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Imagine waking up tomorrow to find that your entire social media following has vanished! What’s your backup plan?
In this episode, Sharran reveals why your email list is the only asset that truly belongs to you and how to nurture it for lasting success. He reveals the ten critical mistakes influencers make in email marketing and how to fix them to build their Influencer Email Machine. These are actionable lessons Sharran has learned from writing millions of emails.
Whether you’re just starting or have an established email list, this episode is packed with practical advice used by top influencers like Alex Hormozi. Tune in and discover how to optimize your email marketing for maximum effectiveness.
“You don’t write better emails until you have more people reading, but you don’t get more people to read until your emails are better–that’s the paradox.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:47 – Why losing your email list is a dreadful thing
02:34 – The only platform that slows the scroll
04:48 – How to build trust through email cadence
06:45 – The dangers of testing the gods of deliverability
09:24 – Writing for readability: Big paragraphs = big drop-offs
11:54 – You don’t need to write an essay–just get your point across
13:14 – One line, one link: The secret to better click-through rates
14:25 – Understanding the inbox battlefield and how to stand out
16:30 – Why most people don’t like emails
18:39 – Treating email like music: Using formatting for easier reading
20:18 – The paradox: The bigger your email list, the better you’ll write
22:10 – Recap: Influencer Email Machine
Resources:
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And I got a confession. If I lost my email list, I’d be scared, deathly scared, not disappointed. Scared and I, I know this because it is the only channel I truly own. ’cause social and everything else can be taken away from me. And, uh, I’ve shared this story with so many of the influencers that I advise and the founders that we’ve invested in.
[00:00:23] And I pulled out the 10 biggest learnings there. Ultra tactical, and I guarantee you you can use two, three, or four of these right now. So I break down for you step by step, what I’m calling the influencer email machine. These are the 10 best lessons that I’ve learned, sharing this with influencers and media personalities, and also by sending a million emails a month.
[00:00:42] And it all starts right now.
[00:00:50] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this, where [00:01:00] can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:13] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:26] All right. Today I’m gonna take you behind the scenes and tell you about what I’ve taught and shared with the world’s top creators, influencers about building an email system that actually works for them. Now, these are amazing entrepreneurs. They do amazing things, but I was able to help share. Install something in their lives and businesses, which I’m gonna share it with you exactly what that is today.
[00:01:46] So, uh, here’s the big idea. If I lost my email list today, I honestly would be scared. I would not be disappointed. I would be scared because it’s the only channel that I truly own, that you truly own. And you probably know that email matters. You probably know that [00:02:00] most creators and entrepreneurs treat it like a newsletter type slide, hustle it.
[00:02:05] That’s a mistake. So let me, in this episode, walk you through exactly what I shared with top creators like my friend Alex and Rosie, and how I personally write and send over a million emails a month. So no fluff, no fake stats. These are 10 real lessons from building what I’m calling the email, uh, the influencer email machine.
[00:02:27] And so here we go. Right? And by the way, at the end, I will give you all of this, uh, as well. So let’s actually jump right into it. I’ll start with lesson number one. Lesson number one is this. Email is the only platform that slows the scroll. Now, think about this, right? Social, uh, media is like a passive kind of experience.
[00:02:46] You’re sitting there, you’re wanting to be entertained. Uh, maybe you’re in line, maybe you just. Wanting to take a break from, uh, what you’re working on. You’re scrolling on your phone, and people just scroll until they stop. Now, think about it for a second. They, [00:03:00] there’s only two reasons that you stop scrolling.
[00:03:02] You keep scrolling until something catches your attention and you stop scrolling or you keep scrolling and you stop when you have to. Be done and have to switch apps or you got another notification or whatever. There is no other time that you stop scrolling and, but, but if you think about email, email forces, uh, us to make a decision, it forces us to look at the email.
[00:03:24] It says from Sharran Srivatsaa, and it says, now you have to make a choice. Do I open it? Do I delete it? Do I ignore it? Do I act on it? Do I just leave it be. Email forces a decision, which means email slows the scroll. You have to act on each, each and every single decision. That’s why every subject line is triage if you think about it, right?
[00:03:45] If you just think about that, the slowing the scroll makes makes it really interesting. Now, I’ll give you the, the bigger lesson around this. A lot of people will do like subject land hacks, et cetera. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I won’t bury the lead. It doesn’t matter if you write a perfect subject line, [00:04:00] all that matters is who the email is coming from.
[00:04:02] So if you have a hundred percent email list with your clients, prospects, sphere of influence, whatever, and you are not sending more email, you’re crazy. Because whether you sent a perfectly curated subject line or whether you wrote, Hey bro, they would still open it because it came from you. They know you, they, they trust you, they care about you.
[00:04:17] So that’s why we’re missing this overall. But the social feeds, you, you, they, they may get lost, they may not see it. The algorithm may. Uh, you know, structure it and not show to them. So I remember this conversation distinctly with Alex and I, uh, told him, I said, Hey, you don’t have to like email, you just have to respect what it does, right?
[00:04:34] Because email out will out convert everything else that you’re doing combined. That’s exactly what I told him, and I remember that conversation and now he’s crushing it. So that’s lesson number one is email slows to scroll. Here’s lesson number two, which is the cadence is what creates the trust. The cadence creates a trust.
[00:04:53] So, um, I once remember this, I sent an email when I was in Paris with a broken [00:05:00] hand. Why? Because I don’t miss my cadence. I write three emails a week. It’s not magic, it’s just momentum. It’s just cadence. It’s just commitment to yourself. So I will tell you how I do it, and so maybe you can consider something like this and I’ll tell you a couple things around it.
[00:05:17] So I use a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday process on. Tuesday I generally provide, I, I do links to my media. My new podcast episode comes out on Tuesdays. Uh, I use that to, you know, kind of share and promote what’s coming. On Thursdays, I actually teach something and have a story based teaching thing. And on Saturday, uh, I generally do what I call the CEO playbook.
[00:05:39] And I then build around a, you know, a playbook way because I know that people have a little bit more time to read on the weekend. So I, I kind of give a digest version of something that people can go implement. That is my cadence. Now you can do whatever cadence you want. But most people say, well, Sharan, don’t you think that’s too many times?
[00:05:54] Well, it’s not. I’ve done one email a week, I’ve done two a week, I’ve done seven days a week. I [00:06:00] saw about a, you know, I saw that between seven a week compared to three to four a week, there’s not that much change and in all the results. So I’ve stuck to three to four a week now. It was, it’s hard to just go from zero to three a week.
[00:06:16] So I would build up, I would go one a week. Generally, probably it’d start with the deal of the week, and then I would add a second one, which is a personal email. Then I’d start third one, which is maybe a weekend email, and then I would just start to rotate in and out. You would grow to a three times a week cadence over time, but you have to agree to this if the quality is not there, like you should not write email at all.
[00:06:38] So just FYI on that, right? So number two, cadence is what creates the trust. Alright? Number three. This is an important one. I wrote down this phrase and I said, don’t test the gods of deliverability. Alright? Don’t test the gods of deliverability and all that it means is that you are not smarter than the email servers and the email engineers at Gmail.
[00:06:58] If your email looks [00:07:00] like a brochure or looks like a beautifully designed marketing thing, it’s going to the promotion step, or worse, it’s going to spam. I have seen real estate agents, mortgage brokers, coaches, consultants, all of them like build these beautiful branded things that you stand. Now, it may work, uh, if you have deep, deep, deep connection with your audience, the only people that it works for, and the email filters know about this.
[00:07:24] Is for e-commerce brands. Like if, uh, you’re, you know, if you get something from Banana Republic or something like that, that makes sense that there is a picture to sell a product. And now with ai, these email systems understand that. But if you’re writing a, you know, beautifully designed email newsletter, you are missing the point.
[00:07:40] I’m telling you, you’re testing the gods of deliverability. I’ll tell you exactly what I do, and I’ve learned this over time. I send over a million emails a month every time my replies drop. Here what I’m saying, not open rates, not click through rates. Every time my replies drop, I get hundreds and hundreds of replies per message that I send, but every time my [00:08:00] replies drop, I go to full plain text.
[00:08:02] Full plain text and they shoot right back up. And when I say full plain text, I mean full plain text, not HTML, plain text, full, raw, plain text because that cuts through all the clutter and it makes the Gmail systems, the Hotmail systems, the uh, Microsoft online systems, whatever, start to feel like, oh, there’s nothing for Sharran to infiltrate our, our email system with phishing or anything like that.
[00:08:25] We should show this text to the reader. I’ll give you the one really simple rule that I like to use. One sender. One link, no images, no fluff, pure text, one sender, one link. No images. Pure, no, no fluff, pure text. That’s what will land, and I’ve found that that’s what lands the best. So, but please don’t test the gods of deliverability.
[00:08:48] For example, if your deliverability is down, you should write an all text email and just refrain. What? What do you want? At the end of the day, you want ’em to read what you sent, right? Why you including everything else. Now I play around with it sometimes. Now, [00:09:00] as soon as your open rates go above 40%, start playing around with graphics, right?
[00:09:04] When I, I only started playing around, like adding one header graphic or one graphic to my email after my open rates were over 50% and now they’re significantly higher than that. But I had to get it over that. Only then I didn’t want to crush my email deliverability. So that was lesson number three.
[00:09:21] Here’s lesson number four. Uh, you may, you may like this, by the way. Write for the eyes, not for the eagle. Alright. People read on their phones. Just know that people read most email on their phones. Big paragraphs are gonna get a big drop off when you get in. Uh uh, when you get a document on your phone, it’s just like instantly your heart just sinks.
[00:09:40] It’s like, oh man, I have to sit and read this. You have to scan with your eyes. Big paragraphs equals big drop-offs. So. Think about this, write like music and see if I, see if you can keep up with me on this one short line, a longer line, a break, a bullet, a punchline. So it goes like this, ba ba, ba ba. [00:10:00] If so, it’s, it’s, you want some form of, I know how tone deaf am I, right?
[00:10:05] So it’s crazy. I’m really tone deaf by the way. Uh, as my, as my wife says, you know, you can’t have all the talents in one spot. One spot. Sorry, I just had to say that it was so, it at least, you know, I’m not reading a script. So you gotta write mu write, uh, email, like you’re writing music, like a short line, a longer line, a break, a short line, a bullet, a punchline, something like that.
[00:10:27] So it goes. And so as you see the screen. It, you’ll see these jagged edges towards the end, and that’s how you want email written. ’cause it’s easier for, um, like the mind and the eyes can literally take a picture, a snapshot of the entire sentence, as opposed to having to read. You want to make the readability easy.
[00:10:48] That’s why I like to say write for the eyes, not for the ego. So you wanna format it like just a text message. You don’t wanna format it like a term paper. So when you see a text message, you don’t read the text [00:11:00] message you. How do we send text messages? You’re like, Hey, next message. What are you up to?
[00:11:04] Next message. You wanna go to dinner? Hey, what about, you know, teki or Next Message Taco Bell. You see that’s five messages. That’s how you want to write email because that’s how people read. And the reason I’m suggesting to write email like that is because you are writing in the realm of how people already read text messages.
[00:11:23] You’re writing the realm of social media writing the uh, realm of DM writing in the realm of chat. Now clearly. I’m not suggesting you do that for a professional, you know, really professional email. But, uh, most of the emails that we’re sending from a marketing basis, et cetera, we just wanna get communication across.
[00:11:39] If you get my emails, you can over index on our prioritized readability and formatting and writing for the eyes, then for the ego. And that’s what’s really helpful. That’s what I get. A lot of responses. That’s number four. Here’s number five. Please don’t forget this from a copy perspective, you don’t need to write a lot.
[00:11:55] You just need to get your point across. Meaning every sentence should sell the next [00:12:00] sentence, right? Most people write like they are creating an essay. You’re not writing an essay. You’re earning attention in the process, and you’re earning attention one sentence at a time. That’s the idea. So all the thinking should be around asking this one big question.
[00:12:16] Say if I stopped right here, what would the reader be thinking? So if I stopped, so you’re writing the sentence and you’re like, okay, if I just stopped right here and I didn’t go to the next sentence, what would the reader be thinking? Whatever they’re thinking, that’s what your next sentence is. And you say, if I stop right here, what would the reader be thinking?
[00:12:32] Whatever they’re thinking, that should be your next sentence, because then you make it easy for them cognitively to keep up with you. That’s why once you figure out this writing style, they’ll, the reader will feel like they’ve been with you. They casually understand you. They, they, they feel like they’re part of your life in it in some way.
[00:12:47] And it’s not copywriting. It’s writing. That’s how the world works right now. It’s not like Shakespeare anymore. I’m not writing flowery poetry. What I’m writing is I’m writing what’s in your mind, [00:13:00] and I’m trying to anticipate that so that the next sentence is exactly what the, the is is being sold in the previous sentence.
[00:13:07] Right? That’s really important. So most people write like they’re submitting essay. Please don’t do that. Here is lesson number six. Um, I have noticed that the best email that can be written is. One line. One link. That’s it. One line, one link. So, so I will tell you my, my, like my highest click, click email of the year.
[00:13:29] Highest click email of the year was this. I wrote typing’s hard right now, broke my hand, so I recorded a video instead. Watch it here. Like, that’s it. That was my entire email. Typing’s hard right now, broke my hand, so I recorded a video instead. Watch it here. The, it was three times the average Click. Why?
[00:13:49] Because it was super simple. It was really honest, and it was only one thing to do. The one thing to do was click here to watch it. So the one line, one sentence, one link, that’s all it takes [00:14:00] because what people want to be directed to do something really specific, the more you give them that people always want to be led.
[00:14:07] They want to be guided to what to do next. People want to know what’s next. They don’t want to, they don’t want you to leave them guessing, and that’s a really, really kind of important thing. So know, know that in the process because when you know that in the process, you’re not trying to sell them something, you know exactly what to do next.
[00:14:22] Right? Here’s number seven. Your inbox is a battlefield. All right. Your inbox is war. People don’t read email. Say again. People don’t quote read email. People only scan email, and they don’t just scan email for information. They scan email like it’s a threat. When they wake up in the morning and they have 37 messages, they’re scanning email to see which one they’re irritated by, which one is spam, which one is more, uh, a, a newsletter that they have not unsubscribed to.
[00:14:55] They, they’re, people are scanning it like it’s a threat. You survive, you [00:15:00] thrive. You cut to the clutter by being clear, by being fast and being not annoying. That’s the important part. So before you hit send on your email, ask this, do I want please, please, please ask this. You should say, do I wanna click a reply, a save or a share?
[00:15:18] That’s it. Say it again. Do you want ’em to click a link? Do you want them to reply to you? Do you want them to save the email or do you want them to share it? And I’ll give you something super easy, right? You know how to get them to click. Literally, you’re like, Hey, just like I, I said to you, right? Typing’s hard right now broke my hand.
[00:15:36] So I recorded a video. Watch it here. I want ’em to click. So I wrote the email for the click. If I want them to reply, literally before I sign off, I’ll say, Hey, when, if you get this, you know, if, if this was, if this resonated with you, can you reply with the word? Great. So I’m guiding them to reply and reducing all cognitive load.
[00:15:55] If I want them to save the email and has important information, literally I start the email with, [00:16:00] you may want to save this email for later, but skim it before you save it. I give them guidance, or if I want them to share it, I, I can be like, Hey, I want you to read this email and I think you’re gonna need to share this with a friend.
[00:16:10] Just tell them, then you only write for that outcome. A lot of people like sit down with a blank screen and figure out what they’re gonna write or the use chat, TPT or whatever. But the point is you’ve got to figure out what you want to have happen because your inbox is a battlefield, right? The everybody’s scanning it like a threat, and if you know exactly why you’re writing, that’s when it really helps.
[00:16:28] All right, here’s number eight. Let me tell you this. Most people don’t like email for two reasons. One, they don’t like email because they either they get a lot of email or they don’t get enough email. Uh, especially if you’re in the services business, if you’re a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, a coach, a consultant in, uh, a, you know, a lawyer, et cetera, you get, you get a ton of email.
[00:16:51] So you think email doesn’t work, it works just fine. You hate email because it hasn’t worked for you yet. I. Say it again. You hate email because it hasn’t [00:17:00] worked for you yet. That’s really simple. People hate what doesn’t give them feedback. Think about that. People hate what doesn’t give them feedback. And email doesn’t give you feedback, but once you get one quote, this changed my life.
[00:17:10] Reply once you get one. This was awesome. Once you get one, this, uh, this made me cry. Once you get one, this hit me hard once you get one. Man. I’m so glad you wrote this. Once you get one, you know that says, this is so creepy. I, I, you read my mind. Once you get one of those, you are hooked for life. It’s like playing golf.
[00:17:26] Once you hit that one shot, you can never quit because you know that you like, think about the scale. You hit one email or you hit send on one email and it goes to like 400 people. How long would it take you to make 400 phone calls? Right. It’s not even like social media on a video. You made a video. You may, no one may even see it, but in this, it is in their inbox.
[00:17:45] They have to see it. That’s how great this is. That’s how I got all the creators that I’ve talked to. I got them obsessed with email. I gave them the play. I got them the results, and suddenly email wasn’t a chore anymore. It was leverage. That’s the cool part. That’s what you want. I. [00:18:00] You hate email right now because it hasn’t worked.
[00:18:01] And the sooner you can get to work, the the more excited you’ll be. And if you don’t send email right now, you gotta send some form of deal of the week. If you’re, you do a deal of the week. If you’re a real estate agent, you do like a strategy of the week. If you’re a mortgage broker, you do a client of the week.
[00:18:14] If you’re a coach, um, you know, one of my friends, my five friends, victim deal, who’s a coach, does a script of the week. One of my friends, uh, Dan, who is a broker, a watch broker, he does a watch of the week. I have a friend who has a pizza store. He does a, he does a pizza of, uh, pizza of the week. And my friend Nick Vees, who’s a, uh, media buyer, runs an ad of the week.
[00:18:32] Once you start that, that’s when you really build a brand around this, right? Here’s lesson number nine. You gotta treat email like it’s music. Now, copywriting is what most people think email is. Copywriting isn’t about being clever. Copywriting is about rhythm. It’s about rhythm. And here is a pro tip that I got from a copywriter.
[00:18:57] His name is Ben Settle. Uh, he talked about the [00:19:00] alternate bullet formatting. So let’s say you have, you know, three bullet, three bullet points in a, in a, in a, in, you’re writing, you know, three sentences with three bullet points. You say, Hey, here are three, uh, three reasons why you should, I don’t know, pike speak, first bullet points, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:19:18] Second bullet point, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Third bullet point, blah, blah, blah, blah. The, he told me that you bold every other bullet. And I wondered why. And I said, but am I, am I not telling them that, that the bolded bullet is more important? He goes, no, you’re just, you’re bolding it, making it visually easier to read.
[00:19:37] That means more people can scan it and finish it. And I realized it because if you go to like Excel. You can click a button and it just, uh, if you, if you ever thought about this, it’ll just change the color of every other row. It alternates rows and it just changes colors. It’s like, does white, gray, white, gray, white, gray, white, gray?
[00:19:54] And it’s significantly easier to read, right? It almost feels like music is like da, [00:20:00] da, da. It’s like a metronome, right? And the rhythm is really important. Small little copywriting tips. If you’re writing an email with like 10 bullet points, uh, or seven bullet points, just bold every other bullet point and it’s significantly easier to read.
[00:20:15] Alright, here is big lesson number 10. I will tell you this, the bigger the list, the better you’re gonna write. I say it again. The bigger the list, the better you’re gonna write. Here’s the like, strange, um, paradox. If you’ll, you don’t write better emails until you have more people reading. I don’t know how else to tell you this.
[00:20:34] You don’t write better emails until you have, you have more people reading. I, Mr. Beast’s current videos with 140 million followers is significantly better than we had 140 followers because he takes the job more seriously. I know that I can’t phone it in on my email. I will, I, I, I will make sure that I send out a quality email every single time.
[00:20:55] Now, it may not be a hundred percent, but it’s, it’s in the 95% range. [00:21:00] I try to put good quality work every single time because you don’t write better emails until you have more people reading, but you don’t get more people to read until your emails are better. So that’s the paradox. So. How do we fix this?
[00:21:13] The pressure that you’re feeling is what makes you sharper. You. You stop rambling, you write for impact. Your reader can feel that, and the only way I will tell you again, the only way to get better is to keep the cadence. You gotta write and write and write. If you’re saying it out three times a week, just make a commitment that you’re gonna write three emails a week for the rest of your life.
[00:21:32] That’s it. End of story. It’s no different than making sure you, you know that you’re going to eat three meals a day. You know that you’re gonna work out every single morning. You know that you’re gonna hug, hug your children before they go to bed. Whatever it is, you’re gonna write three emails. You cannot quit no vacation, non vacation.
[00:21:48] Where I go, what I do, it does not matter if I’m going on a four week trip. I will pre-write 12 emails, four weeks, stem, three emails a week for I I have never missed. In, I don’t know, 12 plus [00:22:00] years, and there’s a reason for that because you get better and you’ve made a commitment that you’ll never take. It is the only thing that I keep the cadence on, which is that’s why it still pays for everything.
[00:22:10] So, uh, lemme give you the very quick share on recap, all the way from the top, just at a, just the high level. Number one email is the only platform that’s slows to scroll. Number two, cadence and cadence alone creates trust. Number three, please don’t test the gods of deliverability. I know you want to do fancy graphics.
[00:22:26] Please don’t do it. Use text as much as you can. Number four, right for the eyes, not for the ego. Number five. Each sentence should sell the next sentence, number six, one line and one link. That’s literally all it takes. Number seven, your inbox is a battlefield. People don’t read the email, they scan it as a threat, so figure out what you want them to do, which is to click, reply, save, or share.
[00:22:48] Number eight, you hate email because it hasn’t worked for you yet. People hate what doesn’t give ’em feedback. So this is your time to actually get the feedback once, and then once you get it, you’ll be hooked forever. Number nine, treat [00:23:00] email like it’s music. If you’re writing bullet points, you know, alternate the bolding number 10.
[00:23:05] The bigger your list, the better you’re gonna write. And I cannot wait for you to have a super big list. Super excited for you to, uh, do that and see, and see and feel and have all the results that, uh, I’ve been really lucky to have in this process. So, hey, do me a favor. If you like this, could you please?
[00:23:22] Take a screenshot of this episode and post it on social. I know this is a pretty tactical one, then I can make more like this for you. So please take a screenshot of this episode or send it to your marketing team, but screenshot and tag me. That way I can make more like this for you and then I will catch you on the next one.
[00:23:43] Hey, it’s Sharran, I have a cool gift for you. Since you like [00:24:00] this podcast, I actually have an ultra super secret private podcast that I make just for my partner companies and the CEOs and influencers that I advise. It’s called 10 K wisdom because I try to wrap 10, 000 worth of value in every single episode in just under 10 minutes.
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