Monica Froese [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast where strategy needs action. I’m Monica Froze and I’m here to help you create, sell and scale digital products the smart way, using AI and proven strategies to build a sustainable, profitable business. If you’re ready to turn your expertise into digital products that sell and eventually grow into a thriving digital shop, you’re in the right place. Each week I break down real world tactics, unfiltered insights and bold business moves. Because building a digital product business should be sustainable, scalable and designed for long term success. Let’s ditch the fluff, leverage AI to work smarter and turn your expertise into a thriving digital empire on your terms. Let’s get started. Welcome to episode 100 of the Empowered Business podcast.
Monica Froese [00:00:52]:
Hitting 100 episodes is a big milestone and I actually have something really special planned to celebrate it. But but I’m also juggling back to school season with my girls and instead of rushing an episode just to hit the date, I want to do it right. So the official celebration episode will be dropping later this month. For today though, I couldn’t have picked a better guest. To mark this milestone, I’m joined by Cheryl Rarik, an email marketing strategist, automation engineer and deliverability expert. She’s the voice behind the Email Diaries, which is a binge worthy five minute interview series where top email pros spill their most creative list engagement strategies. She’s also the creator of the Automate and Chill method, a long term conversion system that helps you make more passive sales, free up hours each week and build a lifeproof business. All through email.
Monica Froese [00:01:38]:
This conversation is packed with gold. We’re digging into deliverability, what’s really changing in the inbox, and how AI is already reshaping email marketing. Let’s dive in to today’s episode. Sheryl, welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast.
Cheryl Rerick [00:01:54]:
Oh my God. Thank you for having me. I’ve been waiting to come talk to you about some really fun stuff.
Monica Froese [00:01:59]:
Yes, you are my go to email marketing strategist. Whatever. Guru. I guess you could say I don’t even like using the term guru. But like honestly, I told you before we recorded you saved my butt when all the deliverability stuff happened in December. So which is something we’re going to talk about before we before jump into all things email marketing, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your entrepreneurial journey and what you’re doing. Give that part away.
Cheryl Rerick [00:02:23]:
But in your okay, who am I? I’m the email nerd. I’m the email nerd. You go to when obviously deliverability Stuff as well as my true email love is like automation and building out these like beautiful long term, intentional funnel style email journeys where we’re designing like a long term journey for our subscribers instead of just, oh, it’s Tuesday and the kids are like dying for dinner and I’ve got to set an email up for tomorrow. What should I write? Haphazard way that sometimes we approach email, which is fine if it, if people like that, but it doesn’t work. I have three kids, let’s be honest, if I approach email that way, emails don’t get sent at all. So I like to build these strategic journeys. And so that’s like my favorite thing in the world. But my entrepreneurial journey started because I’m a mom, I had babies and then really quickly found out that, oh, whoops, society isn’t really set up for you to have kids and go to a real job because guess what, they’re sick all the time and then you have to drop them off here and pick them up there and do all these things.
Cheryl Rerick [00:03:26]:
And so the best solution for me was to start working from home and working online. Like my skill set. I’m a super nerd. I love doing all the stuff. I think I started with like web design for some friends. Businesses got into it like talking like 13 years ago, I’m a dinosaur online. And then being able to work from home, be flexible, create my own life, create my hours, create money. In a sense, you get more control.
Cheryl Rerick [00:03:52]:
You’re not set by like some glass ceiling or some max salary that you’re going to hit. You. You have that freedom to create your life. And so here I am talking to you about email.
Monica Froese [00:04:03]:
So 13 years ago, you decided to. I find it. I say this in almost every interview, but I didn’t know your whole backstory before interviewing you. But I’ve known you in this world for a long time. We all have such similar stories always. Like, we had our babies, we were like, wow, society is not set up for this. But also, you’re not going to hold me back and I’m going to do what I want. I want to make money.
Monica Froese [00:04:23]:
I have goals, I have ambitions. I still want to work, but I would also like to see my kid. And that’s exactly it. Mine was born out of postpartum ptsd and I just decided to rant about it under the redefining mom brand. But really, three years into my oldest life, I felt like I missed it. And I was gonna be honestly damned if I missed the I. My kids are five and a Half years apart. Mainly cause I had a bad birth, but also because I was like, no, I want to actually spend time.
Monica Froese [00:04:48]:
If I go through all of this, which why would I not want to see my kids? And yet I also should not have to give up that side of me that makes me because I became a mom. So I just feel like a lot of us did it and then here we are now we’re like helping each other out and I love that. What happened?
Cheryl Rerick [00:05:05]:
Like I, my best friends are online, like I have best friends in real life, but they don’t really get it. And just like this community that like we instantly understand where the things we’ve been through, where we’ve come from, how we got here, how crazy it is. Like we were just Talking about new GPTs coming on, new email regulations and we’re just like on this roller coaster together. It’s super cool.
Monica Froese [00:05:26]:
It is. Spoiler. We are going to talk about email marketing AI and I selfishly asked her out on because I have questions about this.
Cheryl Rerick [00:05:32]:
Love it.
Monica Froese [00:05:33]:
But I love that what we do is actually putting us on the forefront of what we already know is going to change the world. Everything, how we interact as even humans is like rapidly changing and our businesses are putting us ahead of the curve. I feel like, which is super cool because I remember being in, I was in tech corporate and I remember when cloud computing became a thing because I am old now and I will never forget sitting in my cubicle being like, what’s in the cloud? What are you talking?
Cheryl Rerick [00:06:00]:
What is a cloud?
Monica Froese [00:06:01]:
What is a cloud? Yeah, I look like my 20 year old brain could not process what was going on. And so I, I, it’s interesting cause I witnessed that happen in front of me but I was so young and naive. I didn’t really know like how it was going to impact things. But now with AI, now that I’m older and wiser, as I like to tell my daughter, even if she doesn’t think so, I’m like, okay, this is a big deal and it’s so fun that I feel like I’m exercising this whole other side of my brain that was dormant for a while. Like I felt like I had learned everything I needed to know in the online space. I knew all the tactics, I knew all the strategies, I knew how to make money. It was like going through the motions. And now, oh, this is like fascinating and I’m like consuming again.
Monica Froese [00:06:41]:
And even this is why I started recording the podcast again because I felt like for a while I was like, I don’t even know what to say because I just came old and now I have like lots of questions and now buckle up. I know, right?
Cheryl Rerick [00:06:52]:
And so today, exchanging fast.
Monica Froese [00:06:54]:
The scariest thing for me in my business is, and I’ve said this for years, I can’t tell you the exact amount because no data is 100%. But if I was a guessing person, 80 to 85% of my revenue is directly related to my email list. So one of the scariest things of AI for me is what it’s going to do to our inboxes. And so that’s one thing I want to talk about. But I want to back up before we talk about that and talk about what Google and Yahoo and all Microsoft did at the end of last year that changed deliverability and where we sit with that now that we’re like a little bit over halfway through 2025.
Cheryl Rerick [00:07:31]:
Yeah, they shook up the game real good, didn’t they? They made the biggest changes in 20 years to email. We took for granted that, like with socials, I don’t really do social. I’d say 100% of my income comes from email because I forget Instagram exists. But over there, we get used to algorithm changes and okay, carousels are working. Okay. Trending audios. Okay, now we do a lot of stories now. Reels came on the scene and we do this and we do that.
Cheryl Rerick [00:07:53]:
Threads popped up. We try that over there. We’re snarky on threads and wear this over here and we do this over here and then we’re just taking email for granted. That we haven’t had to pay attention at all, really to it.
Monica Froese [00:08:04]:
It was just there and we would.
Cheryl Rerick [00:08:05]:
Yeah. And so if it helps people to think of it more. If not, it’s a little bit sad to think of it more as okay, now it’s there. There is an algorithm. There always has been. Most people didn’t understand how it worked, but they didn’t also really need to. It wasn’t that huge of a deal. You were still getting decent open rates and things like that.
Cheryl Rerick [00:08:22]:
But basically, how do I wrap it up in a nutshell? I have an hour and a half.
Monica Froese [00:08:26]:
Training, which we’re gonna link to because.
Cheryl Rerick [00:08:29]:
There’S a free training. Yeah, it’s from December 2023. So things have changed a bit since then as well. We’ve. Things have calmed down. It was a bit of an urgent thing right then. But basically what they’re trying to do is make the inbox experience better for their people because they want people to use their emails because guess what? They serve ads just like everyone else. They sell your data just like everyone else.
Cheryl Rerick [00:08:51]:
They’re not spying on it like Cheryl’s talking to her sister about whatever. There is more like a 44 year old mom shopping habits with three kids who lives in B.C. canada. But they are that does matter to them. And people were abandoning their email accounts because of so much junk mail. So their strategy was to reduce spam and security threats and make it a place where people are happy to open their emails and spend more time with.
Monica Froese [00:09:19]:
Now arguably as an email marketer I actually want to give valuable stuff to my audience. So I think with any change I always try to be practical about this. So yes, it’s going to cause some backend things that I have to fix in terms of the tech side but if your people want to read your stuff to begin with, it’s going to actually help us have more space in the inbox. We’re weeding out the bad marketers which is not a bad thing. But what intimidated me at and I’m pretty techie but then all of a sudden it was like oh, you have to authenticate all this stuff and if you don’t then forget it. You just wiped out years of your domain reputation. I was like wait, excuse me but so where do we sit now? What were the three things that we had to do?
Cheryl Rerick [00:09:59]:
Authenticating your domain meaning you have to own the domain that you sent email from. So for me that’s chailrock. Com. You have several domains you can’t email business like marketing emails from an at Gmail, like a free email account. You have to I save show ID to get in the inbox. You have to prove who you say you are because a lot of spammers will like spoofing and phishing big words but they steal your identity. Like they put on a Sheryl mask and they try to get in the inbox pretending to be me and then bad things happen. So what it is just protecting our own property really it’s a good thing for us.
Cheryl Rerick [00:10:34]:
It was stressful at the time and it still can be sometimes when we think about it in all the negative ways. But it’s actually it’s a good thing and it with stuff we should have been doing all along. It was best practice all along. It just wasn’t required. So it’s you have to make some tweaks on your DNS records where your domain is and the three terms are sbf, DKIM and dmarc and SPF is I call it an approved Senders list. You have to like in one little line of code, you have to list all the places you approved to send email on your behalf. So for me, that’s my email service provider, my esp, Google, because I have Google Workspace. And for me it’s also.
Cheryl Rerick [00:11:09]:
I use Amazon SES for transactional emails and maybe a couple other apps. Yeah.
Monica Froese [00:11:15]:
So for me it’s like Shopify, we.
Cheryl Rerick [00:11:17]:
Had a different for.
Monica Froese [00:11:18]:
I’m trying to think.
Cheryl Rerick [00:11:19]:
There are a few. All the apps you have that.
Monica Froese [00:11:20]:
Yeah, all the apps, like some of my Shopify apps send emails on my behalf. I had to go into each individual app and make sure it was authenticated.
Cheryl Rerick [00:11:28]:
Exactly. So SPF is like giving it an ID badge, saying a list like this is who Monica approves. Just an email from Herbert Domain. And then DKIM is like a secret key. It’s like how they get in the door. It’s like a secret backdoor key that they have that you have published to the Internet. There’s a public key and a private key and they have to match. So there’s just a security protocol in the backend.
Cheryl Rerick [00:11:52]:
The DKIM one is the one that really attaches your reputation, like your history and everything to your domain name. So your best practices make a difference in building up a good reputation to make sure that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo like you and want to put you in the inbox. And then DMARC is the security backup. Like it’s the. The way we make sure the other two are working.
Monica Froese [00:12:13]:
Gotcha.
Cheryl Rerick [00:12:13]:
Okay, that’s. And the. Either one of SPF or DKIM needs to pass in order for DMARC to pass.
Monica Froese [00:12:19]:
And at this point, if you don’t have these three things set up, is it going to be near impossible to get into the inbox for.
Cheryl Rerick [00:12:28]:
Yeah. Unless you have a super small list. If you have a super small, super new list, you can get away with it for a little bit, but it won’t be long and you won’t feel stopped getting in the inbox. So it’s better to just do it and build up a reputation from the start.
Monica Froese [00:12:40]:
So do you feel like when this all went down that. So Google and Microsoft, they. And Yahoo, they actually are enforcing it. Right.
Cheryl Rerick [00:12:48]:
The timeline. It was announced in October of 2023. I remember that nobody knew about it. I panicked. Oh. At first when I saw I didn’t think it was a big deal because I’m a tech nerd and I’ve been sitting at people’s tech forever and that’s the first thing I do When I set up someone’s email platform and I didn’t realize people didn’t do that. I also didn’t realize a bunch of apps didn’t even have a way for you to do that.
Monica Froese [00:13:06]:
Correct.
Cheryl Rerick [00:13:07]:
Like Flow, Desk and Cartra. They didn’t even have a way to do it. I’m like, what? So in October, I’m like, are you kidding me? And then I started looking in my inbox. I’m on a lot of email lists and looking. You can look at the code behind it. And I was like, email. Email from my friends and my colleagues were like, not authenticated. I’m like, oh, shoot, this is a bigger deal than I realized.
Cheryl Rerick [00:13:26]:
So I thought right away I better connect with my expert guys. And I’d been training on deliverability for about a year with them to certify in it just because I thought it was important and I’m interested. Lucky for me, it was good timing because I actually understood what I was reading and I just popped up some trainings and tried to help everybody get through it, help people understand in simple terms what it means. Because I think it’s important as online brands to take ownership and start to understand a bit how things work, even if you hired out, but just understanding.
Monica Froese [00:13:56]:
I told you, I ended up working with your recommendation because I have so many domains and I need my email list. So I made. I had someone professionally do it, but I still went through your training because I thought if I’m going to be in the online world, this is something you. I had to have a basic understanding of it. And I feel that’s why, even though that was the boring part of our talk today, I feel like I do want people to understand that if click in their head, if I did not do this or I have to check on this, because you have, you do have a fantastic training on it, which I’m going to link to in the show notes, and I think everyone needs that.
Cheryl Rerick [00:14:27]:
So I have a couple of warnings for people going forward. I think once you get all of that done, it’s done. Unless you change your apps, you have to do a little maintenance and you should keep an eye on your reports every week and make sure no one’s stealing your domain. That’s the whole point. But I think that a piece that a lot of people miss is they think it’s done. I did the thing, now we’re good. And what really has changed in the industry is that you’re so responsible now for getting in for your own behaviors, because people think deliverability is the responsibility of their email provider. But it’s not.
Cheryl Rerick [00:14:58]:
It’s ours. Delivery is their responsibility. They have to deliver your email to like Google Server if it’s going to Gmail accounts for example, or Microsoft if it’s going to Hotmail or MSN or whatever, they can block it from there. Everything from there after to getting in the inbox through the chain of events that happens behind the scenes is up to our best practices, our reputation with individual subscribers on our list. So the most important thing I can tell you to do is clean your list regularly. If someone hasn’t opened in 90 days and you’re emailing weekly, at least the chances of them seeing it are so low because the algorithms are going to put it in front of them anyway. Like it’s time to just focus on the people who are engaging with you and just clean your list. Often it’s not a once a year thing.
Cheryl Rerick [00:15:44]:
I do it monthly.
Monica Froese [00:15:45]:
I cut my list in half in the beginning of the year because I was always there was. I always had a different way of looking at it. Like some years I was like people filter in and out of your world and I didn’t want to eliminate the idea, like take someone off my list. For a lot of time, for a lot of years, I was resistant to it. And I had a coach once that was like told the story about how this person was on her list, wasn’t opening emails and then went on to buy her highest offer. There was like a lot of chatter in my head like that. So I just, it wasn’t hurting me. I was.
Monica Froese [00:16:16]:
Had a successful business and so I was like, ah, I didn’t do much about it. And then this came up and oh, I axed. I asked tens of thousands of people and it was painful. But I have to say my emails are more profitable. So apparently.
Cheryl Rerick [00:16:31]:
Thank you. That’s what I. You’re proven my point. The thing about those stories, and I’ve heard them all too and I’ve had them happen like I’ve. They. That’s not. That doesn’t happen. It’s not that the numbers don’t support it though.
Cheryl Rerick [00:16:42]:
It’s anecdotal. Like it’s. We tell the stories, we work so hard for subscribers like we do, we pay a lot of money and we effort goes into it. Just deleting them is oh, kill me. So it’s hard, but they do especially I like you and I do a lot of summits and bundles and things like that. People will oscillate in and out and that’s actually okay. I’ve had someone buy my like $2,000 program who had previously unsubscribed in the past and it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you, doesn’t even mean they don’t like your emails.
Cheryl Rerick [00:17:13]:
It’s just not for them right now. And they’ll find you out there on the Internet on socials and events. Let them go and they’ll come back when they’re ready.
Monica Froese [00:17:22]:
That was probably the best thing that came out of this for me, aside from good, get rid of the bro marketers, get outta my way. But the flip side of that was it made me really reevaluate my email strategy as a whole and the customer journey and over like a ton of people filter back onto my list. And it’s just one of those things, you just have to keep yourself visible out there. And like for me it’s my podcast and it’s running ads and doing a lot of summits and bundles and they’ll find you again. When they need you, they’ll find you again. And then honestly, I didn’t mind cutting my email bill in half.
Cheryl Rerick [00:17:55]:
And the open rate bump. I tell everyone I can get your open rates up 10% just by cleaning your list.
Monica Froese [00:18:00]:
Mine are 17% and my click throughs are the best that they’ve been in years. So I’m a big fan of all this. But now here’s the thing that’s legitimately scary to me.
Cheryl Rerick [00:18:09]:
The new thing.
Monica Froese [00:18:10]:
Yeah, the new thing. I’m practical. I don’t really buy the whole the sky’s falling thing. There’s always gonna be a way to make money online. So I just wanna be in the know. But I read. I can’t remember if it was an email or if it was a TR creating it about for you, but somewhere you sparked this in me where you’re like, AI is going to change the way people basically interact with their inboxes. Whether that’s AI goes in and reads your emails every day and gives you a summary.
Monica Froese [00:18:34]:
So now you’re not. People aren’t going to be opening or clicking. And in my brain just that little thing that you said was like, oh no, wait a minute, I need people, not more change. Yeah, do it. And I’m sure that example is just like scratching the surface of what AI might be doing to our inboxes in the very near future. So yeah, please enlighten us about.
Cheryl Rerick [00:18:56]:
Well, we don’t really know because people are building their own bots like you build bots, right? So we don’t really know what people are building to help them manage their inbox, really. I look at things this way. I have my little panic attack about it too. But not a panic attack, more of a tantrum. I want to be able to read my emails. I love writing emails. I want them to read every word I ever write, ever. I care about each word.
Cheryl Rerick [00:19:19]:
But really have to come back around to the. It’s none of my business how people manage their emails. And that’s what I tell people when they panic about getting in the inbox instead of the promo tab or the updates tab that we’ve had that for a number of years with Gmail. And people are like, oh, how do I get out of the promo tab? And I’m like, you’re supposed to be in the promo tab, your marketing email. Like you’re coming from a group email list. Like that is legit. Where you’re supposed to be and where people want to see your emails. Unless they purposely make a filter or drag you where they want to see you.
Cheryl Rerick [00:19:50]:
Like, it’s not really our business. And you’ll send an email to 10 people and it’ll go to different spots based on how much you open their email, how much you click their email, how much you reply to that person. It’s not really my business how they want to manage. They’ll just turn off the tabs, like 40%, 35% something. Don’t even have tabs turned on because they can turn them off.
Monica Froese [00:20:10]:
I can’t stand tabs. I turned them off right when they came out. So you’re either going to land in, I’ve either filtered you out, or you’re going to land in spam or my inbox. It’s it.
Cheryl Rerick [00:20:19]:
So a lot of people do that. And so it’s not really our business how people want to consume.
Monica Froese [00:20:25]:
I love it.
Cheryl Rerick [00:20:26]:
And so I had to bring that mentality and I’ve been saying that for years, but I had to remind myself that I’ve been saying that for years. When it comes to AI as well, it’s not really my business if they like my emails. It’s my job to write such good emails that they’re excited to get them and look for them. And if I’m doing that, I have a high chance of them reading them or at least getting a damn good summary. I don’t know.
Monica Froese [00:20:50]:
Like, it’s really.
Cheryl Rerick [00:20:51]:
We just have to focus it back where the focus should be and writing and really focusing on our ideal buyer. Okay. What do they need to hear? What do they need to feel? What do they need to believe to feel seen and heard and understood by me. And so that they continue to want my emails. Okay, so it goes back to a messaging thing ultimately too.
Monica Froese [00:21:12]:
So at the end of the day, this is one of the things that I, that has occurred to me a lot with AI, like from all different angles. Whether I’m teaching about creating high converting digital products or what actually gets people to buy. At the end of the day, our strategies and like how we do business actually doesn’t change with AI fundamentals. Are there this like additional tactics I guess that we have to be aware of. But at the end, people, I still, I’ve been telling people this since all the doom and gloom of oh, AI is gonna make our businesses obsolete or whatever. No, people still wanna buy from people. And I just had this great conversation behind the scenes with my membership where we were talking about that. One of the guys in my membership said that he recently unsubscribe.
Monica Froese [00:21:58]:
He was. He basically had a membership through his H Vac company and when he called, he was having an issue. He called in. It wasn’t a bot, but it sounded very human like. But as he was interacting with it, he started realizing it was a bot and he was so turned off by it that he canceled his subscription. And I was like, see, that’s the kind of backlash that is going to happen. Another example I have of this which I heard on podcast, this was a corporate podcast. I still listen to this sometimes.
Monica Froese [00:22:25]:
I like hearing how enterprises are handling different things. This lady sends her clone into meetings and so she was working from home one day she had 12 meetings, she went to six, her clone went to six others. She was in the office. The next day she walks by this guy who starts talking to her about a meeting that her clone was in and she had no idea what he was talking about. And I said, excuse me, I don’t want to go to meetings with your clone. I’d be ticked right now, Cheryl, if you sent me your clone.
Cheryl Rerick [00:22:52]:
To be honest, your time is valuable too.
Monica Froese [00:22:54]:
I don’t know. So I very much believe that what you’re saying, if your emails are good and people want to read them, no matter what tactics AI comes up with to help us manage our inboxes, you’re still going to be able to cut through the noise if people want to hear from you.
Cheryl Rerick [00:23:06]:
I’m hoping they’re filtering me in, not out and.
Monica Froese [00:23:08]:
Or that if it is. So do you know of anything right now that is helping people come up with summaries that now they’re not even opening their emails.
Cheryl Rerick [00:23:16]:
Yeah. Okay. So one of the newest things is time of recording anyway, who knows tomorrow what will happen? But one of the newest things is AI summaries. Apple Mail came out with that. So Apple Mail came out with tabs too, which were super annoying. And I think most of us turned off immediately because they weren’t good tabs and you couldn’t drag it where you want it. Like you had to just suffer whatever they have. So if you have tabs, you should know you can turn them off the settings.
Cheryl Rerick [00:23:40]:
You can also turn off AI summaries, and I hope you do for one reason, and that’s the preview text. When there’s the subject line to preview text, that is my favorite line of text in an email because that’s where you get to be a little cheeky, a little funny, to give more information about what’s inside. As a consumer, I read them, I find them helpful. So this AI summary is going in place of that. So no more previews text. When people see your emails on Apple Mail, if they have the summaries turned on, because instead of the preview text, they say they see an AI summary of what’s inside. So the concern. I’ll start with the concern and then I’ll start with like the opportunity.
Cheryl Rerick [00:24:16]:
So the concern there for most people, immediate panic is that people aren’t going to open it because they already know what’s inside it. Why do they need to click to open? I agree. What are they thinking? Don’t they want. They want people to interact with emails? Why would they give people a reason like the inbox, why would they do that? I don’t really get it. Besides just the bandwagon, let’s AI everything we can to seem like we’re top of our like forefront. But whatever, it is what it is. So we need to make sure that AI summary is accurate and means something. And what it’s doing is it’s combing generally that can change algorithms change or GPTs change, whatever they’re using in the back side of the LLM, generally they’re combing the top of the email three to five lines.
Cheryl Rerick [00:25:04]:
So my tip for you, if you think your AI summaries are not accurate is just get to the point faster. Or here’s the thing about AI, it’s pretty smart. You don’t have to actually blurt out the point, but you got to have some keywords or hint to the point. So I’m A storyteller in my emails I don’t like to come out say the first thing first.
Monica Froese [00:25:21]:
That’s how all of my emails I’ll.
Cheryl Rerick [00:25:22]:
Take you on a journey first.
Monica Froese [00:25:24]:
Oh no, you’re help.
Cheryl Rerick [00:25:28]:
I have some examples of it. I’m trying to come up with something off my top of my head. I should have had an email ready for you. But just let’s say I’m. Let’s say I’m going to tell a story about a launch flop, a launch that bombed instead of just all of the. Normally it would come into the excitement of the story or the Hawk or whatever I might be dropping instead of I’m describing like oh it was a rainy day. I was watching the rain fall down the window and it felt like how waiting for the sales to come in or whatever that whole scene set up before that or in that I might drop in a few words like launches are. Launches are always a emotional roller coaster or some maybe I heard the word launch up top somewhere or something.
Cheryl Rerick [00:26:05]:
I’ll give it something to work because otherwise the summary might be like cheryl sad, it’s a rainy day. But I don’t know if people are going to open honestly, maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know.
Monica Froese [00:26:16]:
This tip right here was worth recording this podcast and I’ll tell you why. Because okay, so a little bit of backstory. I like kind. We went really econ based when I started doing digital shops and it coincided with a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. So it was great because it was like okay, we’re just gonna talk about our products and remove myself out of it. Which at that season of life it’s what I needed. But I’ve come to learn that people actually follow me for me and that really toned down. Yeah, it is nice.
Monica Froese [00:26:46]:
People actually want to hear from me. Although I had a hard time showing up during that phase of my life so it served its purpose and now I’m getting back to me again or a new version of me and my sales are reflecting it which is a great thing. But what I’ve started doing is I’m very much more talking about personal anecdotes in my emails and that helps my replies. People have followed me for years. They’re excited that they can tell the vibe change that I’m back and because I’ve never been quiet about what I was going through and stuff. So people knew I was going through a lot and they’re like excited for me. Most of my emails now are leading with some Sort of personal story. Like the other day I told a story about I went school supply shopping with my daughters and I shared a picture of it and like how my oldest, I put her on a budget and my youngest was unamused by how long it was taking her and people like relate to that.
Monica Froese [00:27:30]:
But it had nothing. Probably the first three paragraphs I had, they were short paragraphs but they had nothing to do with.
Cheryl Rerick [00:27:35]:
So here’s my caveat to all of this. And I think each person has to take in, take this in as they see fit for their style of email and their business. You could test it, right? You could send some, you could turn that AI summary on in your Apple Mail and send yourself some emails and see what happens. It could be different for every time you send the same email though. It’s AI, right? Who knows? Or you could be like me and I just don’t sweat it. Like I teach this stuff and I’m going to tell you that’s what’s going on. But do I even care? When I write my email, I give it no thought at all because the biggest reason people open an email above subject and anything else is the name of the sender. So it goes back to sending good emails people look for.
Cheryl Rerick [00:28:13]:
So I’m going to trust that if I’m sending an email, even if it’s got a like wild, weird summary, they’re going to be like, what’s your talking about now? I hope they’ll open it. And then the other thing is watch your open rates. If they drop, then start playing with some things.
Monica Froese [00:28:27]:
Can I tell you something that I, I can validate what you just said about sender name because I built my business while I was married with my married name. And when my divorce first started, I thought I was going to go back to my maiden name. So I stopped sending. There was a period. My ex and I are fine now, but there was a period I didn’t want to send but it hurt my deliverability and it hurt my sales and I, if I could go back, I would kick myself in the butt and be like, why were you. I was stubborn for a year and that was stupid. Why, why was I stubborn? And now I’m fine. I’m not changing my name, it’s my daughter’s names, everything’s fine, I’m keeping it as is.
Monica Froese [00:29:02]:
And now I had someone who I’ve known in this space since 2016 and I even took my last name off of my Facebook. We have been friends in the on Facebook since 2016. She ignored my message because she didn’t know it was me. She didn’t recognize the name, she did not recognize me.
Cheryl Rerick [00:29:18]:
Powerful.
Monica Froese [00:29:20]:
I know. And so when you just said your people open the emails because of who it’s coming from.
Cheryl Rerick [00:29:25]:
Yeah, that’s the number one reason. Like factor in opening emails.
Monica Froese [00:29:28]:
Yeah, and I found that out the hard way, let me tell you. And it’s true. It’s a hundred percent. Okay, so what’s so back to sending.
Cheryl Rerick [00:29:35]:
Good emails that people want to read. Okay, here’s the way bigger risk with AI in my opinion, that is everyone’s using it lazily and my inbox is homogenous. Every email I open is damn near the same. Same words, same structure, same copywriting formula. Everything in three is negative, positive fluff, no fluff, search the, have a, play a game. It’s really fun. I don’t judge anybody for using it also. So like, for me it’s just for fun.
Cheryl Rerick [00:30:03]:
Just search the word fluff in your inbox and see how many this week alone come up. And so the problem is, to be fair, I don’t begrudge anyone using it because the people using it or even using the common words that AI spits out, they’re probably not. They don’t study emails like I do. So and to be fair, there people probably won’t notice. However, for me, the bigger risk with AI in the inbox is everything becoming samesies. And so I would rather write a real email from the heart. Sure, I use AI to clean them up, edit it if I’m stuck on a sentence, but I don’t lean into it first. I spend a lot of time on an email, but email is where I make my money.
Cheryl Rerick [00:30:43]:
So I think the bigger risk is that is blending in.
Monica Froese [00:30:48]:
Okay.
Cheryl Rerick [00:30:49]:
Rather than an accurate AI summary, because I think if I continue to write emails from the heart, pictures of your family talking about real life, if the AI summary is whack, I still think they’re probably gonna, if they’re used to hearing from you as a person, the chances of them opening the email. And so until I see an effect on my open raise, I’m not sweating it.
Monica Froese [00:31:08]:
Well, so here’s something funny too, that I, and I just started saying this, I feel you actually, you’ve made me feel so much better. So thank you for this conversation. I started telling you people on my membership that I was writing when I took the emails back 100% in early June. So we’re like almost 90 days into me writing all my emails and I send an email almost Every day.
Cheryl Rerick [00:31:27]:
So that’s a lot.
Monica Froese [00:31:28]:
That’s a lot of emails. In the beginning, I was relying on AI because I was overwhelmed. That was like a huge undertaking to take back when it hadn’t been on my plate for quite a while.
Cheryl Rerick [00:31:35]:
Yeah.
Monica Froese [00:31:36]:
And I wasn’t getting traction. So then I was like, you know what? I’m going to start every email before I ever touch ChatGPT. And it has made a world of difference because here’s the thing. I’ve written emails for 12 years to my email list and AI wasn’t a thing for the majority of those 12 years. And I still managed. So I’m like, why can’t. What are you doing? Just go back to the basics. Go.
Monica Froese [00:31:57]:
I went back to the basics.
Cheryl Rerick [00:31:58]:
I say, still use it. Just be careful. Right.
Monica Froese [00:32:01]:
Still use it.
Cheryl Rerick [00:32:02]:
But I don’t lead with it. I try to come up with my idea by myself or have a conversation with ChatGPT or whatever to come up with some ideas. My fix for boring CNC emails is read it out loud before you send it and be like, you have to be looking in someone’s eyeballs. Pretend you’re looking into a human being’s eyeballs. What color are they? Are they wearing glasses? Look at someone’s eyeballs and read every word of that email. Would you say that in an actual real conversation, I don’t say the word no fluff. If I’m looking at you, we would crack up like, yeah, it.
Monica Froese [00:32:34]:
I know.
Cheryl Rerick [00:32:35]:
The problem is you get AI blindness because on the page it looks good. These words go good together. It is a pro at putting words in a string, but it ends up being word salad. And it doesn’t. Even the other thing, because I edit emails for my students in one of my programs. So I’m editing all, like, a lot of emails. It’s just take out a lot of the sentences AI puts in there. Says too much.
Cheryl Rerick [00:32:55]:
Usually you can get rid of two out of three sentences.
Monica Froese [00:32:58]:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And also, like, I’ve been experimenting with longer emails. On my Friday email, I used to just send a flash sale deal and I felt like that got stale. So now I’m sending actual, like, newsletter styles. But I noticed even though my newsletter is long, it’s sectioned. And so even they perform better when each section is shorter. So I can still have a overall long newsletter and people are engaged with it. But if any given section before a.
Cheryl Rerick [00:33:24]:
Break is too long, our attention spans are short.
Monica Froese [00:33:27]:
They are. And I have to real short. So this. Okay, so basically what you have Validated for me here is like we have the mechanics of we have to make sure we set up our domain.
Cheryl Rerick [00:33:36]:
Gotta do the back end stuff that sounds non negotiable. Clean your list. Take that away today.
Monica Froese [00:33:40]:
Clean your list. But what you have validated is what I have been saying all along about AI and in general us running our business, which is people still want to hear from people. So if we keep our personal human touch involved with our emails.
Cheryl Rerick [00:33:55]:
Yeah AI, you’ll stand out even more now. Yeah, to be honest.
Monica Froese [00:34:00]:
Yeah, I agree.
Cheryl Rerick [00:34:02]:
So there’s an opportunity there. So takeaways. Clean your list. Do the backend stuff. If you need help, hit me up. Clean your list regularly more than you think you should. Don’t change your from name. We’ve established that.
Cheryl Rerick [00:34:14]:
Do not and get to know your people best. You can talk to them when you can, ask for replies, interact in communities where they are so that you’re connected with them and you can write what they need to hear from you.
Monica Froese [00:34:26]:
One of the best things I implement it is I do believe in the power. Like my newsletter goes out Friday at 3pm and I’m adamant on that because people are trained to expect things. If they didn’t get my Friday at 3pm we would get emails like what’s the deal this week? And it’s yeah. And it’s literally people in my inbox, if you think about it, begging to pay me money and I’m like whoa, this is great. The power of sending. Like if you really want to be memorable too, if people are expecting it from you, you train them to expect it even better. So I feel like all these things I’ve been doing. So this is great.
Monica Froese [00:34:57]:
Thank you.
Cheryl Rerick [00:34:58]:
And then the AI summary let’s end with like on the final editing pass. If you see an opportunity to bring up a couple of keywords or just get to the point F in your editing process, then go ahead and do that.
Monica Froese [00:35:09]:
I’m going to consider how I’m going, what I’m going to do and I ask this I will ask ChatGPT to do once I write my intro. That’s like my personal thing. I’m like this is the, this is what? Like the CTA of the email. How can I weave it like a preview of it in sooner and then tell my story and then get. It’s just like reworking, I think how I’m going to weave my story in. So this was. And I would. I didn’t even think about inboxes and keywords to be honest with you.
Monica Froese [00:35:34]:
So that was a huge takeaway for.
Cheryl Rerick [00:35:36]:
Me talking pretty interesting stuff actually.
Monica Froese [00:35:38]:
It really is. Okay.
Cheryl Rerick [00:35:39]:
Okay.
Monica Froese [00:35:39]:
So if people want to learn more from you, because I know you have tons of resources, I consume all your stuff. I love it. So how can people find you and get in touch with you if they want to?
Cheryl Rerick [00:35:47]:
My website, Cheryl Rarick. Com. Let’s see if you want to join my email list. Let’s give away something today. How about we’ll share the deliverability stuff. Like I said that free training was recorded a while back, but it’s still incredibly helpful on learning all of this stuff. But I have this tool that I built called a time to conversion calculator so we can talk like we’re email nerds, you and I. We can talk about like how valuable email is to your business, but if you don’t really see the numbers for your own self, like stats we share don’t matter.
Cheryl Rerick [00:36:18]:
So I have a tool called Time to Conversion Calculator where it’ll show you how long people take to buy something once they subscribe.
Monica Froese [00:36:26]:
Awesome.
Cheryl Rerick [00:36:26]:
So like they get on your list, Are they buying something right away? Are they taking six months? And then you’ll be able to see the opportunity both in your short game making sure you put something in front of them right away and also your long game email, which is my specialty, making sure we continue to sell it to them over the long term. Because a lot of people take longer than the first three months to buy something. They stick on your list for a while, but doesn’t mean that they’re not going to buy. I’ll set you up with a link for that calculator as well.
Monica Froese [00:36:50]:
I will absolutely add that to the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Cheryl Rerick [00:36:53]:
Thanks Monica.
Monica Froese [00:36:57]:
That’s a wrap on today’s episode, but your next next step starts right now. If you’re serious about selling digital products and want the AI powered tools, expert strategy and real human support to make it happen, then you need to check out the empowered business society. Inside. You’ll get AI driven trainings to create and sell digital products faster, a private community for expert feedback and real time support, exclusive access to the Monica Memo podcast, and if you go pro, you’ll get monthly marketing shortcuts, live Q&As and 20% off of the empowered shop perpetually. Because smart business owners sell smarter, they don’t work harder. And the best part, you can get started for as little as $9. The best business growth happens when AI and real humans work together. Ready to make your next move? Join us inside of the Empowered Business Society.
Monica Froese [00:37:46]:
You can check us out at Empowered Business Co Society. See you in the next episode.
