Scaling Your Agency's Revenue With Email Marketing

Jan Koch  00:03

Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining me again on the WP Agency Summit. I’m here with my good friend, Davinder all the way from India, and Davinder is doing something that I cannot do to save my life. He is consistent with email marketing in his business. And not just with one email campaign. Yes, like, I feel like 1000 projects going on at the same time where he uses email marketing. And in our conversation before the recording Davinder, you said something that really stuck with me. And that is even 100 email subscribers are gold if you know how to use them. So please share your wisdom with us and maybe start with a little introduction about who you are and what you’re doing in the WordPress space.

Davinder Singh Kainth  00:47

Well, my name is Davinder Singh Kainth. And I’ve been into this online space for almost 18 years now. And I’ve seen all the ups and downs, more downs in the beginning. Now, fortunately, there are more ups these days. But yeah, I’ve been through that traditional route that most people follow, build an agency get direct clients, then get bored of building websites, and then do something that you really love to do. And guess what? When you start doing something that you really love to do, money floodgates to open because you have your heart and passion into it. And email marketing has been a big plus in my business in terms of building connections and obviously bringing in revenue for the last three, four years. And prior to that even I thought email marketing is a waste of time. Like most people who don’t do email marketing, as of now would have that kind of perception. Even I had it. Until a few smart people around in my ecosystem showed me Hey, this is how you do email marketing. And this is what you can result, you know, into if you have consistent effort. And, you know, email marketing is something like SEO, like a lot of people, teach it and people who are teaching is actually don’t practice it. So that is the big problem with email marketing like they will give you all kinds of fun, whoa, this is the new fancy email tool, you should use this. There’s all kinds of automation. But guess what, majority of people don’t even need automation when they startup or even I use very little automation in my email marketing’s because automation is something that you use at the end, you know, a tale of the elephant. First, you need to follow the trunk of the elephant. And that’s very important. And that’s where the problem is we all are, like, blinded by shiny objects. So we are more focused on finding which email marketing tool works for me rather than how email marketing works for me as a business. So, you know, I have a very simple frame. A lot of people ask me this question like, hey, what is the secret of email marketing? I think there’s only one golden rule book rule number one, consistency. And rule number two, follow the rule number one, consistently. Seriously, a lot of people create an email list. A lot of people will buy expensive email marketing tools, there are many. But guess what? They won’t be consistent in emailing people. Why? Because firstly, obviously, they are busy, right? We all are busy. Second, they don’t understand the value that they are missing by not touching their subscribers on a regular basis. Now when I say do email marketing on a regular basis, it’s not like you have to email them daily. Yes, there are people who email daily and they are successful. But then you have to have that kind of an audience who will open your emails daily. I personally prefer to do it once a week for certain projects, and twice a week for certain projects. And for certain projects, which have, which are on their downtrend now, but still are there, I have switched it to once a month, so that they can that relationship remains. Because if you don’t email a person for few months, and you suddenly email them with an offer, and they’ll say, oh, who’s this person, the next thing they will do is unsubscribe, they won’t interact with you or your email. Because our site is out of mind. That is that works in email marketing as well. So consistency is one thing. And if you are, if you really want to, you know elaborate on two steps on how you would do email marketing, I think the first step would be consistency is obviously there. But the first step is honesty. We need honesty in everything. In email marketing. It’s more important because we are protective of our email inbox. No one wants to, you know, see spam or unnecessary stuff in their email. So as an email marketer, you need to be very honest, in terms of how you collect your email leads. Now you need to be clear and honest with your subscribers that this is what you’re going to expect. And that would start from your email landing page where you tell them hey, I’m going to email you and this is what you can expect and some people even show a sample email that people can see. And that can be either yes or no for them to subscribe to your, you know, email system. And there are many approaches to how you bring people into your email system. One, obviously, the natural approach, which I use all the time, and I love to use, which is you write a good piece of content, and you slap a, you know, email box at the end of the content or put it in a pop-up. Mind you, if you’ve written something useful, that person will sign up. It’s not a spamming technique, obviously, some people Oh, it’s so boring, every site has a signup box at the end of the content, but mind you, it works, provided your content works. Like if you’re writing boring content, well, you can put 10 boxes, it won’t help right. So your content should work. Obviously, there are other less natural approaches, which are you know, doing lead magnets, you know, ebooks, and all that stuff. I’ve tried it, it builds your email lists faster, but the quality of emails that you build with a less natural approach is not that good. Because just see with the mentality, that person joined your email list that person join your email list to download that freebie not to hear to your blabbering or rants every week. So you need to balance it out whether you want to build because if you want to build email lists very fast, you can definitely build every email ebooks and you know, offering free courses and all that it works. But the quality is less I have used that approach in my course I offered a free course, almost like a thousand people joined it. And so I had thousand email ids to upsell the paid course. And almost 200 people bought it. So the conversion was very high. And I was surprised but the thing is the people who joined it, were already familiar with that topic. So again, the way you slap your email box also matters like if you have an agency website and you have a niche you know say for example I have probeaver.com right which is for Beaver Builder stuff. Now if I slapped the same email docs on my agency website it’s highly unlikely those people would be interested in Beaver Builder because they would be more of people who want a website and they don’t really care. It’s Beaver Builder or Elementor. Right. But if I’m slapping it on beau website pro Beaver, they already know what Beaver Builder I don’t have to warm them up. Right. So that approach also. And then there’s the last approach, the last approach where you buy an email list for a couple of dollars, sometimes even for free from spam website, which obviously does not work. But it gives you the feeling Oh, I’ve got 10,000 subscribers, but guess what? They are dead on arrival. So…

Jan Koch  07:46

It’s like 10,000 fake Instagram followers. Yeah. doesn’t help at all.

Davinder Singh Kainth  07:50

But then you know what, there is also a market in that also like I’ve discovered it like, more idly on the face of it, we’ll see that if you if you’re buying an email list, it’s a spammy activity. There are people who buy it. And there are ways to filter out that email list. But again, you need to be exploited that not so white hat thing, right? Because it’s not a white hat, right? It’s sort of grey hat slash back black hat. But there are people who are actually full time into this. So because I can tell you like when I started email marketing, I didn’t have I didn’t know about much. So it’s all about hit and trial and trying things. But for the last years, I have been into few communities which are only focused on newsletters. And I’m surprised some people have built a careers only newsletters, and I was like, really, you, even though newsletter contributes like 20 to 30% of the revenue that, you know, I generate, but there are people who live off newsletters and you learn so many techniques from them, which is, you know, again, you need to go into the ecosystem and learn from people who have done it, not just read it, right. So, honesty, very important. Second, again, once you have once you’re honest, you build an email list. Second, consistency. Now, again, consistency again depends on you. If you can write one email per week, do it one email twice a week, do it. Again, depends on how you want to, and when you’re doing the email writing be a little fresh. Don’t be robotic, because no one likes to read a robot, right? Be a little personal because email writing is a little more personal than blog post writing, even in blog posts, we people tend to get a little personal, which is fine, because that’s how it will resonate and give a unique proposition of you writing it and not some hired virtual assistant, right. So in email marketing, you can go to the next level of personalization, and again, once you start email writing and someone replies to your email, that newsletter, that’s a win for you. That’s a validation that’s not just people are reading it, but it’s also causing them to think and reply. When someone replies to my email man, I feel so good. I’m not I’m flying in the sky, even though it doesn’t matter in terms of money and all that, but it matters in terms of validation that what you’re doing is right. So look out for those signals as well. And don’t be afraid to click your emails and you know, be honest, like, sometimes we send an email with the wrong link, send them again say sorry, just be human. Right?

Jan Koch  10:19

I’ve done that so many times. Yeah. It happens.

Davinder Singh Kainth  10:21

Yeah say sorry, it happens. And whenever you’re writing an email, make sure you give value in your every email. Because if, if an email subscriber discovers something new, even if it’s one item new to him, he will value your conversation. And I get, I am fortunate that I get this reply to a lot of people, hey, I didn’t know about this, and you shared it. Thank you so much. And that’s kind of validation. Because we tend to think like, Oh, I know this. So every other person in my ecosystem will also know it, which isn’t true. So honesty, consistency. And the last important point is analysis, like, you know, hitting the send button on the email. That’s not the end of the process. That’s, in fact, the beginning of the process. Like you’re doing this email marketing for something, right? Obviously, it could be like, I’m building my authority or value, but it could be like, I’m selling a product, I’m trying to make revenue, right. So when you send an email, then your actual process starts, you need to analyze, obviously, there are a few important, you know, mattresses like open rate and click-through rate. But the most important one is the open rate, right? Like, if you have a hundred people, how many opened actually opened your email? Because that’s the first step right, then only they will click the thing, right. And again, open rate can be very different for different people, I target just over 50%, because that’s usually industry standard is around 20%, something

Jan Koch  11:55

that’s pretty insane. I’m not close to 50% was my news. I’m not consistent either, though,

Davinder Singh Kainth  12:01

There’s a trick for that, which is coming next. Because, you know, for me, my personal target is I need to have it above 50%. So usually, my open rates are generally about 40 to 55%. The maximum I had is was 65%, which was a very small email list, which happens in a small email list right? Now, the thing is, when you send an email, not everyone will get your email. That is given. Some of them some inboxes were rejected, some in boxes, it will land in the spam folder, that on the face of it, it looks like you can’t do much. But guess what you can do a lot more. Firstly, how are you sending your email? Right? Firstly, your email id like if you’re sending it from WP mastery dot XYZ, right? So your email id would be somewhere like Yana WP mastery dot XYZ, right? So first thing, you got to make sure that your email id is not blacklisted anywhere, right? Because that is a sending signal that your email will carry when it lands in your inbox. So if it’s blacklisted, man, that’s a very serious problem. So out of a hundred people on many will receive it, especially if it’s blacklisted by Gmail or Google because 90% of your subscribers will be Gmail or Google suite people, right. So that’s very important and how you can avoid it. The best way to avoid it is to have double opt-in enabled when you’re collecting your email. Why because if I come to your website and put my email address, right, I will get a confirmation email in my inbox. And usually confirmation emails don’t land in the inbox. And when spam inbox, they land in the normal inbox. And when I click on it, it gives the signal to Gmail, your account that this email is important coming from this email id. So you’re already building a relationship on the right footing. So double opt-in is very important. Some people think it’s an annoying thing to do it. But guess what, it’s a very important thing to do. I’ve noticed when I don’t use double opt-in, the emails don’t land properly. So double opt-in is very important.

Jan Koch  14:08

Sorry to interrupt. But that’s also another thing that’s shining through in this conversation, and that is your focus so much on quality email subscribers rather than quantity. And that is what I’ve locked it also helps you do is you build a list with people who are willing to take action to receive your content. So that immediately improves the quality of emails, even though it will reduce the quantity by maybe like 50%. But it also highly improves how people respond to your content.

Davinder Singh Kainth  14:40

Exactly. I don’t need 10,000 people email list man. For me thousand and max 5000 is more than enough. Provided, I’m still sticking with my metrics of at least 40 to 50% open rate. So if my open rate is less, that means there’s something terribly wrong. Now one is double opt-in check If your email list is blacklisted, the other important thing is cleaning your email list regularly. I’m sure most people don’t do it because they don’t know it right. And when I say keep cleaning your email list, you should check your email list like look for email ids, who have not opened your last, say, 10 emails. Now, someone who’s not opening your last 10 emails will not open your next 10 emails as well. Right? So that person is not your subscriber. So what you can do is obviously, you don’t need to delete them straight away, you need to segment those people into a separate group or tag them, and then send them an exclusive email with a very catchy headline, hey, you didn’t open this inbox, man. Fireworks gonna blow up if you don’t open this, like, you know, this is where you have to be a little shameless, so that they open it right? Once they open it, they will read it, oh, I’m missing all these emails, right. So you need to be clear in those conversations, hey, you’re not open email for the last few weeks, if you wish to, you know, keep, you know, as a subscriber, remain as a subscriber. So start opening or reading my emails, or it would be deleted, I usually wait for three, four weeks after that. And then track again, if that person opened the email, I don’t care whether that person clicked any link. But if it’s open, that’s the first step I’m happy with it. So after four or five weeks, if that person does not open the email, well, bye-bye. Because, you know, when you remove those inactive people from your email list, your clicked open rate automatically goes up. So that is a secret of improving the quality of your email list. And, you know, improving the overall setup. And obviously, the last set thing that you can do is segment your email. Obviously, there are so many courses that teach you how to, you know, segment your emails, you know, this person is interested in this stuff this is interested in because I follow different approach rather than wasting my, you know, brainpower on segmenting people, I actually have different email lists for different side projects, because every side projects will have a different, you know, niche or topic. So that person will only sign up if he or she is interested in that. So I don’t, personally don’t spend that much time on segmenting because my email lists are very different. And I don’t send the same email to different you know, side projects, email subscribers, like that’s committing suicide and making people angry.

Jan Koch  17:26

This is pure gold. And this is I’ve just made notes to clean my email list over the weekend because I haven’t done that myself. And I definitely have some lurkers in my email list that sign up like five years ago and probably aren’t even interested in what I’m doing anymore because I changed what I’m doing over the past five years. So what they signed up for my might simply not be relevant anymore to them.

Davinder Singh Kainth  17:50

Yeah, you need to say them, bye-bye, you know, because that’s, and there’s another metrics man. If you improve your open rate, your overall quality of the email list goes up and your deliverability actually improves. Obviously, these are parameters that are very subjective in nature. But objectivity happens when you see the open rate, and it will go up when you remove it because again, what is the use of having someone on your email list who is not interested in what you’re saying? Right?

Jan Koch  18:17

Yeah, you’re just paying the cost of the marketing tool for that account. 

Davinder Singh Kainth  18:21

Exactly. And people often say it’s email is gold and all that stuff. Yeah, email is gold. But when you start email marketing, it’s like a gold brick, you need to convert that brick into fine jewelry to make money, actually. So you can buy the fanciest of email marketing tool, you can build an email list. Everyone can build an email list, the problem happens how you interact with an email list. And that is where most people fail. Because people are not consistent because people don’t value the thing that, hey, I have other things to do. Well, guess what everyone has other things to do. Right? But again, it depends on your focus. And I’ve been consistent with email marketing for the last three years now. And earlier, I thought, like, I have to email every day, that’s like, terrible because I can’t do that. But I have made a schedule now. Like, I have you, uh, you know, side projects. So I made one specific day and time to send an email for that specific project. Why? I’ve done it because it keeps me consistent. And I don’t have to think of, Oh, I didn’t send an email here. I didn’t send an email. So if I project A and B so one is what happens on Monday have another happens on Tuesday, another one email I just write it on my other you know, podcast website Smart Web Creators, I just write a free-flowing casual email only I don’t publish on our website. It’s just like, a digest of something that I’m doing and all that and I get more replies in that email than other emails and because that I do it with a free mind. I just share what I did this week. What I found useful and people do reply and say, oh, man, that was interesting. I should have read it. So Again, if you want to do email marketing, you need to have something to share also. So I’m a very big consumer, I read a lot of things I interact with, you know, I am on Facebook all the time. So…

Jan Koch  20:11

Definitely, and you have some of the most active communities on Facebook as well. So can you walk us through how the side projects contribute to your overall agency’s bottom line, as you mentioned, they make up like 20 to 30% of your income, which can be a significant amount of money and might actually mean that it’s making or breaking the business? So if somebody would focus more on email marketing, to maybe generate leads, or create some passive income, like affiliate marketing, I know you’re doing that sometimes. And pitching like a course or something like that. It can basically cover the reoccurring costs for the business like employees and random stuff like that. So maybe walk us through how you structure those side projects.

Davinder Singh Kainth  21:01

Okay, so why do we start an agency – to make money, right? So besides doing websites, there are so many other things that you can do with your clients to make money and, you know, this cycle of, you know, everyone starts building websites. And then after a while, you get bored of it, you either develop a bigger agency where you hire people, and you become a manager, or you pivot, and you build a product or a service, right. And we all do that. Some people build a course, some people build SaaS, some people build a digital product, right? So basically, it’s like balancing act like, I personally, I don’t do that many website builders now, like last two, three years, because I don’t want to depend on one revenue stream for my business. And I often tell people, like if you want to survive, not to survive slash flourish in the online world, you need to have many revenue streams, it could be very small, it could be just $500 per month, one revenue. But when you have multiple just, they add up in a big way, right? So spend your time building something that you love. And there are so many shiny examples. And I’ll come to the side projects. First, if you’re running an agency like I can give you examples of people I interact with, and they have agency and they build an email list. Like when you have your clients, your website clients, you need to have them in an email list. And there’s something called the Friday email concept. So for example, you have 10 clients that are you know, actively, you know, you’re building websites for them, right? You should send them an email every Friday, telling them what’s the status of their project. Why because it keeps you honest, it keeps both the parties warmed up. And so there’s no ambiguity because Friday is a day when the person will read it, but he won’t take action. And will come back to you on Monday. Right. So that’s, that’s, that’s the key if you are doing for the website clients, now for the clients who have for whom you’ve done the website, but they are still your clients in a way that they will come back for a second project or third project, make sure you have them in a separate email list. And to them, you got to share online updates, online updates that would be relevant to them. Like I can, I can give you an example. Like, recently WordPress did that auto-updates thing, right? So just imagine, you have like 50 clients in an email list and you send them an email, which is not on your care plans, and you send them hey, what this is gonna auto-update your website, and it might break. So be careful about that. And our friends who got converted those clients from not being on care plan to be on care plan because they got scared of not just scared, but they got worried about like, my site will break. So now it’s the time to get on with the care plan. Because you know, how a care plan works? Usually, clients are like, “No, I wouldn’t do it myself”. We all are superhumans, Superman’s, and Spider-Man. So they don’t want to pay for it. But when the building falls, everything falls. Right. So this is not just your, it’s like, it’s not a scare tactic. It’s also you’re sharing knowledge with them, right? Like, for example, you have that said clients, and you’re telling them, hey, courses are getting bigger, you need to advise your people, you might get another add on a project where there is a site and person wants to build an e-commerce site and because they want to teach their employees in their company, right? So it’s all about because you got to be a broadcast medium because until unless you don’t tell something to someone, how would they know about it? Right? So email marketing would be a broadcast medium for your website clients who are active, do a Friday email with them who are not active, do a regular email sharing the basic You know what, not just WordPress Don’t be too technical with those people just share the online you know, changes like Zoom is getting popular. There are many alternatives to Zoom, we can help you set up the online conference center. Is this an add on service? and you will get an out and business with that. Now that’s one part of it if you’re strictly in agency mode, like, I was in that mode for a few years, but now I’m speaking not in agency mode because I also work with other agencies. Because personally, I don’t like talking to clients. So don’t take that personally. But that’s I prefer to do technical stuff. That’s my comfort zone. So if you come out of your agency’s zone, and you want to build something, you know, extra, that will supplement like, earlier, when I started, like 15, or 18 years back, I started as a blogger, and all my income was dependent on Google via Google AdSense. And I was so scared when some of my friend’s AdSense account got banned. And I said, Man, one day, if my account gets banned, I will be at zero, I will have nothing to you know, make money. And then I went into website design and development, then then I had clients and all that. And you know, when you start an agency, you spend more time chasing clients rather than doing work, right? Because you’re new, you’re learning the process, you don’t know what to price even. So how many zeros you need to add, to make sense of value pricing, there are so many teachers online, right? So you get clouded with a lot of things, because the thing a person teaches may not be applicable to you, you have to find your own path in the online world. So you start an agency. And then the other, you know, creepy part is like earlier, I was dependent on Google. Now I depended on five people who run a company and once their company goes bust, guess what, man? I’m gonna go bust. So then you go to the next step. Right? Those five people are good enough right now you need some other revenue source. And how I did it. I think the first thing I did was to build a niche site called probeaver.com. I think you’re familiar with it. And that I didn’t do to make money, to be honest. And I said like, I’ve been using Beaver Builder for a lot for so many years now. And let’s share because people ask me questions about Beaver Builder. And I thought, why not? write the answer on a blog post rather than you know me, telling them in a messenger and all that. So I made that website, and I started getting traffic. So I started putting affiliate links on it. And guess what I was a big failure at affiliate marketing. Before that, I did try affiliate marketing. And it was a big zero for me because I was doing affiliate marketing how affiliate marketers teach you, which is to specifically build a product for affiliate marketing and then do it, man, but that’s like a robotic thing now probably will happen from the heart. So when you build something from heart and passion, that connection is there, like with your audience as well. So, affiliate marketing work. Then I did an Ebook, I did a free course that was used to build an email list. Obviously, I had, you know, I told you about the natural process and not so natural process. So I built actually only almost three, four email lists there. One was like, the natural industry, this was just 800 people. And guess what they were spending the more money, 800 people, the unnatural link was almost like 3-4000, which was like courses, ebooks, and all that stuff. And that was like, sort of a dead email list. So there’s a hint, yeah, that was a dead email. So affiliate marketing, I learned affiliate marketing with it, I learned how to make horses with it. I learned that because I’ve never done it, obviously, you can search and you know, you can, obviously, you won’t be perfect, my first course never took off because it didn’t take off. Because I thought I’m gonna make a very big $2,000 course. But guess what? That’s like flying to hide when you don’t have ink. So it was a failure. But I went to the drawing board, I made a smaller course, which was really good because I launched it. And guess what, within the next four hours of launching, I made 1500 dollars. And I said, man,., this works.

Jan Koch  28:54

And I think if you’re seeing these small wins in your agency, and just knowing that you don’t need to strive for that 10k email list that takes so much pressure off your shoulders as well because you’re comparing yourself to these big marketers necessarily the affiliate marketers, they always claim that you need to have like 25,000 people on your email list to make a significant income and stuff like that. And I find it’s a really refreshing perspective that you are giving us here that 800 people 500 people can be plenty to make money from an email. 

Davinder Singh Kainth  29:27

And it depends like those 800 people were not beginners, those 800 people were people who were running agencies, which were profitable. So when a person is running an agency, which is profitable, and you tell them hey, this is a tool that will help you in your agency, they will be more than happy to buy it right. And when you come to the $10,000 and $25,000 thing, you know, these marketers said because they got to sell their course right? Now. You need to have a shiny wrapping paper to blind people and get their credit card info right. And that’s how the online thing works, right? Again, you can do any amount of courses, you can spend any amount of money on training. But the real training happens when you actually do the work, and you have to do it, you have to get down and dirty and not just talk. I see a lot of people just talk about which email marketing tool should I use, guess what it’s not relevant, because all those top-end email marketing tools that have all kinds of features, firstly, you won’t understand those features. Secondly, you won’t have even the need for those features, at least for one or two years, when you’re beginning with doing email marketing. And thirdly, you just gonna lose money and say, oh, email marketing doesn’t work. I just lost money, right?

Jan Koch  30:42

Yeah, that’s so true. And you’re it’s also super easy to waste like weeks on writing emails that don’t convert and that don’t get anywhere if you don’t know how to build that connection. Or if you are talking to that dead email list, as you said, then there’s no point in even spending the time to trying to revive that email list because it just, you’re riding a dead horse. At that point essentially. What I would love to know is how do you stay so on top of stuff like you have, you have a lot of things going on, as do the people watching this conversation? How can we make time for writing emails, that’s something I struggle with myself, actually, it said, I would love to send out a weekly email. And I’ve scheduled it in my calendar to write it every weekend. And then the weekend comes and I don’t write it.

Davinder Singh Kainth  31:31

Okay, so it’s not that difficult if you enjoy the process. Firstly, you know how to organize the content. Right? the content that you’re going to write, like, you need to have bullet points on things that you want to write, right? And when you talk to people, how do you organize, they will tell you 10, fancy tools, use notion use this, I’m not saying they’re bad tools or something, they are good for certain things. But you know what, I’m a dead simple person. And I use things that are always on my desktop. So I write how many I write as of now I’m writing three emails regularly per week. So what I have it, my Gmail is always open in my Firefox, and I do all my website work in Google Chrome. So my browsers are different. So Gmail is always logged in. So what I do is, I have a draft email for every email newsletter that I send, right? And it’s like Probeaver, Smart Web Creators and all that stuff. So I’ve written it in capitals. So this draft email is just for me. So whenever I discover because you read a lot of things online, right, so whether I’m on my phone, or I’m on the desktop, whenever I discover something that is worth sharing, I just copy the URL, and paste it in the draft email, because my email is also there on my phone. So copy pasting is easy. So by the end of the week, I already have content that I have to write about, I mean, the main points. So because the problem happens is when you start writing an email, and you’re blank, what to write about it, right? This is the main problem. But over the week, as from Monday to you know, Thursday, because those are the more activities. So I read a lot, I interact again, you need to be a good listener to be a good speaker, just like you need to be a good consumer to be a good producer, right? So I consume a lot, and I interact a lot. You know, I’m very active on Facebook, and some people say it’s a waste of time. But guess what, I’m not on the Facebook feed, or obviously, I’ll say happy birthday people and all that stuff. But I’m mostly in my Facebook group. And other there are so many other Facebook group as well, where I interact regularly because it’s not I have any, you know, the intention of being good with someone, it’s just I’m learning also, because, again, learning should never stop. Once you get into a certain level, you shouldn’t think oh, I’m not gonna reply here. It doesn’t fit my standard and whatever. There are people who think that way. But I’m not that rare. Actually, you tend to learn more from beginners than from gurus, let me tell you, and I love it. And I had one Facebook group, I now have another Facebook group, which is basically targeted at beginners. And I love to talk to them as a friend, not as a mentor or a teacher or anything of that sort because I don’t consider myself that. And I tend to learn a lot. So during these periods, I just copy those links and put them in the right draft email. So at the end of the week, I just copy those, open those links in my browser and just draft an email around it. It is so simple process.  It’s really smart. It’s really smart. And I’m just while you were explaining that I’m doing the same in my notepad editor, I tend to keep notes on my desktop too, but in a simple notepad editor, and I just jot down some notes from what you were sharing in this conversation. So that I can send an email. I actually have a very, a notepad file with it on my desktop which has in capitals To do where you know, whenever I have something important to do instead of, you know, a reminder on the phone and all I just copy-paste that link or write in caps at the top. So anything that is a top of that file has to be done first. So, I’m pretty, you know, I know there are tools that will save you time. But guess what? This kind of setup saves me time. And because I don’t have to spend time learning new tools. And secondly, these things are always there on my desktop or on my phone, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Right? So in then, because I’m not going to hire someone to write an email list email letter newsletter for me. So it’s me only me. So I, the setup should work for me, even for a cause you know, what people say you have to use people make all kinds of you know, they use tools like them sickle and make all kinds of flowchart diagrams to build a course index, you know, I have a very dead-simple way to do that. I don’t make any diagrams, I just open a notepad file and start writing the process. The steps that say, for example, there’s a course on Beaver Builder, right? So how would a user who wants to learn Beaver Builder will start? So first step, whatever is the start, step one, step two, step three, I just write all the steps. And then it’s simple. You just have to organize those steps into different sections. And then I use Google Excel and Google Sheets. Because I’m all Google. I don’t use anything other than obviously, their friends who showed me Airtable and Notion. It’s good, it fancy. But guess what, I don’t have time to learn those things. Because for me, my business is running fine in Notepad and Gmail, so why not? That is a super important point, I really want to drive this home for the people watching this is you need to do what works. And you cannot afford to have FOMO and all these shiny tools that come overnight. I am as guilty of this as everybody possibly. But it’s something I see from most high achievers that I’m talking to is they have the simple tools they have a pen and paper next to the keyboard so they can jot down ideas they have a notepad file opened where they jot down stuff. They hack their way into the tools they have to make them do what they need to do rather than spending a week learning how air table works. Yeah, Exactly. And you need to spend time where it’s important like even for you know building courses like I build LMS website for my clients on WordPress but for my own website on for my own courses, I don’t use WordPress. I use Teachable, why? It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, is just I don’t have time to manage updates, security, payments. And because teachable handles everything for me, I just get one check end of the month, which is my earning because they pay my affiliates they pay you the tax this that all kinds of things that I don’t have to manage. So it saves me time. Yes, I have to spend a little more but that spending more actually saves me more time. So why not? So a tool, you know, we always say you know, this is the best tool best is just an opinion, it’s not a fact, best for you could be different best for me could be different. So, find the best tool for you not for someone else, right?

Jan Koch  38:19

Yeah, 100%. And I think that’s all connecting back to where we started at the beginning is that you need to be passionate about what you’re doing so you know, in what direction you are going. And then it’s quite easy to reengage and to reinvent the wheel from the back if you will. And you go through the process backward, you see what do I want to achieve with that email list and then you re-engineer what every email needs to do and how you need to structure the emails and what type of calls to actions you need to bring into and what type of content you need in the email. And then you can build your toolkit around that rather than saying oh I have Active Campaign what do I do with Active Campaign?

Davinder Singh Kainth  39:07

Yeah, because even these tools email marketing tools are you know the thing that people spend so much time like even I have done those mistakes. We all do it like everyone doesn’t need ConvertKit everyone doesn’t need Active Campaign. And guess what? Everyone doesn’t need MailChimp either, right? It depends on what you are comfortable with. If you’re starting up MailChimp is good enough, they deliver it fine. They work fine. They also have fancy features if you want to use it. Like I started with MailChimp. I still have my older email list on MailChimp and it works fine. The delivery is good. The good thing about MailChimp is whatever it offers. It works like charm, there’s nothing broken in their system. And now most of my newer email lists are on mailer light. And I also handle a lot of clients who have their email list on Active Campaign. Now why they’re on Active Campaign because they need that kind of automation like for me for example my courses on teachable, so teachable integrates directly with, you know, MailChimp and ConvertKit. So you can easily and you can also do the Zapier thing, but with, but with those, you know, courses and students, they have their setup on WordPress. And it’s easier to talk to Active Campaign with WordPress because they need all kinds of fancy jazz, well, I say fancy jazz, but it’s useful for them like, like, for example, lifter LMS, you can put a course with LifterLMS and connect to Active Campaign via WP Fusion. And it’s like a dream, you know, set up because, for example, if a person signs up for a course, and he buys it, and he opens a course, once the moment he opens the course he’s tagged as course opened and the tag goes automatically to Active Campaign. So when he opens a lesson number one, he’s entered a lesson number one, so you can actually see everything in your email marketing system. So do you need that kind of fancy jazz? If you need to Go for it. But this comes at the end tail of your journey. So if you’re starting up, just focus on building an honest email list and keep sending them the content and, you know, do the basic thing, right. Because again, you need to know your basic foundation has to be there to build a fancy porch or balcony.

Jan Koch  41:17

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. And I think it’s a fantastic way to wrap this conversation up because we’re already at the end of the time block that we scheduled for that and I do want to be respectful of your time. Davinder, thank you so much for coming on. And please let us know how people can get in touch with you.

Davinder Singh Kainth  41:35

You can follow Idavinder, I as in iPhone followed by Davinder. You can find Idavinder on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or you can visit a few of my websites. Smart webcreators.com, the WP Weekly. I’ve got so many so I’m not gonna spam you so you can just go to idavinder.com it’s got a boring landing page there. So…

Jan Koch  42:01

I love it. Thank you so much, Davinder.

Davinder Singh Kainth  42:04

You’re welcome. Bye-bye.