Email Marketing for Creators: How to Delegate, Protect Your Energy & Grow

Allea Grummert:

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 Allea Grummert, 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.

Hey there, welcome to Happy Subscribers. I’m so glad you’re here. Today, I’m going to jump right in to a conversation that you’re probably not expecting, but maybe you wanted answers for it. If you recently listened to my episode with Andrew Wilder, you heard me mention once, maybe twice, that I take an F every afternoon, which is a little bit superfluous. I don’t take one every afternoon, but I do wrap up my days, most days, by 3 p.m. I want to explain this because it could come off braggy and maybe it is a little bit braggy, but I’m going to tell you how I got here, why it matters and how it impacts you and why it matters for your email marketing. Because if you’re like, Allea, I don’t understand. I have more things to do. What do you mean take a day off at three o’clock? And maybe that’s not what you need to be doing. I want to explain myself so that you can follow along with me on why this has become really important for me.

So yes, when I actually started, I was like, when did this start? Why did I actually start taking off around three o’clock in the afternoon? It actually started probably a year and a half ago. And it was because I was running a launch. And when you’re running a launch, like a webinar or whatnot, you can burn out so quickly. And you can also like lose the fun of a launch when you’re that tired and you’re just like, kind of strung out with all the details and all of that. And my business coach, she was my business coach at the time and is now, had recommended, and I never thought of this, she’s like, what if you just cut your days short for a couple of weeks so that you can actually just focus on the launch, but not feel like you have to get everything done under the sun every day like you have been? I mean, I usually work like nine to five because that’s what I did at my corporate job. And shortly after working with my coach, she had encouraged me in this way, but also to take Friday afternoons off. Like Fridays after one, just nothing good happens. Friday afternoon after one o’clock during the week. I’m joking, but honestly, I would be, everyone would be better off probably taking a nap than replying to emails with half a brain left or less than that by the end of the week. So after a while, this just kind of became the standard for me, not just the launch week habit. I think I kind of experimented with like, is this something I could do more often or a couple days of the week? I know that last summer I was just like my personal list of to do’s was so long. My friend Liz, instead of calling it a personal day or personal afternoon, she calls it a personal admin day. That’s what it was. And so I had these personal admin days so that I could actually like go get my real ID for travel and I could go drop off these donations and get this stuff in my personal life taken care of as well. So it kind of like evolved into this like, what if I actually just like took off a couple of afternoons for the whole month of June, know, two afternoons a week for a whole month. So it kind of developed from there just for some context. But also, you should know about my work week. You you probably just listen to me here or you get my emails, you rarely see me on social media. But that’s because my days are quite busy. And when I’m working, I am working, I am focusing.

And I don’t have a water cooler to chat with people. Neither do you, most likely. I mean, I do have a cat that interrupts me about 1 30 every day because she wants to be fed. I’m like, too soon, too soon for supper. But my weeks look like I have at least four calls most days of the week. So Tuesdays and Thursdays, sometimes Wednesdays as well. And Mondays are my podcast recording days, which often means I’m recording podcasts with two different guests back to back developing the show notes, developing the notes for the editor. And it’s just a whole day of production. It’s not even a heavy, heavy production, but it’s really involved conversations because I want to be a good listener and I want to have my guest just be on this pedestal for half an hour to an hour while I get to ask them about their expertise, which is a little draining. And then my responsibilities throughout the week look like because I have a team, I am responsible for answering questions for them, for clients. So that everybody has what they’re doing and need to do at all times. So the time that I’ve spent working is like full brain time. There’s no dog to go for a walk, though Tilly does bother me sometimes and wants to go outside. But I’m not leaving for a gym class. I try not to work over my lunch hour. And if I do take a break, it’s usually just a walk up the street and back, which takes 12 minutes, or I’m going to my coworking space, which is a 15 minute drive. And honestly, I really enjoy doing those things because I need the brain break.

But basically I realized over and over and over again by Thursday nights, I am like a shell of a person. I am pancake Allie on the couch and I have nothing left to give. And I’m in this new city. I’ve been in Nashville almost two years permanently. And I’m like, my gosh, if I work my tail off and I have no spoons left to offer my friendships or my Bible study group, like I’m just going to be a shell of a person and I don’t want to do that. So for me, I really had to balance where I’m putting all my brain power. So sometimes that looks like taking a nap in the afternoon. So that I have the time and energy to engage with my friends in the evenings. You should also know if you haven’t heard this, I don’t have children. I don’t know what this will look like if I ever have children. That’s kind of the dream as well. But I know this is going to apply to people differently. But stay with me here because I am sure you also leave it all on the court every day, whether it’s tending to children or homeschooling and running a business and running errands. Every day is a personal admin day on top of full-time work. So I want you to hear me hear what you’re thinking. I know that you leave it all on the court. But this is why I’m telling you all of this. I want your best energy being spent where your best energy needs to be spent. I want your voice in your emails.

I want your taste and your creativity in your content. And I want to see your face on social media if that’s what you’re doing. So that means there’s a lot of things that are not happening or are not as pressing. If you, however, don’t prioritize what actually needs my voice, what actually needs my content, my type, my taste, my flair, you’re giving a lot of things attention that don’t actually need your particular attention and can be outsourced.

I’m saying this because if you are burnt out, giving everything to every detail in your business, that email might not get written or that product doesn’t get created. It’s really funny. I was chatting with my friend, Melissa Harstein the other day and she laughs about this. Like every time we catch up every six months or so on the phone, she’s like, Ali, remember when you said you weren’t going to start an agency? And she just gets a kick out of it. And honestly, it’s so true. There was a time in my life I was like, ain’t no way I’m going to manage people. No way. But I have learned that it’s not so scary. And I do have a boutique agency. I have one really well-developed skill set and a few particular service-based products that we provide for clients. So I’m not like constantly reinventing the wheel internally in my business. I got it to a point that this wheel is rolling. It’s great. And then I’m able to bring in team members to help me with specific tasks. I bring this up as well because I had a call with somebody just the other day and she was like, but Allea, I don’t want to hire because I don’t want to become this big conglomerate. I don’t want to be this mega food blogger. And I was like, here’s the thing. You don’t have to, but at what you could do is you outsource pieces of your work so that your brain power goes to what it needs to go to. And I’ll share with you a couple of examples of how I initially brought people onto my team. I always like to remind people you can start with somebody being on your team for hours a month.

It’s still a hire, it’s still helpful, and it’s still relieving you of some to-dos. You don’t need 10 people to get started. You don’t need to hire them for 15 hours a week. I’ll tell you why, because then you have to figure out what to have them do for 15 hours a week. I’m all about the gradual hire. The thing with hiring is it requires a lot of teaching and training and also trust. And so stick with me here, because I’m going tell you some of the lessons that I’ve learned.

One was my very first hire outside of my best friend who helped me type in some business card information from a conference in 2016. But my very first hire for my team was an assistant and I hired her and quickly I learned she doesn’t actually use Google Drive. She comes from a corporate background and she uses Outlook. And I was like, this isn’t going to work, and I had to face in my humility, I had been humbled of like, I didn’t ask the right questions. So it’s a training ground for you, as well as training other people when they do work out and they’re on your team. I had another hire that just wasn’t working. This is a bonus story. This isn’t even the second one I meant to tell, but I scheduled her like, hey, you can’t work for me anymore email for like 8 a.m. the next morning.

Allea Grummert (10:29.544)
I was in my bathroom leaning up against my bathtub just on the floor, weeping the whole night before. I hated having to fire someone, but it really wasn’t a good fit. And so I learned a lot as a person through this as well. Like for starters, don’t schedule an email, just send it. There’s your lesson for that. But the other more recent, because I’ve been in business almost eight years, the other more recent example that I have was when we started bringing on more copywriters onto the Duett team. For a while, it was me, then it was me and an assistant, and then we hired on a copywriter who was basically doing all of our client work. And then when she had to leave for health reasons, we needed to bring on more copywriters. And so what happened was one day I’m reviewing, I’m copy reviewing, editing this writer’s work, and I don’t even know who it was, doesn’t matter. The fact was, it took me two and a half hours to edit it and I spiraled, I was like, my gosh, how is it that this isn’t following our format? How is it that this isn’t done exactly the way that I would have had it done? Well, listener, I didn’t give them any instructions as to how to format the document. And so I was like, this is humbling. I needed to take the time to take what I knew, develop it into what is now our copywriting guide. And so now what we do is that when we have a new copywriter,

They sign off saying, I will review this at the start of a project. I will write the project and I’ll go back to the copywriting guide and review it again before submitting it to the Duet team. Now that resolved so much frustration for me, so much frustration or unknown for them. And now we have a really slick system that we bring on copywriters all the time. Now it’s not this huge thing of like, I’m just training this one person. I’ve created this backlog, this asset that is up to date with what we expect of our copywriters.

The lesson in this is that stepping out of the doing means that you’re stepping into a completely new role. And it’s weird, okay? I’m sitting with you in that nodding being like, exactly what do you want me to do? Because you have to get clear on how you want things done to the point that you can write it down and hand it off. And that is nerve-racking because you’re like, I’m already so busy, Ali, what do you mean? are you’re already doing things. And honestly, you can bring in a new hire at a certain level and just ask them to write down the instructions and you review them. That’s basically what I my team do because they can write down instructions and it’s part of it is their training. Write down everything I just showed you in this video that we recorded on our walkthrough call. And then I’d like to take a look at it to make sure you have a clear understanding of the tasks.

And then throughout all of that, you get a better understanding of your own processes better than you ever did before. And honestly, if you come across stuff that you’re like, why am I still doing that? You can cut it out of your process. You don’t need it anymore. And so you’re getting really clear about what actually matters because if you’re not willing to hand it off to someone else, then why are you the one doing it right now? One other story, going back to this idea of I want your time and energy being spent where your time and energy really needs to be spent where I want your voice to be in your email, in your social media, in the content you create, in the products you create, in the coaching offers that you provide, wherever that is. I do what’s called the email strategy playbook. It used just be called an audit back in the day. And I remember sitting down to start a new audit for a client when it was just me. I was spending three hours, four hours onboarding a client, getting the files in order, reviewing their existing data, getting access to Google Analytics putting it all into the documentation and things that I had created. But then when it came time for me to actually start doing the audit, my brain had nothing left. I was like, I’m tired. It’s time to go home for lunch. And so then I hired a project assistant. And this is actually, I say it’s the oldest role on the team because I used to do it, Laura did it, Sydney on my team does it now. But what I’ve done is I’ve given them the onboarding materials. You.

Dear team member, go and do this part so that when I sit down, I can just focus on the analysis, the strategy, the creative, the creation of something. So think about what are some tasks that you’re already doing that you could hand off a piece of it to someone else so that when you sit down to write, when you sit down or you gather what you need to do a day of photography for content creation or videography, whatever it might be.

If you can use the assistance of someone else, like Leanne was working for me, was it five hours a month? 10 hours a month, two and a half hours a week tops. Like, and slowly that role has changed to where there’s plenty more work to do. the scope of that role has changed. But at the time, it’s exactly what I needed in order to put my full brain power behind something the way that my clients had hired me to do. On top of all this, if you’re the one doing all the things all the time, what are you not able to do? What are the things you dream about doing that you don’t have the capacity for? And maybe it’s just taking off at three o’clock every day. I met with a gal who uses Clariti, because I’ve done their case studies on their website for a couple of years. And it’s this tool, it organizes all of your data from your WordPress and your Google Search Console and all this. And I asked her, what is it you’re doing with the 10 hours a week of time you’ve saved using Clariti and y’all she had an answer immediately she goes tennis lessons. I was like really she’s like yeah 10 hours of playing tennis every week because I’ve saved time in my business which is wild and so cool and I love that she had an actual place that she could say I saved this time this is what I’m doing with it. So maybe it’s tennis lessons or taking it up at three o’clock or even in my case because I was able to bring on team members over years and train them and trust them and be available for questions if there are hiccups. I was able to create a podcast. There’s no way I could create this podcast if I was still writing for clients. Y’all, a duet debut writing project for me, just the writing portion, the writing and the copy editing would take 18 hours. And part of why I it wasn’t a good fit for me is because I can’t keep my butt in a chair that long.

I can’t do it. So like I knew what needs to be created. I could create the strategy. I know what good copy is. I know how to write. But I mean, I realized I got a much better editor and it’s better for my heart and my soul to not have to be behind a screen for 18 hours every week creating email content for a client. So now I’ve found I’ve leaned into my strengths. I brought in people who are good at what they do. And because I was able to kind of download my brain to them that has opened up a lot of opportunities for me. Two years ago, I didn’t have my one-to-one coaching program. Now I do. I didn’t have Ready Set email as an offer. Now I do. I didn’t have a podcast. Now I do. And I’m able to create these webinars and workshops to test and send out to my list to see who buys, who attends, do they sign up to work with me. Those are all things I wasn’t able to experiment with if I were the one responsible for every deliverable that our clients get.

And it’s just so great because there’s like a redundancy here because I have multiple team members in kind of some overlap roles, some not, but like I’m allowed to go on vacation and things don’t stop. I’m allowed to go back to Nebraska for my niece’s graduation. I’m going to go to Europe for a few weeks this summer for the first time in like 15 years. I haven’t been to Europe and knowing my team is so freaking capable because I’ve trained them and I’ve given them all the things that they need to do it. So.

Same in your case, that when you want to take three weeks off at Christmas, or if you want to take off the summer really, or just take it light all summer because you have kids that are young and they want to go to the pool every afternoon, that your business is still operating. And if you’re sitting there going, Ali, that sounds awfully expensive. No, you can hire a VA for $25 an hour. It’s what I tell you, 10 hours a month, that’s $250 to save you a lot of brain space.

So I’ve actually created a document and it’s at duet.co slash hire. And that’s where you can see the job boards that I post to. You can see which one has been the most successful for me. Multiple team members have come from the same job board. And I’ve also got a resource in there for my fractional COO that I’ve hired to hire for me at different points in my business. You can reach out to her as well. That is not even an opt-in. It’s just a redirect and

You can go check it out. share all of this. I you know, I come off of that interview with Andrew and I felt like a goofball and a little bit braggy to be like, but having and protecting my resource as a brain, as a person, as somebody who gets some fresh air during the day, like that that’s really important to me. It really spoke, I think it was the very next day I had this conversation with a food blogger.

And she loved the concept because she’s like, I’ve always wanted to do cooking classes. She’s like, I’m kind of out of recipes for her particular niche. And her emails are already being recycled quite often. And for her, she felt this need to be creative in a new way. So the idea of like, what would it look like to do cooking classes? What would it look like to pitch that to my list? But she’s so busy. Again.

This is where I feel like this can fix a gap, fix an issue. And I know you’re probably thinking, but Ali, this opens up other issues. It does. And I believe that you’re absolutely capable of tackling them because you have such an expertise. You’ve been doing this for so long already. And so having these standard operating procedures, these SOPs and to-do lists and checklists are going to be able to get that information out of your brain into Google Docs that live as an asset.

No matter if a different team member comes and goes or gets promoted to different roles. Laura on my team, who’s our wonderful, one of our wonderful project managers, she started out in this role, like in 2021, like a long time ago. And now she’s a project manager. So that transition to bringing on Sydney as a project VA was like pretty seamless because Laura had all this stuff written down and what she didn’t have written down already, I had written down before then.

I do know that these decisions feel costly in time and money and energy and a learning curve, but I believe that for your longevity and vitality, if you will, as a long-term content creator, I believe that it’s worth your time and energy to think about what parts of your business are purely yours and what you can give away. I also want to make sure you hear this. I’m almost eight years in business. This took a long time for me to do. And I actually hope that that’s really encouraging for you. It’s not something that just like you flip a switch and you have a full-time employee. Heck no, techno. So start small, develop your systems and instructions little by little, pass them on off to someone that you can trust. It does not have to be perfect. And you’ve learned a lot about yourself as a human, as a leader in the meantime, in the process. Bye now. Maybe you’ve heard this.

I say all the time because I love systems so much and because they do, they allow me to live and breathe because if something happens, I’m not out of luck. I have these resources. I do have, there was a quote from a client, Sharon, years ago where she basically said, everything that we’d set up for her, she basically sighed a huge sigh of relief and was like, because this is all set up, I get to think in new, more creative ways.

And that has obviously stayed with me for many, many years because, yeah, when somebody else can handle the draft of an email or the formatting of the email or even like the cadence and answer some questions for you about what your email could or should look like or what needs fixed, you have a lot more freedom to go do other things and make other decisions. So that allows you the opportunity to connect with your list and hopefully makes email in particular stop feeling like a checklist item or what gets pushed to the back of the back burner all of the time. I hear that all the time. You get to be a storyteller and a connector and a person and a human sitting behind your email thinking more strategically about it because you’re not worrying about who is going to make your images square on your website or updating alt text. I want you to protect the parts of your brain that need vitality that need rest, need creativity and a walk outside or a nap if you’re tired. That’s how I want you to shop with your voice online, in your emails, in your content, and honestly, in the rest of your life outside of your business as well. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this is encouraging to you. Again, that resource for how I’ve hired people on my team is duet.co/hire.

And if you are curious about working with me, we have a handful of different options for how we can audit the work that you are currently doing, or we can write emails for you and get these automations set up and really check some of the boxes off of your to-do list when it comes to email marketing and segmentation and consistency and a beautiful newsletter template. We would love to do that for you. You can always book a call with me. You can go to duet.co slash happy.

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.