Grow Your Email List and Connect with Your Audience with Allea Grummert

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, we’re welcoming Allea Grummert from Duett back to the podcast. Allea started her email marketing agency in 2018 with the goal of helping content creators take their email marketing to the next level. She’s been an invaluable resource for the Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum teams and is also an industry expert in the Food Blogger Pro community. So you may have seen her around the forum. In this interview, Allea discusses why creators and publishers should prioritize email in their businesses and some of the strategies you can implement to grow your email list. She also shares her perspective on the importance of building human connections through email and how to create a high quality welcome sequence. Hearing her take on how you can relate to your audience on a personal level through a digital medium was really an eye-opener for me. Allea has such a great energy about her, which always makes for a fun interview, so we’re excited for you to dive in. If you enjoy the episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Allea, welcome back to the podcast.

Allea Grummert: Thanks. So good to see you again.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the great joys that I have is being able to say that more now. Welcome back to the podcast. You’re somebody who I get to say that too often, welcome back to the podcast, but at this point it’s a blur because it’s like we work with you within different businesses. You’re on the podcast, you do Food Blogger Pro, live Q&As with the team. So this is more than anything, just another chance for you and I to connect to talk about business and to talk about business specifically within the context of email. It’s one of the really important things that we need to think about as people who are building businesses online, really any business online, it’s important to think of email, but especially in this world, for people who are publishing content, whether it be on a social platform or on a blog, we need to be thinking about email. My guess is this is something that you think about all the time insofar that you’re like five layers deep on it. But if you can go to the first layer of just establishing baseline, why is it important for us to be aware of email and to prioritize email as creators and as publishers?

Allea Grummert: Yeah, baseline, I would say I treat it like business insurance because there are so many other fluctuating parts of having an online business that if you put all of your eggs in one basket, whether it be social media or largely social media or ad costs or whatnot, there’s so many variables when in reality, if you can have your people on an email list, it’s a lot… Yeah, if anything happens, those other platforms, you can send an email and it will go out to all of your thousands of subscribers. And then beyond that, there’s just so much you can leverage when it comes to actually communicating with your list or launching products or boosting revenue with email once you have something created. So at the very minimum, it’s a way for you to actually capture your audience in case you lose them anywhere else.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I think of, you and I have both been in the world of online content for a long time and so have experienced a lot of these kind of ups and downs. I think of the idea of Facebook algorithm changing and we knew people who were really good at directing traffic to a site from a Facebook page, and it’s like overnight Facebook changes something, there’s a flip that’s switched and you can’t reach those people. Same with Pinterest. It wasn’t quite as drastic. It was more of a gradual decline, but maybe you got really good at Pinterest and that goes away over time. And it almost seems like part of what we need to do isn’t necessarily think about how do we take our Instagram following and only direct them to email. But it’s like, how do we at least share that spotlight? And if the spotlight is always on a link, like go to this page, how do we 25% of the time, 50% of the time, start to direct people to our email list as well? Starting there, do you have examples or do you have stories of people that you’ve seen take their social media following or even take their website traffic and start to capture some of that traffic or capture some of that following into an email list? And how do you do that well?

Allea Grummert: Yeah, I was just talking with a client about this today. ManyChat is a tool that a lot of folks use when it comes to capturing Instagram interest. And I know some folks will use ManyChat to direct them back to a blog post. That is the pitch. We are not even getting them on your email list. But I think also incorporating blog posts and stories that promote your freebies or whatever incentive there is for being on your email list to get content or exclusive insights behind the scenes, whatever that you can’t get anywhere else. Getting those freebies out in front of your audience, having them comment on the post, the link to the landing page lands in their inbox. So just incorporating that into your content strategy is one thing. And then of course, capturing your website traffic. It could look like pop-ups. It could look like embedded forms. There are a ton of different strategies. And any good marketer, I will say, just test them all out. See how your audience responds. Some people might not have as good luck with inline forms for one freebie, but maybe it works for another one. You’ve got tools like Grow from Mediavine or the Highlighter from Raptive. I know a lot of folks have been playing around with different ideas with that, but as much as I get hired to look at people’s email marketing strategy and I’m like, I tried finding your freebie and I can’t find it.

Bjork Ostrom: Had to work for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Allea Grummert: I have to work for it. So yeah, sometimes what feels really obvious to us is not really obvious to a user. And yeah, there’s a difference between “spamming” them with all of these things all over your website versus saying, “Hey, I have this really valuable resource, I want to make sure you know about it.” So I don’t know if anybody has hesitations around putting forms on their site, but it’s the best way for you to continue to connect with your subscriber. And if they are the right fit, they’re going to stick around. And so yeah, we would definitely want to get them on your list.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. So I want to play a game. This will be live, first time we’ve ever done this. It’ll be every other, we’ll go three rounds. And so we talked about the technical considerations, ManyChat if you’re using social, we don’t have to go deep into what that looks like. It’s just a back and forth automated bot that could potentially sign people up to an email list and then send them an email, a pop-up on your site, maybe an inline form, meaning you scroll through the content and it’s within your blog post. There’s a prompt to sign up for it. Now let’s talk about, this is what the game is. We’re going to come up with three ideas for you, three ideas for me around what that can actually be. So let’s say that you are a food creator and you have recipes that you publish. Those recipes are free, and that’s your top of funnel. If the next step down is actually getting people to sign up for your email list, a lot of times the incentive has to be stronger than or a more compelling offer than, “Hey, just get all my email updates.” Sometimes that will get people, but the chances are there’s going to be something that converts a little bit better. So I want to have a back and forth to see if we can come up with six examples of what that could actually be. Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?

Allea Grummert: Oh, I have so many ideas. Yeah. One could be video tutorials. I know Ali from Alexander Cooks did this years ago. She has a knife tutorial, how to actually cut up things in the kitchen. And I’m like, oh, that’s so unique. And if I’m going to be following her recipes, I opt in for a three-minute training.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. So you have the recipe and the recipe maybe involves cutting. The opt in can be learn how to do these knife skills, which is adjacent to the piece of content.

Allea Grummert: Right. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. All right. So I’ll do one. My example is, for me, I’m somebody who really likes gear. Just today I searched… I would say once a month, I do the search best gear 2023. And so I think about that in the equivalent of the food world. And one of the things that we often hear from is people who are interested in certain things like, “Hey, what air fryer are you using?” Or what’s PFS? PFA? I don’t know the abbreviation. Chemical free products. So something that’s a complete kitchen gear guide. See all of the different things that I’m using in my kitchen that could also potentially be affiliate if you have Amazon or Target or whatever it might be. So that’s mine. Back to you for your number two.

Allea Grummert: On that, did you know that Amazon’s allowing affiliate links in their emails now?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. For a long time, so there was this, for anybody who is in the world of Amazon Associates and Affiliate, they had this rule around you couldn’t use Amazon affiliate links and emails. Pinch of Yum six years ago, somehow got ahold of somebody at Amazon and we had signed a secondary contract, so we’ve been able to do it for a long time. Everybody’s always like, how did you do this? We’re like, we just randomly came across this person who’s like, here’s what you need to do in order to do it. But it sounds like now they’ve opened that up to essentially anybody can do that.

Allea Grummert: So if you had gated content at all, get this list of Amazon favorites. You couldn’t technically use Amazon Affiliates for those, but you can now.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you know sort of something that you need to do or is it just within your regular account that you can use it?

Allea Grummert: Yup, just your regular account. And somebody was like, “Oh, I didn’t know. Why didn’t they tell us?” I’m like, “Why do you think they didn’t tell us?Because they were like, whatever.” So now-

Bjork Ostrom: What do you mean, they’re like, whatever?

Allea Grummert: I don’t know. They’re just like, are they losing money from it? It just seems like a very corporatey thing. They’re like, we changed the terms and conditions and somebody just happened to read it at the beginning of March, but it’s not being broadcast. So another opt-in, one that could be cool. Like a quiz. What kind of entertainer are you? What kind of appetizers or drinks? Are you a sports enthusiast, sports event type entertainment food person or fancy dinner? That could be really fun. People love learning about themselves.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting in the world of marketers, I have some groups that I’m a part of and one of those groups is marketer people and quizzes is like, oh, that’s like a thing. Getting leads through quizzes. Is there a software that you’d use for that or is it like a tool?

Allea Grummert: Yeah, I was just at Craft & Commerce last week and they had a session put on by Interact.

Bjork Ostrom: Conference. Conference.

Allea Grummert: Yeah, the ConvertKit conference. So Interact, so it’s tryinteract.com, and I sat through this workshop, but if you do tryinteract.com/ai there’s a quiz for finding out what kind of quiz you should do.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, funny.

Allea Grummert: And I was like, this is the most meta thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Instructions. Yeah.

Allea Grummert: And so that was really cool. And it did. It did a really good job. So in my case, it was like, what kind of email marketing person are you? Or how would you best use email marketing? And I was really surprised. I was like, what do they know about my business? I’m such a snowflake, so unique. And then I was like, holy crap, AI figured it out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Okay, I have one. This was actually, I just listened to a podcast recently. It was actually my two worlds colliding because it was, I’m interested in real estate and I listened to the nerdiest podcast in all of podcasts, and it’s called the Tax Smart Real Estate Podcast. Tax Smart Real Estate Investor podcast where they talk about, it’s so bad where they talk about real estate taxes.

Allea Grummert: I wasn’t expecting that.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. So Tax Smart Real Estate podcast. But on that podcast, they had Sam Parr who, he had a huge newsletter called The Hustle that eventually sold to HubSpot. And he came on because he’s starting a new business called Sam’s List, which is Angie’s list for accountants. But anyway, so it was real estate and email and digital business, and they came together and it was my perfect podcast. But he was talking about this third business that he has called Hampton. And one of the things that they had was they did a survey of their members and they had information about those members, and they compiled that up and they offered it as like a PDF download. And I think it was like, what is the average spend, personal spend for these… It’s finance related. How do these people allocate their investments? And it’s like, oh, that’s really intriguing. I want to see how a business owner, what their personal family spend looks like on a month to month basis on average. And I think about in the world of food, I think you could probably do similar things, like do a survey of your audience, and then you could say, see what the average grocery bill is for a Pinch of Yum user. Or what are the top three things, the top three items that people keep in stock in their pantry? Or even from our audience, here’s the top 10 recipes that they consider to be the easiest go-to recipes on a weeknight for their family. What niche and genre are you in? And then how do you get an inside look to scratch that curiosity itch for people around your audience or your people? So that’ll be my second. Do you have a third?

Allea Grummert: I like that. And I want to riff off that too, is that especially when we think… Let’s see. Years ago somebody had said that kind of first party data that you could put out in the world is so unique. That’s not something that AI can just do for you. Nobody’s out there competing for that exact same information, so it’s something that you definitely have an edge on. So yeah, that first party we’ve generated this report data is really cool.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s not something that somebody can easily replicate.

Allea Grummert: Yeah. I think another one that’s really simple that I often talk about when I’m writing welcome sequences with clients is like, what does everyone who’s joining your list need to know or have in their pantry, have in their freezer in order to make your recipes? And often it’s just like, I don’t know. What do I need for Guatemalan food? As somebody who maybe is trying to get in, try these recipes, oh, here are some things I can pick up at the store that’s going to make it easier for me to make the recipes that she’s sending over email.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I’ll do a last one here to round it out. So one of the things we’ve been thinking a lot about is as we create content, instead of extending the gap between us as creators and people who are consuming the content, meaning, oh, that person is really different from us. Their life is different, their lifestyle is different. I think it’s in some ways, maybe social media at its worse. How do we shorten the gap? How do we show people and X-ray into our life in a way that feels authentic and genuine and helpful? And it came from last night, Lindsay’s finished up. She was working on some things and she came in and I was like, “I want to show you this. It was called a Hub’s Life. H-U-B-S-L-I-F-E. It was a YouTube account.” I was like, “I want to show you this guy’s content. I love it.” He’s this 29-year-old guy who works in insurance and it’s all around this normalizing a nine to five job and how great that can be. And it’s like him getting up at 6:30 and getting ready. And so all of that to say, one of the things that we’ve been thinking about is how do we give people a look inside of our lives to be like, “Hey, things are chaotic at our house and there’s toys all over the place.” And it’s a little bit of an invitation in, and I think about that within the context of social media, but also within the context of email to say, “Hey, what would it look like to do the equivalent of inviting somebody into your house, into your life?” It’s a little bit of like, “Hey, I’d like to meet you. I’m not going to broadcast this necessarily on the blog, but if you’re interested in getting to know me a little bit better, sign up and I’ll give you a little bit. We’ll do a house tour. You can see our house.” Or some people, if you want to be a little bit more private, maybe it’s like an introduction into the hardest things about my day and how I approach those and try and combat those. But essentially it’s like you meet somebody and then what’s the next step? You get to know them a little bit better within the context of email. How could you have the same prompt? And for anybody who wants to get to know you better, then they can go through that process. It’s probably not the most tantalizing thing like, ooh, I’m going to do this. But if you do go through it, you have that trust and that connection just like you would in a normal relationship.

Allea Grummert: Yeah. Well, and I think it’s not even so much, we don’t want to give people whiplash of, oh wait, just remember I’m also a real person. It’s like, how do we weave that in? I’m even thinking about, so coming back from this ConvertKit conference, I looked like I got hit by a truck. I also, my flight got delayed from Denver back to Lincoln so I ended up having to spend the night at a Denver airport-

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Allea Grummert: … hotel for four hours. I’m glad I got the hotel, but it was $180 for three hours and 59 minutes of sleep according to my Fitbit. And they didn’t lose my luggage, but my luggage was being sent to Lincoln. I would’ve had to wait until 1:00 in the morning to get this luggage. It’s being sent to Lincoln. I had to fly out to Omaha. I’m wearing the same clothes I wore on Saturday that I slept in on my flight into Omaha where I had to have a friend come and get me, take me to the Lincoln airport to get my bag in my car. And I’m just like, I’m a disaster. And that’s not typically stuff you put in an email, but here I am in the midst of just a long travel flurry and just being like, what would it look like for me to present this to my email list of… Somebody had mentioned that Gen Z calls it rotting. I just want to have a rot day. And I was like, oh my gosh, it’s me. And so what happens when you still want to have a connection with your list, but you also want to have a rot day? And I was thinking about what if that was the story I told? Because you can have a rot day. Part of being a content creator is you have so much great content already. It doesn’t always have to be new. What if I just gave my list permission that, yeah, have a rot day and send them back to three popular blog posts?

Bjork Ostrom: Totally

Allea Grummert: Call it a day, shut the laptop and go back to watching, downloading.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Allea Grummert: But I don’t typically talk like that. I tend to just be really pragmatic in my emails, which people love. They’re like, you really just get down to it. But let me bring you in on the fact that life doesn’t always look like my brand new website from a year ago. I have a picture of me in second day close at 4:00 in the morning that I sent my best friend, and I’m like, yeah, that’s going in there. This is me with my eyes closed.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that.

Allea Grummert: About to sleep with my mouth open in the Denver airport for the next hour.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so great. That’s so great.

Allea Grummert: Not cute. But how much do people just need to hear that? It’s okay. I remember, I think you had shared in our Slack group and tell me if you don’t want me to share this.

Bjork Ostrom: Go for it.

Allea Grummert: But it was so funny because you’re like, here’s Lindsay making just grilled chicken on the stove top, just warming up some chicken. Whereas everyone thinks, oh, she’s probably out here making these miraculous meals every night.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Allea Grummert: And it’s like, you know what? Sometimes a girl just needs to survive and she has small children. And I just thought that was so endearing of, even Lindsay.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and I think that’s the point is one of the things that we can do as creators, we can build businesses, we can build impactful businesses, we can build revenue producing businesses. Another one of the things that we can do is we can connect with people. And both of those things are really valuable. And the most, Lindsay just said this the other night, the most valuable feedback that we get, or the most I think meaningful feedback that we get is the other day she got a message from somebody who was like, “Hey, I have two hours between when I pick the kids up and when they have to go down for bed. And I was able to…” It was like these green beans and air fryer chicken, and she was like, “I was able to make a meal that my kids ate and that was super impactful.” So all of that to say, I think as we think about all of this stuff, the way that we’re going to frame it up is from the business perspective just because that’s what we focus on. But I think we always think about the additional benefit of what we’re doing. And a lot of times there is impact within it and really meaningful impact. And so the human connection piece is important. And I think that is a good lead in to one of the things that’s really valuable about email is the ability to connect with people on a human level, especially in a world where the transactional information is going to get solved through generative AI. It’s a chat interface and you need information. You’re going to get that information. Right now, it’s not great at recipes. It might be eventually who knows what’s to come with that, but more and more the way that those questions are going to be solved is through a chat interface. And so our job as creators, publishers, people who are earning income through producing content online is to figure out how to evolve. And one of the ways that we need to evolve is to do content production that is harder for an AI chatbot to replace. So can you talk about why email is good at that and how we can be aware of that as creators?

Allea Grummert: Yes, we can talk about that. I think I am really into systems and smoothing as much as you can out of the hurdles that it takes to send emails to your list. I promise I will get back to your question, but part of it is-

Bjork Ostrom: Here for the journey.

Allea Grummert: … as much as you can smooth out the process, it means you’re one step closer to helping your reader. If you are telling yourself, this email has to have 16 links in it where I have to share this massive whatever, because it feels super valuable to share a lot of content or that it has to be perfect, this has to have the perfect hook, the perfect subject line. I would rather you just send the email without it being perfect, or I’d rather have you send a simpler email. So if we smooth out that process, you’re getting the content that you’ve created that is super valuable into the hands of the people who’ve said that they want it. And you don’t need to be spending… I know I had a friend who would spend four hours writing up a newsletter and I’m like, “I’m sorry, you feel like you have to do that. Can we find another way to do it? Can you send a video update with this content or an audio, how-to file versus feeling like you have to type it up?” So whatever ways you can get the wonderful valuable content that you have into people’s hands, the better. And then, so that being said, I think there is a time and a place for an RSS feed. There is a time and a place for… ConvertKit’s coming out with an app that works with their tool that takes a video from YouTube and creates an AI-generated email. Awesome, because the video is what’s most important. Because we want to drive them back there because that’s where the value is. But when it comes to revealing yourself and having relationships with your readers, there are other ways you can do that to compliment these quick fast system type, I don’t know, broadcast emails you might want to send out. So what does it look like? I specialize in welcome and nurture sequences, but especially that welcome sequence. How are you introducing yourself to people? So that’s the kind of stuff where you really want to share who you are, how you want to help them, what they’re going to get from you. Because if you can frame it in that, you are already more human than an AI bot trying to write that out. So while you’re competing with other types of content, the way that you package up the content and deliberate is what’s going to make that person feel known, feel heard, feel supported. That recipe from Lindsay could have come from anyone with the green beans and chicken, but because she’s on Lindsay’s list, Lindsay has created this community to where people want to open her emails and her recipes and have their problem solved by Lindsay and the Pinch of Yum team. Does that make sense?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. It’s almost like part of what we’re doing as creators is we’re thinking about what does it look like for us to establish a connection, establish a relationship. And the best way to do that is to think about what does that look like in real life? And the people that I feel most connected to most quickly are willing to tell stories, share about their life with me, and in a real relationship outside of the context of publishing emails, it’s like there’s a back and forth to that. You send something, somebody will send something back. I think that does exist online in some ways. There’s one-to-one. Generally speaking in a relationship where it’s one to many, you need to think strategically around what does it look like to introduce yourself to the degree that you want to be known. It doesn’t mean that you have to share everything, but to the degree that you want to be known, what does it look like to introduce yourself well? And what you talked about was a welcome sequence or a nurture sequence. Within that, it’s a way to either introduce yourself if you are personal brand creator, or introduce your brand in a way that somebody can go from being aware of you to by the end, what is the goal to know you, to feel comfortable with you? Maybe all the above.

Allea Grummert: Yes. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Period.

Allea Grummert: Okay. Well, sorry, I was definitely also already thinking about something else, Bjork, I apologize. But you had me think… I’m sorry, you just got my brain spinning in and out.

Bjork Ostrom: No, go for it. What were you thinking about?

Allea Grummert: Thinking about… Yeah, that’s a vulnerable moment. I’m sorry. But I think about relationships and how the difference between sending a text message, making plans for, oh, we’re going to do something this weekend, or can you pick up milk at the grocery store? Those communications are really helpful, but so is sitting down at dinner without your phone and making eye contact. So I guess what I’m saying is that both matter, and if you can craft some emails with great intention, you’re not belittling that because you also have content that goes out a little bit more straightforward. So what does it mean to tell those stories or to bring them in? I think about the way that we write our introductions for clients to their list. We always think about Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle. So there’s some of you want to have some sort of emotion. You want to have some sort of credibility. And so I often will, like clients, I’ll ask them, “Do you have a photo of you baking as a child?” Or, “You started baking because of your grandma. Can we include that photo?” That builds that uniqueness. What’s so cool is that everyone who joins your email list will have that same introduction to your story.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? The Aristotle’s triangle of?

Allea Grummert: Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle.

Bjork Ostrom: Rhetorical triangle, yeah.

Allea Grummert: Yeah. I used to work in video production and we do a lot with storytelling, and those were always the three elements that we wanted to include in the video in their story. Now I always have to Google it. I should never bring up Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle without having it memorized. I need to have it just plastered on my wall. But there’s one around emotional connection.

Bjork Ostrom: Emotional, logic and reason, and then ethics credibility.

Allea Grummert: Yes. So some of that is-

Bjork Ostrom: Ethos, Pathos, Logos

Allea Grummert: Logos. I think it’s Latin. So fancy.

Bjork Ostrom: Logic reason. Yeah.

Allea Grummert: Yeah. So part of it is it clear to understand, do I feel a connection to this person and are they a credible source? So sometimes that’s just your backstory. Your backstory can be like, yeah, I started baking in the kitchen when I was 12, or I started learning to cook last year and I’m learning and you’re learning along with me. Either way, it fills in the gap for the reader so they know that you’re human.

Bjork Ostrom: Yup. Yup. That makes sense. That’s great. And that is my first exposure to Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle. So I’ll be doing some deep dives on that. That’s great. So you go through this process, we’re walking through start to finish. You have the content that you’re creating. We’re not talking about that, which is Instagram, it’s TikTok, it’s social media, it’s blog posts. From there, you’re creating some type of compelling offer. It’s going to depend on who you are, what you’re creating, who your audience is. But eventually you have the ability then to connect with people. You can use a nurture sequence, a welcome sequence. You’re establishing your credibility, your emotional connection, using that triangle, providing some logic and reason, maybe facts, evidence around why you’re a good person to follow. Then what does it look like? Because I think there’s a handful of people, maybe the majority of people who are listening to this who then are like, okay, now what? And it’s not like it’s an e-commerce business where you’re then selling a thing, or maybe there’s some people who are really strategic with affiliate marketing, but I think there’s a lot of people in this genre who are collecting email addresses but not really doing much with it. If you have this email list, what does it look like to really tap the full potential of that?

Allea Grummert: Yeah, well, the potential grows with wherever your next step is. There’s so many different directions you can take an email marketing strategy, so you don’t have to do it all at once. Just pick the next right thing. So when I talk about the three strategies I recommend for creators, it’s having a couple automated sequences, one to welcome subscribers, one to nurture them a little bit long term, and those are evergreen. They’re running all the time. And the other is this live consistent content. So it could be new blog posts, it could be a roundup or whatnot, but those are just being sent out to everyone. So it’s a little bit of a mix of older content and new content. And you as a creator know my older content is going to have eyeballs on it. At some point, at some way, people are going to get those emails, which I think gives us a lot of peace of mind. They’re like, yeah, and everyone will know I have a cookbook because I told them multiple times in these automated emails. There’s a peace of mind there. Can you remind me of what the question was?

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and I think real quick on that point, I think one of the things that you’re able to do is you’re able to build a little bit of a flywheel. And so if you have a thing that you want to make sure that people know about, one of the great ways to do that is to make sure that there’s an automated way that people are seeing that within your email list is a great example of how that would work. If you have your top 10 pieces of content, you want to make sure that you include those in a sequence, or maybe it’s even just in a single email. That’s like my top 10 most popular recipes in our world. So people can see those. I think sometimes we feel like we’re inundating people with this content, but it’s like people are so scattered, they’re looking in all these different places. Even if they do hear about something five different times in five different places, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Allea Grummert: Well, and not everybody is following our content as closely as we are following our content.

Bjork Ostrom: Nobody is. There’s nobody in the world.

Allea Grummert: Nobody is. Nobody is opening 100% of your emails most likely. So part of what makes a really simple next step, once you have… Even if you don’t have any automated emails and you just want to start sending out live broadcasts, campaigns, whatever they’re called, depending on your platform, and you’re sending out newsletters, maybe we’ll call it that or new content, what really helps is to create a schedule for yourself. And the reason why I say this is because we used to do this thing when people would join through Mailchimp or whatever, and you’re like, and five days later they get this and two days later they get this and then you’re like, I don’t actually know what days of the week people are getting emails. And then you worry about sending out a new email because they’re going to get a double email and not a good double coupon kind of way. Like a, oh, no, they’re going to unsubscribe anyway. So what does it look like just to say, these are the types of emails I send out on Thursdays. These are the types of emails I send out on Mondays to allow your brain to say, to create those parameters gives you so much more freedom as a creator. You’re like, I know that my automated emails go out Tuesdays and Fridays, great. I will send out my other emails the other days of the week. Create a theme for those. I have a client, she’s like, my Friday email is where I share all my personal stuff and people love it. She goes, they won’t find it anywhere else. So while everything else, the rest of the week is business and recipes or whatever, the Friday email is that personal touch and nobody’s asking her to tell a personal story with every email she sends every day of the week. So it’s also there’s a space for that so that people still feel connected to you as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. You spend a lot of time on your blog content. From planning to recipe testing to writing to promoting, but do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clariti, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console so that you can make well-educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention, think broken links or broken images, no internal links or missing alt text. You can also use information that Clariti pulls about sessions, page views, and users to fuel the creation of new content because you’ll be able to see which types of posts are performing best for you. Get access to keyword ranking, click-through rate impressions and optimization data for all of your posts today with Clariti. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I .com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode. And so the other question or part of it is you have this email list. Let’s say you have 10,000 subscribers or a hundred thousand subscribers, whatever the number is. What value does that inherently represent for you? Just from, we talked about the softer side of connection. This is almost the extreme other side tangibly from a revenue perspective. Tell me about what that means for me as a creator. What does the value of growing my list in translating that into revenue?

Allea Grummert: Yeah. So part of it is look at the number of people who are clicking through from each email. What does that turn into for your RPM? And if it’s low, that’s okay because you’re going to grow it. Or the other alternative is to send more emails.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Allea Grummert: I have a client who last summer just started sending a daily email and each one had a different theme. We created a newsletter template for each one, like duplicate, replace, send, because the numbers were like, oh, this is a lot of traffic that I have control over. Sure, the click-through rate is like three point a half percent, but the open rate is still pretty good. People have options to opt out of things. We’re allowing that, but we are almost like a media company in a sense of here’s the new content and then when they go back to the site, you get ad traffic from there. And I’m not saying you need to send seven emails a week. If you’re like, “Oh my gosh, my audience would kill me, Allea.” I get it. I hear that often. But that’s where we can allow different preferences. Either it’s types of content or days of the week. You can usually set that up within your email service provider. But yeah, part of it is it’s your livelihood. It’s a big part of your business. And so you also don’t want to snooze on that because you think people might have their feelings hurt or they have to delete an email. We often think that we send more emails that we’re annoying people when our readers are not thinking that in most cases. And if you want to be hospitable, which I always recommend, I sound harsh. I’m like, “Just send the emails.” But I’m like, “Give your people room to be able to also, I have an automated email that goes out on Tuesdays at the very bottom, it just says, if you want to be removed from the best of Duett emails, just click here. You’ll still get everything else.” And I think maybe four out of 1,800 people have unsubscribed, but it’s there. It gives me peace of mind that I’m caring for them and I’m not just shoving stuff in their face when they don’t want it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s options that they can remove. And it’s interesting, I look at our dashboard for Pinch of Yum, and RPMs, depending on the ad platform you’re working with, you might be able to see the earnings based on where people are coming from and direct, meaning people are just coming straight to the website. I don’t know if direct would also include an email click or not. That might be something I’d have to dig into. But direct is like a RPM. And so direct might also be just like if they’re typing it in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that also includes referral from email. I’d have to look into that. But point being, you can play the numbers game. And what was interesting on this podcast interview with Sam Parr on that real estate podcast, we can link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to check it out, but he was talking about his early stage of raising money for The Hustle. And he talked about there’s this VC that he went to that he really respected, and he was going into this meeting and the guy literally laughed at him. And he’s like, “I would never fund a company like this because it just makes no sense.” And he was like, “But you can play the numbers game.” And in his case, he was working with direct advertisers within email, which I’d be interested to talk to you about. And he was saying for his type of newsletter, they could get $50 per thousand subscribers. And if you worked with a company that would then pay to be a sponsor, not a subscriber, but a sponsor for that email, you can play the numbers game and you can say like, okay, if you’re sending out five emails a week and you have a hundred thousand subscribers, and you can multiply then and see. Okay, so I know then inherently every email subscriber is worth this amount. But what I’d be interested to hear is do you see any creators working with brands in that way where we will get a sponsorship on Instagram or we’ll get a sponsorship on a blog post. I think there’s a huge opportunity for us, and we haven’t done a good job of this, of getting a sponsor for an email. If you have-

Allea Grummert: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: … a big list, it’s no different than getting a bunch of eyeballs on a blog post.

Allea Grummert: I think we get a little bit precious about our email subscribers because we don’t want to offend people. Will they sign up for free things? I don’t want them to see an ad. But the reality is you have created this awesome sweet audience that other people have content related to that they would like to get in front of. And yes, I have seen this done with newsletter sponsors. So what would it look like for you to have this sponsor deal? This is a real question. Can you counter and say, would you also like to be an exclusive newsletter sponsor for our Friday emails for the next four weeks? Because it would up the contract. If you’re going to do it-

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Totally.

Allea Grummert: … go for it. And I would say do it in bundles like that. I will do it once a month for the next six months. Make it easier for yourself. You’re not just doing one-off sales.

Bjork Ostrom: And this is what we’ve found for the podcast. We’ve started to do sponsorships for the podcast for the Food Blogger Pro podcast. One of the things that’s really nice about that type of sponsorship is that I’m doing this interview with you. I don’t know whether this podcast itself will have ads within it or not. I think it probably will, but that doesn’t change this interview at all. It just we’re opening up a spot in this medium for somebody that we consider to be a good brand for the people that we are working with to be aware of. And I’m not really having to change anything about how I’m operating. It’s much different. Let’s say if Pinch of Yum signs a deal with a food brand and we work in partnership to develop a recipe and for that recipe to then have the ingredients in it, that’s still great. We love doing that, but it’s harder than if we send out a newsletter once a week or twice a week and then we sign a sponsorship deal that then gets included at the top of the email, that suddenly is much less work and potentially a similar value exchange where that brand gets in front of an audience in a similar way, but it’s less of a lift from a effort perspective. So I think it’s an untapped area for a lot of creators.

Allea Grummert: 100%. And a couple of things, if I can remember them. I need to take notes while we talk because my brain is-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Allea Grummert: One, I heard someone talk about last week at Craft & Commerce that you can also include an option that’s like don’t want ads in your emails, click here for $5 a month to contribute to the newsletter. And they get more from the people who don’t want ads than they actually do from the ads-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting.

Allea Grummert: … which is really interesting. But you can just add, and then you use conditional content to exclude anybody who’s already paid just does not see the ad, which is great. They have a great experience. Oh, the other thing I was going to mention is because brands are going to have different expectations too. So Pinch of Yum, my guess is that people are going to want to tap into that newsletter largely for exposure, which what we called in when I got my degree in advertising, we call it just general awareness, and that is a worthy campaign, paying money to have Mountain Dew on a billboards that you are thinking of Mountain Dew 16 times a week on your commute or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: Code red specifically.

Allea Grummert: That’s awareness. And you’re like, well, there’s no conversion. And it’s like, yeah, that’s a whole other realm of advertising. Versus you might have other advertisers who want to include a link to an opt-in form and they actually want to be able to track those. So you might have different… Then the price of it might be different, but just so you know there’s a difference. It’s like, yeah, do you just want to show up? Great. But yeah, I think, I don’t know if advertisers would say it, and only if I get a certain number of subscribers. That’s not on you, whether they’ve picked the right audience and they’re trusting you with that, but they still need to pay.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think part of it too is one of the things, so I’m doing a lot of the calls for the brands that we’re working with now for Pinch of Yum, and one of the things I’m just always trying to do is understand what success looks like for that brand. And that’s super helpful to go into the conversation if they’re like, success for us is getting a thousand people to use this coupon code. It’s like, okay, we’re probably going to approach it differently than we would if what they said was success for us is we just want people to know about this type of noodle. And it’s like, oh, okay, that’s different. And therefore how you approach working with them is different. In some cases, we’ve said, this just happened the other day where we got on a call and they’re like, the brand is like, “Yeah, we really want to get more link clicks or links or something like that.” I was like, “It’s probably not a good fit. We’re going to be really good at getting you in front of people and for people to be aware of that and for it to happen in a genuine authentic way. We’re probably not going to be great at converting on your food product for your new e-commerce site.” That’s just not how people are transacting with the content we’re creating. So I think your point is really good around understanding if you are going into some type of relationship where you’re working with a brand or advertising to know what they consider to be success for them.

Allea Grummert: 100%. Well, and then ConvertKit now has programmatic ads that you can put into your newsletters as well, so you don’t have to-

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what that means? Programmatic, the idea behind that?

Allea Grummert: You’re asking questions. No, I’m just kidding. So being these dynamic ads, I had to ask what that question was. Yes. Years ago. And so instead of you are picking out the sponsor and putting it in the newsletter and you’re manning that relationship, you get to hand pick this sponsor for this audience or this product and you get to say no or whatnot. ConvertKit now has an ads program where they will just inject the ads in different parts of your email just like they would through an ad network on your website. And so however, you do still have a lot of control over these brands, not these brands. It’s a children’s thing, but I am marketing to the elderly. Maybe not. You can still pick and choose. And what’s cool about that is there’s really no minimum number of subscribers in order to be able to do that. I don’t really know what the cost benefit of that is, but especially if you’re in that in-between where you’re like, I have people on my list and I would just want to test it out, that’s an option as well.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of those things we often talk about this idea of what’s your motivator, and I think we tested out some of the programmatic ads with ConvertKit. It was like, okay. But I think for people who maybe are working with a Raptive or Mediavine and are used to those types of numbers, it’s not going to be that and might be different for different creators and how they include the content. I think the approach for us would be if we end up going in the direction of working with brands within emails, it’s like direct to brand type deals. But one of the things that we’ve always said is it can be really motivating in the early stages if you have a hundred subscribers to see that you’re making $3. $3 becomes six becomes 12, and just to see that you’re getting some traction from that in the early stages as a brand scales up, you have 10,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand subscribers. That gets to the point where you can start to work more directly with a company, have a more holistic maybe relationship where it’s like, hey, we’re going to do something on Instagram, the blog and in the email, and this package then looks like this X, $10,000, $20,000 or you can start to roll those up. Can you talk a little bit about the speaking of advertising and the connection to email, some of the changes that are happening with clicks and first party data within emails as it relates to the traffic to your blog? Why that’s important? What we should be aware of with that?

Allea Grummert: Yeah. So I’ll tell you, I don’t know all of the technical reasons.

Bjork Ostrom: Specifically, how it’s working technically within-

Allea Grummert: Technically, your next question.

Bjork Ostrom: … the server infrastructure.

Allea Grummert: I keep using things that I’m like, I don’t know all the words for that. But basically because third party cookies have gone away, Raptive and Mediavine in particular, because they’re the most common ad networks in our industry, they have created ways for you and them to capture subscriber data through all their clicks to your website. But in a way, I believe it’s called hashed, just follow everything with a question mark for the next minute. Is this how it works? So the data itself is still protected somehow it’s encoded or decrypted, I don’t know, question marks. But basically what’s happening is that because you’re tracking the user’s data, and that’s going back to Raptive or back to Mediavine, they are able to be able to serve better ads to your audience because they know where that subscriber is also engaging with other brands. And so basically what it does is it leverages that information or to get you better ads for your audience, which makes you more money in the long run. Raptive, it is called Newsletter Identity Capture. Mediavine, they call it Email Connect. Either way, what it’s doing is it’s adding a query to the end of your URLs in-

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning, like additional-

Allea Grummert: Code.

Bjork Ostrom: … Characters on the URL. Yep.

Allea Grummert: Yep. And so it reports back to Mediavine and to Raptive, like this person’s data, but it’s still protecting their data. So it’s not like there’s a list of, Melissa went to all these sites, it’s still protected, but the more data you can give them, it’s like working like a team with all the other folks. And you can use that within your podcasts. You can go back and add some of that code to sequences. Raptive actually has a integrated way with ConvertKit to add it automatically just pretty slick. Whereas Mediavine, you need to use their Email Connect tool.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Idea being generally speaking at a high level, if you are able to identify who somebody is, you can target those ads better. The more targeted ads can be, the more beneficial they are to advertisers, especially with third-party cookies eventually going away because then now you can’t identify people as much because you don’t have these third-party cookies tracking people. So then it’s like, well, how do we do that? Email being one of them. So in the conversations I’ve seen people talk a lot about that, “Hey, make sure to turn this on, make sure you have this in place.” Because that’s going to allow you to add on a little multiplier to the value of that traffic if they understand that third-party or first-party identifier information for them. That’s great. And for anybody with those respective ad networks, you can follow up with your ad rep to figure out how to turn it on or my guess is they have support as well, or they can connect with an expert of which you are one. Allea, you work with clients and you work with us and our team, and we’ve partnered for a long time, work with other bloggers and publishers. So can you talk about just how you work with creators, publishers, anybody in this world who’s interested in leveling up their marketing?

Allea Grummert: Yeah, so my business is almost six years old. I think I worked with you guys maybe a year two, so it’s been a while. So my company is called Duett for a couple of reasons. One is that a lot of creators come to me and they’re like, this thing that I haven’t done with email for four years, can you do it? And I’m like, I will do it. We’ll do it together.

Bjork Ostrom: We will do it. Together, we will do it.

Allea Grummert: Exactly. I know. I cheese out at my own puns. But the idea is also you are an expert in what you’re doing. You don’t have to become an expert in email marketing. I could get that set up for you. So we do project-based work mostly. I do have some one-on-one coaching as well, but it’s like how do we get you from where you’re at now to feeling like, okay, I know that when people join my list, they’re having a really great experience, they’re learning about me, they’re getting segmented if needed. Some automated emails are going out, sending them to my best content or my best affiliates, giving them a breadth of understanding of the type of content I create. All those things we talked about like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody knew you had a cookbook? Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody knew you had a YouTube channel or a podcast or whatever? We build all that out for you and make it really easy for you just to then focus on growing your list and emailing your list. Because if you know that people are going to have a really good experience, it makes it that much easier to actually go and get subscribers because so many people are like, I want to grab my list because they’re not getting whatever, or it’s outdated or it’s not representative of me anymore. And so yeah, I’ve been blessed with an awesome team. I used to do all of this by myself. I have people now. And yeah, we’ve got a process for figuring out your brand. We do audience research, we figure out what your readers want, and then we use that to really fuel part of that strategy along with whatever’s most important to your business. And so I get pretty excited about it. We do all the tech set up for you, so you really just like we turn it on and then you just go and focus on connecting with your audience.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And I think as much as possible as we are building a business, it’s important for us to think about who, not how. It’s one of the, I think it’s a Dan Sullivan book actually, the title of a Dan Sullivan book, but just this idea of there’s a thousand different things that we can be doing, and in so far as we have the resources financially to bring somebody in to help us with that, that’s going to be the thing that’s going to be the differentiator for us is finding those people who are good at what they do to come in and do the thing that needs to be done. And we don’t have to figure out how to do it. We need to be aware of it, but we don’t necessarily need to know how specifically. And then the key is finding who. And so for people who are interested in email, I think working with Duett D-U-E-T-T .co is a great solution for connecting with you and your team there. So good next step would be to go to the site, is that right?

Allea Grummert: Yeah. And then I’ve got a fancy link for you all, so just duett.co/foodbloggerpro.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Allea Grummert: And I’ve got some free resources there and a way to connect with me.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. And you are also an expert in the Food Blogger Pro community, which you’re super appreciative of. And so Food Blogger Pro members might see you around there as well. We do live Q&As, obviously active in the forum when email stuff comes up, and so appreciate all your help and insight there and on this podcast as well. So Allea, thanks so much for coming on.

Allea Grummert: Thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance. And that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.