kind of answer questions and then kind of clear up any questions about the survey before it goes out. But then once the strategy gets delivered, that’s all just done over email and comments in the doc to put the strategy into its final phase. And we’re like, OK, from a high level, these are the 15 emails we’re going to write. Then we take that. And before we start writing, this is where people are like, how do I know that the emails are going to sound like me? Well, I’ll tell you, because we ask good questions.

[10:30] Copywriting and Client Collaboration

And so in the phase between strategy and copywriting, I’ve created a phase called copy prep. We have a document where we actually take all of the content ideas from the strategy and we pull as much related content as we can, not ad nauseum, but like the most important content for each of those topics that we might want to link to or reference. And we put it into a document and then we have our clients review it and say, yep, that’s content I want to link to or no, those are some older blog posts.

I don’t want to link to ⁓ or don’t review my old blog posts for tone because those haven’t been updated to be more personable. Look at newer posts since April 14th or something like that. Or here’s a social media link to a series on threads or an Instagram video or caption that got a lot of engagement, kind of gives the correct tone we want throughout emails. So in this way, we’re gathering the important things about how you want to show up.

but also making sure we’re linking to and sourcing the right content. And we do all that before we dive into copywriting. And then in the copywriting phase, we kind of go into our little copy cave, my team does, and we do a lot of internal checks and balances to make sure that we are hitting on all of the goals that you first outlined, make sure that the content aligns with what you shared with us. But we’re also making our own kind of executive decision of like, sure, we had eight potential blog posts we could have linked to with this email.

We’re deciding to link to these three and here’s why. We might not say here’s why, you might just have to trust us, but we’re using our own instinct and training and experience to say eight links is too many for this email. Or if we’re going to have eight links, we’re going to frame it this way. And it might be a feature with five bullet points. So you get six links instead of eight or whatever that may be. But we’re making those decisions and we’re writing the subject line, we’re writing the preview text, we’re writing the introduction to every email.

And then it goes to our clients to review in bulk. So you get all 15 emails to review at once. And so you get to read it as a flow. Now, I always tell my clients, like, I don’t know your content as well as you do. I don’t know your inner workings of your mind as well as you do. And so we encourage our clients, like, while we did all the heavy lifting to put these emails together, tweak what needs to be tweaked so that it sounds even more like you. Like, if you don’t want to make a

a reference to the office, but you’d rather make a reference to full house? Tell us. That’s fine. We’ll tweak it. But the important thing is that it’s getting created and it’s going to have your sign off and we’re going to get it out to your audience sooner than if you were to sit down and try and strategize and write 15 emails yourself. But by the end of copywriting, we know that what we have both reflects your business goals, your personal goals of connecting with your audience, your audience and what they’re coming for and looking for.

[13:53] Technical Setup and Automation

as well as links to affiliates. Like it’s all, like we’ve gone from broad stroke to really detailed things and it’s just all moving along. And then once the emails are all signed off on and you’re happy with them, we add them to your email service platform. So whether you use Kit or Flowdesk or MailChimp or MailerLite or Kajabi or Klaviyo, once the emails are approved copy-wise, we go and do all the technical setup.

so that when somebody clicks, I’m a beginner, it triggers a beginner sequence before they go into a general nurture sequence, for instance. Or if they say, I don’t have an Instant Pot, great, we’re gonna have them skip these emails that focus on the Instant Pot. So we do all that technical build out. We make sure that you have a template that looks and feels like your brand is also simple for you to use and reuse. there’s just so much we do on the tech side that you don’t even know, right? We’re setting up like,

this automation so that as people come in from whatever place they come in from, whether it’s a landing page or grocery list or many chat or a plugin on your website or hubbub, whatever it might be, or grow or select stream, there’s so many different things. Like however they’re getting onto your email list that everybody goes into the welcome sequence. Then we’ve set up parameters on the backend to be able to keep an eye on who isn’t going into the welcome sequence.

And how do we fix those leaks? And then how do we educate you that as you create new opt-ins to ensure that you follow this process so that everybody gets what they’re supposed to? Because you don’t want to find out that 18,000 people on your list never got your welcome. And not only that, they didn’t get your 10 emails that you worked so beautifully on creating, it worked so hard on, and crafting it for them. We want to make sure that they get all 15 of these automated emails as well as your newsletters.

so that they’re getting your best content. We’re giving them all the resources that you planned for them. It’s like if you made somebody a little gift basket and forgot to give it to them before they left, and you’re like, no, no, no, but I gave you a gift basket. ⁓ Not that there isn’t a way to weave them back in to your nurture sequence. You can definitely do that later. But we just think of all of these potential gaps, whether it’s in messaging or on the technical side of things, that we fill in to the best of our ability. And we want to make sure that we explain

like how your tech works by the end, so that you’re not like knocking on our door necessarily to like set up every little thing. We want to equip you to use the tool that you have well. And chances are you don’t know the full scope of what your email service platform is capable of. And that’s where with working with us, you’re gonna be like, it can do what? It can do how? We, could.

Yes, the answer is probably yes. And so this is all the stuff that comes with, you know, a five or six month project like the duet debut, because we get to ask those questions of you, you get to ask those questions of us. And I always tell folks on discovery calls with me, like, if you have a question about the process, about how we do this or that or whatnot, there is a high likelihood, like 99 % chance that it’s getting answered in the process already. I’ve done this for

[17:09] Customizing the Process for Each Client

⁓ man, over a hundred one-on-one clients. And there’s a reason why it works. And then what I want you to hear also, because I know processes are not that sexy for most people. They’re sexy to me, but I am the way that I am. I love processes and stuff, but I hope you hear that while there is a process, everything that’s actually getting produced is custom. Like when we audit your email, your email setup, your messaging, like we are in there looking at it.

When we are writing your survey questions, we’re considering what do we need to know about your audience? Are there additional things we need to ask? And then when it comes to copy prep, we are doing the heavy lifting to pull together all the resourcing that we need to write the emails. And we want your sign off because we care that you are the ultimate managing editor of your content and you know what’s best to use and what can be left out. And then with copywriting as well, like

We’re not using AI to write your emails. I have incredible copywriters on my team who think holistically, who think strategically, who do research on your own brand voice and tone in order to write those emails. So you can rest assured they’re not copy and paste it from anywhere. And then with your email tech setup, like we have a process that we don’t forget to do bits and pieces that are important for every project, right? Like especially something so technical.

We want to make sure all of our I’s are dotted, T’s are crossed. And then you get a walkthrough video from one of my team members explaining how it works and the opportunity to hop on a call with somebody from my team to make sure that you understand it all. And if you don’t, you have a space for questions. So that’s a real overview of what we do through the duet debut process. And I hope that you can hear the things that are important for me and why we do it this way so that you are

not only heard, but your wishes are respected. Your perspective is not something that we can just like copy and paste. And so we want to bring you into the conversation, but we also don’t do it in a way where it feels like you have to do lots of work. We do most of the heavy lifting. We keep most of it over email and through Google Docs, and we can hop on a call if we need to. But most clients don’t really need to, nor do they have a lot of time. But that option is there if you need it.

[19:05] Conclusion and Call to Action

And so it’s important to me that your most valuable content get in front of your audience and in a way that feels so custom made for how you want your subscribers to feel when they subscribe to your list. And I know that that’s important to you. That’s why you’re listening to this podcast, because you have really resourceful content that you want to get in the hands of the people it would benefit from the most. And so that is the joy that I get to do with the Duet debut process, as well as some of our other client services.

but my team is all on board with this as well. I have the most credible team to walk through the processes that I’ve created over the years and make sure that you get the best product possible in the end. So if you have thoughts or questions or you want to hop on a call to chat about working with me and my team, you can do that at duet.co. slash contact. You just reach out to me and we can chat more. We can hop on a call and make sure that it’s the right fit for you.

But I wanna make sure that, yeah, you know kind of the scope of what’s happening with the duet debut, know how much we are taking off of your plate and creating for you. And that that is an absolute joy for me and my team to serve you in that way.

Thanks so much for listening to happy subscribers and our conversation about email marketing today. I hope you feel inspired to take action, even if it’s a small change, so you can more confidently share your valuable message with your community through email. Special thanks goes to my team who makes it possible to produce and share these episodes with you. Seriously, thank you guys. If you want to hear more email marketing tips, strategies, and success stories to help you develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with your email subscribers,

Be sure to subscribe to happy subscribers so you don’t miss an episode. If you have a few seconds, I invite you to share this episode link with a friend or post it on social media so your peers and community can benefit from it as well. And if you have a few minutes, I’d appreciate if you’d leave a written review of the podcast since that helps more people hear about it. And I believe we need more creators sending more valuable emails to their audience with more confidence. If you want to reach out to me directly, the best way to do that is to join my email list through one of my top freebies listed in the show notes.

You’ll get regular emails from me that are packed with value. And if you hit reply to any of those emails, it’ll land in my inbox and I can’t wait to chat with you there. Until next time, let’s do it.