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Hey,

I’ve been writing this newsletter for the last 17 months.

Have written 71 editions.

However, I felt keeping the value only for my newsletter subscribers wasn’t justified. More people should know about the Dark Chocolate and its value.

That’s why I started Dark Chocolate podcast as well.

And I recently worked with my email marketing coach.

So, I didn’t need to find anyone better to start the podcast.

In this edition, I will share her learnings with you in a question and answer format.

So, say hi to the first guest of Dark Chocolate podcast…

Samidha Singh

I will directly jump to the questions and answers.

1. Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what led you into email marketing?

So I started doing all the marketing four years back. I was working with a client and doing everything inside their company, like everything related to digital marketing. There, I was running ads.

I was handling their social accounts, commenting on posts, and doing all that stuff. Then, they told me they needed to create a lead magnet and an email sequence for people coming from ads. They wanted to nurture these leads and all that. The problem was, I had no idea how to do it, like four years ago. But I only had three days to implement it, so I thought, "Okay, I'll do it." I didn't want to show them I had no clue.

At that time, I had just come across Copywriting Secrets after hearing that it was one of the greatest books on copywriting, recommended by Russell Brunson. Russell had a huge impact on me back then. So, I read the book in three days and started applying what I learned to the email sequence I was creating for the client. I completed the sequence in three days, and the client loved it. We started nurturing people through the ads, and we got some good results. We made some sales, I don't remember the exact number, but it was enough to get the client excited.

That experience showed me the power of email marketing, and it felt like something I could really do. Email is a simple channel that targets the right audience, and it worked wonders for us.

If you go and run ads and all that is, it targets these cold audiences and people who don't know you, so it's difficult to get those people to buy stuff from you and get those people inside your world. But those who come inside your world, either with a lead market or anything like if you're selling an e-commerce product, then discounts or something, they're basically raising their hands and saying send me more information, so they've given their consent.

And if you're sending emails to them, it's an inviting thing. Welcome sequences always work better than any other part of the email marketing strategy, so that's why emails work a lot better because it’s a warm channel. And if you send an email with a strategic approach, you'll convert a lot of people into clients, and even if you don't convert, you'll engage them.

Now in my email list, I don't have anything to sell, so I'm just engaging people and when I do have something to sell, I can you know pitch that product and I'm sure people would buy it because they have a good relationship with me. So that marketing has grown really rapidly; it's still so much in demand right now because a lot of businesses still don't do email marketing, they're just doing ads and all that's just to acquire people. But they're not doing anything to retain them and to do something to keep them top of mind for these people so when it's the right time for them, they come to you.

So that's a missed opportunity right now which I'm trying to fill in and I'm teaching other people, other email marketers who also can come in to do email marketing, learn email marketing and bring results to their clients because even if you write one email and it draws some sales like I write one email for $250 and if it gave my client $1000 of sales, it's completely justified right, so or that's the approach with email marketing.

Plus writing emails doesn't take that much time but the reason is that email is a warm channel, it works. You make a lot of money and your clients make money and then you make money. With just small effort, as you keep writing more and more, you'll get better and your speed becomes really better and it's a win-win for everybody.

2. What’s one mistake you made early on in your email marketing career, and how did you overcome it?

The number one mistake was to niche myself down too much. So I heard all these people saying riches are in the niches and I said okay I'm going to niche myself down to like there are e-commerce brands, I wanted to become an email marketer for e-commerce brands but I thought that everybody is targeting e-commerce but I'm going to a niche down, I'm going to only target health and fitness e-commerce brand.

Even though I hadn’t worked with anybody, I'm like even if e-commerce people come to me, I'd work for them and I'd want to work for them also because I have no clients. But riches are in the niches, I thought, okay, I'm going to niche down and I only specified myself as a health and fitness e-commerce brand and that costed me a lot.

When I niched down myself that was hurting me because I was not able to go after a lot of people that I could have served, plus I've never worked with an e-commerce client, I've never worked with a health and fitness client, also so I didn't even know what to expect there. Because of that, I was missing out on a lot of opportunities.

3. What trends are you most excited about email marketing right now?

I actually don't follow trends. My biggest thing is trends keep coming and going, right? So I don't focus on something that keeps changing. I focus on something that never changes. Emails that resonate with your audience win. That is the fundamental truth, and Gmail, Yahoo, and all the other platforms are optimizing for that only.

So whatever new trends come in, if you focus on them, you will realize that, at the end of the day, all these trends focus on getting more engagement, right? So if you have this fundamental thing in your mind—that I need to get more engagement—whatever you do will help you optimize toward it, right? You're not going to follow trends, but you're going to follow how to get more engagement from your audience. So that's what I keep in my mind.

4. What’s the biggest challenge you face when building an email list, and how do you tackle it?

For my clients, I usually just tell them to create and find one small thing where they can help their customers. So it can be a four-step checklist, it can be a small video. One of my clients is using a case study video where we helped a business make this much money, and this is how we did it. So he is explaining that in a 10-minute video, and we're using that as a lead magnet.

The goal of the lead magnet is that it has to filter in the people who are the right prospects, right? You don't want people who come in and never buy anything from you. Then what's the point? You want to get the people in who are your ideal future customers, right? So if you want to attract e-commerce brands inside your list, you can use a lead magnet like an abandoned cart sequence that works like crazy. That converts a lot of people—converts a good percentage of customers. If you use that as a lead magnet, you know the people who are coming for that lead magnet should have an e-commerce store where they are attracted to this lead magnet, right?

So then you can get them inside your email list, and you can start pitching them more about, you know, how they can get more sales from their email list and all that. So your lead magnet—the biggest challenge is that most people don't understand that the lead magnet has to get people that will get them ideal clients.

Actually, I did the same mistake also. I did this 21-day series. It helped me get a lot of good people, but it also helped me get people who were just looking for the free thing. So they started talking about, "Can you do this for free? Can you do that for free? I'm looking for this; I'm looking for that." And they don't respect your time and all that.

So you don't want to attract freeloaders. You want to attract people who can be your potential trust. So that's why it's important.

5. What are your top 3 tips for increasing email open rates?

Okay, open rates are usually about tighter segments and better subject lines. These are the two factors that impact the open rate. If you're using a good subject line—a curiosity-based subject line that opens a loop in people's minds—just like the brain wants answers.

If you watch suspense movies or read suspense books, why do they work? Because people are hooked. People want to know, "Who killed this person?" "What happens next?" and all that, right? So it opens a loop in the brain that people want to close. So I like to open a loop in the subject line.

Start with a question that people are asking themselves. So Robert Collier said, "Meet people where they are." Start a conversation that people are already having in their minds.

So let's say someone is asking, "How do I get my first client?" and this is a question they keep thinking about. And I write an email like, "Here’s how you can get your first client," and put how to get your first client in quotation marks. They’ll think, "Maybe this is an email for me," right? So it gets opened.

Curiosity-based subject lines.

And if you use the person’s name—just the name and something around their name—that also gets a lot of attention. So those are great ways.

Plus, you need to have title segmentation. Don’t send your email to everybody. Send it to a small group of audiences who are actually engaging—like 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day segments. Don’t go beyond 90 days because they’re not interested.

You use a good subject line for this segment, and you send them—there's a high chance that these people are going to open your email. So that’s the trick.

6. How to master the art of Email Copywriting?

You have to make sure you're entertaining your audience. Nobody wants to get boring content inside their emails, right? TikTok is just a step away. Instagram is just a click away. They can watch cat videos instead of reading your email, right? So you're literally competing with it.

You’ve to entertain as well as provide value to them. So, it’s an art of storytelling. You can use a problem-agitation-solution approach. Show them a problem like paying taxes and then agitate it a bit, and then give them your solution like "Hey, here’s the link. Buy it."

So when you talk about a problem that's keeping them awake at night, and create a story around it, you get people hooked in. Then you give a solution—it usually helps you get more sales.

With email copywriting, that's what you need to do more. You have to practice a lot.

So I would recommend reading a lot of emails from big newsletter people—Chris Orzechowski, Alan Drago, Kevin Rogers, and all these people. If you read their emails, you’ll understand what they’re doing.

And what goes in, comes out. Whatever you feed your mind with is what you’ll write.

7. Can you share a case study or example of an email campaign that delivered unexpected results?

So I wrote a testimonial email for a client and that got a lot of cold emails, and lots of call bookings. So when I say call booking, it's not cold email or something, but they had an email list of people and they wanted to get more call bookings from there so they can sell their coaching program.

So I wrote a testimonial email okay, that “This client of ours, they joined our coaching program and this is the result they achieved, do you want similar results, click here to book your call.” So this actually worked really well for us and this testimonial email got us a lot of call bookings, so that was my first time that I realized ok wow, testimonial emails sell really well. Every time I wrote a testimonial email for them, it outperformed all the other emails that we wrote.

Then some story-telling emails worked well for us, so I asked my client to share their stories with me, and then I converted these stories into emails. We got a lot of call bookings there, so story-based emails work.

8. What tools or software do you use for email marketing?

Claude is a great tool. It's an AI which actually writes really good copy, so I've trained it like if you don't train it it's not going to work. I've trained it a lot like whatever previous emails I write for a client I put it on Claude and I ask it to match the copy tone and voice and the structure and format and all that I've done and then I prompt it to write the next email and it gives me a boilerplate which I have to work on so it's a very amazing tool to save some time.

Then Transcript LOL. It helps you take an audio content, video content and whatever it is and convert it into text. Then I use Notta. Whenever someone’s speaking something and I cannot download the whole thing, but I want to just convert a little bit of that into text, so I use Notta and it lets me convert just minutes of if I'm speaking something into text so it’s also helpful.

9. Where do you see the future of email marketing?

I see that email is going to grow a lot because there is a huge gap today, especially in India, where a lot of businesses are using WhatsApp marketing but not email marketing.

It's outside of India too but it's filling up, so I think that a lot of new businesses that are coming up now, they would need a lot of help with email marketing. And AI has made it super super easy to start a new business. If they are going to start, they are going to purchase a lot of ads and on social media, they are going to do a lot of social media content to get more eye balls but once they get in like this is something that everybody does but email is something that most people forget so as this demand is going up the price is going to go up again right because more people are bidding for the same eye balls.

So email is something that is going to be mandatory. Right now, it's not mandatory for most businesses, they're like okay, LinkedIn is giving me good reach so I'll stay here and y'all know all that, but they realize that LinkedIn reach will also go down with time. So email marketing is going to be life-saving for a lot of businesses.

10. For newcomers in email marketing, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to help them stand out?

The number one advice I'd give them is always have good communication with your clients so a lot of people who do good work, but they don't have good communication with their clients. Robert Allen told me, he's my mentor, and he told me when you work with the client, the number one reason they leave you is the communication. So I think that’s a really big thing.

Even if your emails are amazing, you need to be good at communicating with clients. Plus, you need to be good at strategy.

So if you don't have a strategic mindset—okay, how do I use email profitably?—you're going to get fired. Copy on its own doesn’t bring results. It brings results when you couple it with a strategy.

So strategic mindset like teaching yourself how to bring results to clients, not just writing cute, clever copy but bringing in results, is very, very important.

Key takeaways

After taking the interview, here are 3 key takeaways:

1. Send more outreach and know them better before pitching

2. You need to focus on the strategy part, not just the copywriting part.

3. Read more emails and write emails every day to create better.

Thanks for reading the 72nd edition of Dark Chocolate.

So I will see you the next week at 10:00 AM sharp.

Till then, byeeee.

Your “email guy” Anirban.

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