Post Updated [November 14, 2022]
Group programs and courses are a fantastic way of working with more than one client at a time and pave the way for scalability in your business. While the scalability potential that comes with programs is essentially limitless, it comes with a lot of work to create new programs for your community and clients. How can you be strategic with the program launch to ensure the time spent on content creation efforts pay off and allows you to maximize the earning potential of your program? Ashley Srokosz believes that with the right upfront work and proper preparation, you can position your business so every program launch achieves your desired financial target. Ashley believes in a systematic approach that is clear on what direction you need to take, and that this due diligence is what sets apart those who are able to achieve a full-time income from their business and those who are not. Whether you are brand new to launching a program or have fallen short in achieving your sales targets when launching a program to your community, Ashley’s simple methodical approach will help you understand what needs to take place in your business before you launch.
In this session, Ashley shares her exact formula and tangible advice to understand how you can meet your financial targets during your launches. By using simple math, Ashley helps provide a clear starting point to take your earning potential to the next level and understand exactly where to place your efforts. We learn how to understand what direction to place your efforts in order to be set up for a successful program launch.
Ashley’s strategy to meet your financial goals when launching a program requires you to prepare upfront. This ensures that when you do go to market, all the right pieces are in place to achieve success. In addition to actually running your program within Practice Better, much of the initial prep work can be supported within the Practice Better platform.
Each month, our Business Success Coaches, host an interactive BBC YouTube Live, bridging together expert advice and Practice Better technology. Take a moment to watch the session with Ashley below.
Video Duration: 38 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPcav6fM2eY
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Ashley Srokosz is a former Registered Holistic Nutritionist turned marketing expert. She knows how to build a business in multiple ways after serving dozens of one-on-one health clients, generating thousands of dollars through her online courses, and growing a network marketing business to 6,500+ customers and multiple 6-figures.
Ashley’s taught hundreds of tech-shabby entrepreneurs how to brand their business and build their own websites, and in her group program Audience Authority, she teaches overwhelmed solopreneurs how to master timeless marketing strategies to grow their audience so they can finally make a full-time income. She firmly believes in setting up systems to grow your business and sell on autopilot, and that you don't need to be a tech guru to do just that, you just have to know where to start.
Connect with Ashley: Website | Instagram
Brittany:
Hi everyone. Brittany Andrejcin here, business success coach with Practice Better. Today we are here for another Better Business Conversations and we're joined by Ashley Srokosz, who is a former registered holistic nutritionist turned marketing expert. She knows how to build a business in multiple ways after serving dozens of 1:1 health clients generating thousands of dollars through her online course, and growing a network marketing business to over 6,500 customers and multiple six figures. So welcome, Ashley. We are so glad to have you here today. Thanks for joining us.
Ashley:
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited for the information we're going to cover today.
Brittany:
Yeah, awesome. So today Ashley is going to be walking us through how big of an audience you need for a five figure launch. So she's going to be walking you through her actual formula so you know exactly how big of an audience you need for that five figure launch. I'm going to turn it over to Ashley. She's going to take it away, share her screen, give us all the good information, and then I will pop back on the end if there's any questions.
Ashley:
Perfect. I don't always have slides, you guys, but today I have slides because it's a big deal. I'm actually going to share my entire desktop and then I'm going to make my slides the whole screen. So let me do this. All right, you can see it, Brittany? Everything's good?
Brittany:
Everything looks great.
Ashley:
Awesome. Welcome guys. Like you heard, this is what we're here to learn today is, down to the actual number, how big does your audience need to be for a five figure launch. It seems to be that's the number everyone's like, "Ooh, five figure launch. How can I make $10,000?" Because that sounds like a lot of money and it is a lot of money.
Let's pop on in. Brittany already introduced me. In case you don't know, there's a picture of me. I don't always look that good, but you already got my information in the introduction, we're going to pop right in.
Your audience size directly impacts your ability to make a full-time income. When I say audience size, I mean email list. I don't necessarily mean social media following because we all know that organic reach is going down, especially now Instagram is now saying, "We're a video platform, we're not even a photo platform anymore."
They've changed so quickly. The things that we do own and can control is our email size. That's what I'm mostly referring to today, but I'll loop it back into the social media at the end.
I'm talking about this because most entrepreneurs, they'll spend months, maybe even years developing and launching a new program. We all like to do that like, "Oh, the problem is I just need to launch a new program. Let me go ahead and create one."
You do that instead of doing the thing that will allow your business to make a sustainable income and that's growing your audience. The sexy thing to do is to launch a new program, the really organic, consistent unsexy thing is growing the audience, but this is where you have to make this mindset shift to have a successful business.
I'm going to teach you how to calculate exactly how big your audience needs to be to have a five figure launch. I'm teaching you this today because when a former business coach of mine taught me this super simple math...Don't worry if you're not a mathematician, it is super simple. I'm going to go through it with some examples ... I was blown away.
I had no idea that you could put an exact number on these things. I was just like, "Okay, we're just going to have a launch and we're just going to launch this thing and it's going to go great." No, you can actually break it down to math.
I'm a total spreadsheet nerd, a math nerd. I have a physics degree. I love that stuff, but the nice part is that you can plan and work towards that five figure launch. That's what I'm going to teach you right now.
For me, one of the most empowering things I experienced in my business was when I stopped guessing, of having those goals that always seemed really far away and they weren't getting any closer, and I started getting strategic. It's not just about knowing your launch or income goal, but do you know how many paying customers or clients you need to make that?
That's the difference between someone who will make it in their business and someone who might not, someone who might just have this five figure launch or full-time income goal up on their mood board, their vision board, in their journaling. That's the difference between someone who will always just put that as a dream and someone who will actually achieve it.
Let's break down the math. Again, I promise, if you're not a math person, don't turn this off. I do want you to get out just a simple sheet of paper, or even if you just have a calculator, this is not hard math and I promise you're going to be able to understand it.
Step one is to determine what goal you're reaching for right now. So in the example of this teaching itself, this could be a launch goal. For instance, we're working towards a five figure launch in this training, but you can use the same math to determine how you're going to get to your yearly income, a six figure business. You can use this same math to determine and break down many other types of goals as well.
So of course, with the title of this presentation, how big does your audience need to be for a five figure launch, we're going to use the example of a $10,000 launch. If you hear the five figures and you're like, "What does that mean?" It just means $10,000 or more. If you look at the numbers in 10,000, it's five figures that go into it. So we're working towards a $10,000 launch in our example throughout this presentation.
Step two is to figure out how many sales you need, which is going to break down to how many customers you need to find during that time frame. So to do this, you're going to take the total that you want to make and you're going to divide it by the average price of a sale.
For example, we want to make $10,000. Let's say that you sell a $500 program. If you divide $10,000 by $500, it's going to give you a goal of 20 sales. You're going to need to find 20 lovely people that you are going to support, that are going to invest in your program so that you can help make their lives better.
Now, as an aside, this is also an exercise in pricing. Depending on what type of program that you're launching, is it even possible for you to onboard or work with that many customers at once? That's a total separate part of making sure that a program will work for you and is sustainable in your business going forward.
This is a test of your program systems and the way that you've set it up, but it is something else that you can think about as you're going through this example. So how many sales i.e., how many customers do you need to find, that is our step two.
Now, step three is to figure out how many email subscribers you need to reach that sales goal. An average email list … This is across hundreds of thousands of businesses. You can find these numbers from places like Mailchimp or very big businesses that look at millions upon millions of email subscribers in different companies that work with them.
An average email list converts 1 to 3% of subscribers to sales. So what this means is that for every 100 people you have on your email list, about one to three people will buy something that you're selling. Now, you could get that conversion rate higher, but this is just an average. It's giving us some place to start.
We are going to work our example here and we take our example of 20 sales in order for you to make $10,000 off of a $500 program. You're going to divide it by 0.01. That's 1% as a decimal. Instead of 1%, it's 0.01. Divide 20 by 0.01, and what you get is 2,000 email subscribers, which can sound like a lot to some people, but that's what the math breaks down to.
Now, on the other end of the average, what if you had the higher conversion rate of 3%? Take your example goal, 20 sales, divide it by 0.03 and you get 667 email subscribers. For this example where we want to have a $10,000 launch selling a $500 program, your goal size for your email list should be between 667 and 2,000 qualified people.
When I say qualified, I mean are these people who are actually interested in that particular thing that you are selling? You're not going to want to use your overall number of your email list, if you've recently changed niches, if you've changed the types of programs or services that you're offering, let's say you used to specialize in hormones and now you're specializing in colitis.
We know as potentially holistic health practitioners that those might be related, but chances are people who are looking for support with their PMS, most of them probably don't have colitis, although there might be some overlap. Make sure that your email list is full of qualified people.
Step four, this is where you play with the math until you're happy with the numbers. You can do this step if your expected goals are not matching at all with where you are right now. You need to get, let's say 2,000 email subscribers, maybe 5,000 email subscribers and you're like, "I have a 100 right now." Those are really not close at all.
That's quite the difference and you might be feeling totally defeated. How can you play with your numbers to narrow that gap? Let's go ahead. Let's go through this and see how we can narrow that gap to get you to a five figure launch.
In this next example, let's say we change the price of your program. You want to have a $10,000 launch, instead of a $500 program, let's say you increase that to $600. Actually, it might sound like a lot, but the difference between selling a $500 something and a $600 something is not actually that different.
Instead of 20 sales, you only need 17, which if you take the average between 1 to 3% and you say, "Okay, let's just say we're going to split it down the middle and our email list converts at 2%”, that means we're going to need 850 email subscribers.
Increasing your price again to $750 per sale, you need only 14 sales to get to $10,000, which again, if you converted at 2%, you only need 700 email subscribers. If you bring it up again to a $1,000 a sale, you only need 10 sales and then you only need 500 email subscribers versus possibly something like 1,200 at the lower example. Or sorry, I guess a 1,000 if you split the difference, if it was a $500 program.
Of course, you can raise your price. You can have your programs priced at whatever you want, but you need to ask yourself if your program reflects the new price. Your program or services might have been so under priced to begin with that you don't need to change your program if you decide to raise the price. This in fact would be a mindset issue, not a pricing issue.
For example, my brand, Build, Blog program that I have, I've had 200 plus students go through it. I've had people tell me this is worth more than Marie Forleo's B-School, which is $2,000 US. I started selling that program, because of my own mindset issues, at $147 Canadian for a lifetime access to this huge program that I've redone twice and the curriculum is 150 videos for $147. That was a mindset issue.
However, you might need to, if you look at a program that you are formally selling for $37 and you're like, "I'm going to raise the price to a 1,000," you need to look at the value that you are offering in the program in terms of what sort of transformation are you helping them with. I mean, the ultimate test is, are people actually going to pay for that price?
Think of how many customers. You might increase your price 10 times, therefore you only need to find one customer instead of 10. You might be able to find two customers and still make more than you had with 10 customers in a former launch. So it just depends. You have to experiment with your customer base. You have to experiment with the value of the program, your marketing.
There's a lot of different stuff that goes into this, your branding, your messaging, but remember that you can just decide to raise your prices. For a lot of women especially, women solopreneurs, that tends to be an issue. It's something to think about as you're going through some of this math and some of these examples.
Don't forget, you could also have a higher conversion rate. If you have a smaller email list and you've been attracting people for the same problem or the same niche for a long period of time, chances are that those people are much more qualified and you might have a 4 or a 5% conversion rate during a launch, or higher.
If you needed, going back to that original example of 20 sales, if you could get a 4% conversion rate instead of something like a 1% conversion rate that brings the email subscriber goal down to only 500, instead of that original 2,000, if you only had a 1% conversion rate. This comes down to the quality of your email list and do those people on the list match the program or service that you are trying to sell them?
Going forward, again, a 5% conversion rate would bring that down to only 400 email subscribers. I had my first five figure launch, I believe it was just over about $11,000 of that $147 course that I originally offered, and I only had 400 email subscribers at the time.
I will tell you that if you have been growing a list for a very specific problem and that is what your program or your service solves, then you could have a much higher conversion rate than that average of one to three, but you're not going to know unfortunately until you launch.
Now you need to ask yourself if you're even close to the goal size that you'll need. So if you are not even close to it, again we're going back to the example, let's say you estimated that you're going to need 1,000 or 2,000 email subscribers and you have 25, that's obviously a big difference.
If you're that person, then you need to start marketing to grow your audience big enough to launch by a certain date. You could try to launch and just throw caution to the wind and say, "Hey, I'm going to launch anyway. I know that my audience might not be big enough, but I'm going to see what I can make." That's fine going in eyes wide open, especially for a launch.
If you do a launch fully and properly and one that is going to most likely create that excitement and that agitation and urgency that people need, a good first time launch, for creating all the assets and the emails and all that sort of stuff, you're probably looking at a minimum of six weeks to two months of work.
You need to ask yourself, and you can reverse engineer this. If I were to work two months and according to my list size right now I might only get one to two paying customers, would I be happy with the amount that I would make for working for those two months?
That's a choice that you can make, but you can also make a forward plan to launch by a certain date in the future and figure out how big your audience needs to be in the meantime and how big of a rate and at what rate do you need to grow your audience.
For example, if you need to grow your email size to 500 people with the math and your launch goal is six months from now, that brings you to a total of 83 email subscribers a month, which is only three email subscribers per day.
Growing your list from possibly even zero to 500 in six months, it does sound like a big goal, if you have tried list growth in the past. But breaking it down and saying, "Okay, I just need to find three people a day," three isn't 300. So that makes it feel a little bit more doable.
Now, according to this example as well, if you need to grow to 2,000 people on your email list within six months, that comes down to about 12 email subscribers a day. It's definitely not impossible, it is absolutely doable, but this gives you a goal to shoot for.
Even as unrealistic as the goal would be, I always like to break these really big problems or big goals down into smaller goals, which makes them feel a little bit more attainable and realistic for me.
Now also, if you want to change the timeline in here, so instead of just changing the total email list size on this slide and saying the launch goal is six months from now, you could also say, "Okay, I need to grow it to a 1,000, how many email subscribers do I need per day to launch in one month?" Or if I want to launch in three months or six months or 12 months, you can break that down as well.
You can see here, if you needed to grow your email list to approximately 1,000 people, you could say, "You know what? I can probably work really hard for six months. I think I can go without that launch income for six months. So breaking this down, that's going to work out, if I want to hit 1,000 subscribers in six months, I need to get six email subscribers a day." If you wanted to wait till 12 months, you would only need to get three email subscribers a day.
Now if you wanted to grow your list to 1,000 people within one month, that's 34 email subscribers a day. So you're obviously going to have to have a very different email list growth strategy for goal number one, launching by one month, than if you wanted to take your time and grow a little bit more organically and grow 12 months from now.
Again, these are just exercises. This is just starting to get your head and your heart and your soul comfortable with what it's going to look like and at what rate and are your goals realistic or not.
Again, we always have those outliers. I'm not saying that whatever goal you have in mind right now is not going to happen, but we're just saying let's look at the numbers and to get some expectations so that we're not expecting a six figure launch when we have five email subscribers. Most likely not going to happen, but that's just my job to I guess dash people's dreams sometimes.
Once you've gone through that math and to know how many people do you need to join your email list every day or break it down per month, the only question you need to ask is how am I going to get that many people to join my email list?
This number requires you to know the conversion rates of different opt-in pages and landing pages. So this might be, you have a webinar page that you have people join your list and that converts 30% of people who visit that landing page to email subscribers versus a lead magnet that might be on the homepage of your website, may only convert 1% of people who land on that page.
Once you know your conversion rates of the different opt-ins, which is that way of getting people to give you their email address, then you can start effectively marketing to get that many new visitors to your website or to that specific page.
Do you need to run ads? Can you get it organically? Can you get it organically with working with the social media platforms you're most likely on right now? Or do you need to look at new social media platforms like Pinterest or can you do that through search engine optimization? Do you need to learn those new skills to get that many people to your website so you can convert them to email subscribers so you can convert those people to customers?
Most of your time in your business, especially in the beginning, is not spent actually working with clients. If you have been in your business for any amount of time now, you probably know this. Very honestly, you know this, I didn't know this when I started my business because no one told me this.
And then it was very clear after about six months of me just sitting in my office, my beautiful office that I decorated and I had my hours that I was open and when I was in my office time and I would have it hanging on the door. And the door would be open, but no one was walking in the door because I didn't know that I had to market. I was just this, if you build it, they will come. I didn't know that, that is only a tagline from a movie that doesn't actually exist.
You need to be making sure that you are marketing and not just pretending or thinking you're going to be working with clients all the time. 20% of the time you'll be working with clients and 80% of your time should be spent marketing and growing your audience until you're at the point where obviously you need to start changing that percentage to work more with clients because you have a big enough client roster to start taking time away from marketing.
It's this constant push and pull as an entrepreneur between marketing and doing everything else that you need to do in your business, because without marketing, you're not going to be finding new clients, you're not going to be making more income and you're not going to be growing your business.
Once you know your numbers and your goals, this is how you reverse engineer your business to make sure you actually reach them instead of just being dreams on your vision board. I put up an Instagram post at the beginning of the year and I said, "Screw your vision board."
There's a place and a time for the vision board, but there's also a place and a time for action and for making things happen and for putting your time into things that are going to move the needle the most.
We're not just throwing spaghetti at a wall. We need to make sure that the time you are spending on your business is being put to profit growing and income growing activities. In the beginning, that's always going to be marketing and making sure you're doing that in a way that is actually finding you paying clients.
The best program or the product in the world, it's not going to make enough money if you don't have a big enough audience to sell to. So stop launching, start growing your audience and finding enough people to launch to, because I promise if you switch your mindset on this, you will always have successful launches.
If you launch just for the sake of launching and just thinking that it's going to grow your business and you haven't been doing any audience building in the meantime, you're not going to make enough income ever in your business.
Not only that, but let's say that you do have a big enough audience for a $10,000 launch, you went through this math, you're like, "Oh my god, I actually do have a big enough email list that if I work according to the averages and all the math that works out here, I could have a $10,000 launch." Oh my god, if that is you, I am so proud of you. That is amazing. That's a brand new level of your business. If you're not growing your audience consistently, your next launch won't be that big.
It's kind of like the rockstar who has a really amazing first album that comes out because that's the album that they've been working on for 15 years. That's the album that they wrote the songs in high school and now they're 30 years old and they're giving you a 15 year time snap of all of their expertise and all of their ability. It's the second album that trips everyone up.
I bet that you can't just live off of $10,000 a year. You need to make sure that you have some systems in place for growing that audience between your launches. That's step number two. Step number one is let's get the big enough launch that we can prove that our program or service works. And then the next thing is, okay, now I need to grow the audience between my launches to make sure that launch two and three and four and five and six are continuing to make me a sustainable income.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you're overwhelmed, I know that feeling right now. I was telling Brittany before we got started that I'm at a point in my business where I'm feeling very similar with having to learn new skills, and at a different point where what I've been doing right now isn't going to necessarily work going forward and I have to change my mindset. I understand how that feels.
Take a big deep breath and start making a plan and start putting those tasks on your calendar so that you can start moving towards the goals that I know that you have. That might be really big goals, it might be little goals, but they're goals and you're going to feel amazing when you actually achieve them. But you have to have a plan and you have to take action.
Questions, questions. You want me to stop sharing my screen now?
Brittany:
That was amazing
Ashley:
Yay!
Brittany:
Sure, we can hop on back to just us.
Ashley:
Okay.
Brittany:
I loved that. I always have such great conversations with you whenever we're able to collaborate. I'm so grateful that you're here, but I love the reality check. I love that you're bringing maybe some people back down to earth. I feel like that would've been really beneficial for me because I was certainly someone who got caught up in the hype of the five figure launch that you hear about. It's so elusive when you're first starting out and something so many people aspire to.
I love that this is such a tangible exercise for people where you really can better understand where you stand and what you need to focus on before you just jump into the launch, because that is the claim to fame these days is to launch that program, but [Editor’s Note: we couldn’t make out what was said in the recording].
Ashley:
And it's the tip of the iceberg, right?
Brittany:
Yes, it is.
Ashley:
The public facing launch is what you see. You might see people that you follow go through launches and you're like, "Okay, I see what they're doing, I'm going to do the same thing." You might not know everything that has gone on behind the scenes and if you don't know that part, that's the part that actually makes it work.
Just seeing the outside surface of everyone's businesses, without that inside information and this extra knowledge, you're not always going to be able to replicate that for yourself.
Brittany:
Definitely. If somebody did the math and they are realizing that they really need to spend some time growing their audience, in your opinion, what's the most effective way to do that? So where should they really start to focus their energy when they're growing their audience?
Ashley:
I mean social media is always the overarching, like social media, you just go on social media, but I mean we all know that there's a lot of different platforms now and they're all very different.
What I like to recommend and what not a lot of people necessarily go to first is using Pinterest to find new email subscribers, the conversion rates, because people are going on Pinterest because they're future planning. They're either using it like a search engine, it's a great search engine just like Google, and they're going on there and they're actually searching for a recipe or they're searching for specific things for decor, but they're also searching health things.
This is where we're linking up the base foundations of the website with the blogging. We're writing individual blog posts that solve or answer those questions, or solve very specific tiny little problems. You're then making the assets or the images that you put on Pinterest. That's getting a lot of people to the website.
Then again, from there we can create ... Once we have the people on our email list, that's when we ask them, "Hey, do you want to come follow me on Instagram?" Then when we're sharing information on Instagram, I think of Instagram as more where the conversations are happening.
That's where you might feel like you're converting more paying customers because you're answering questions, you're in the DMs, you are taking some polls on your stories or you're getting comments on some of your posts, but it's not necessarily going to be the place that you're going to grow your email list the fastest.
That's the difference between followers and email subscribers. You could have a huge follower base on Instagram, but they might not necessarily convert to email subscribers or even paying customers. I like to use Pinterest plus the search engine optimization.
If you're writing the blog post for Pinterest stuff anyways, you can search engine optimize that to make sure that you're taking advantage of anyone who's going on Google or other search engines for those same questions that they might be putting in similarly on Pinterest are looking for that information.
There are hundreds of thousands of health related searches on Google and other search engines every single day. There are people looking for answers for the things that you know how to solve for them. Those things I find are very underrated because everyone's like, "Instagram!"
Instagram is a great place to nurture the relationships, it's not necessarily going to be the best place to spread your net to try to bring them into your ecosystem in the first place.
Brittany:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. One thing of course, we all know that you can unsubscribe from an email list at the click of a button. When we're being bombarded with emails and we're feeling overwhelmed with how much is coming into our inbox, sometimes it's tempting to click that unsubscribe. It's really interesting to take notice of what you continually read and what you actually open versus what people will unsubscribe from.
As far as keeping people on your email newsletter list and nurturing those people, how do you do that so that you have them around long enough that you have the opportunity to actually convert them into a paying client?
Ashley:
The first thing that you need to know about an email list is you will always have unsubscribes. It's kind of like people unfollowing you on Instagram. You need to be okay with every time you send an email out, you're at least going to get probably one unsubscribe. It's nothing about you personally, it's probably the person's overwhelmed. Think of all the reasons why you might unsubscribe from something, right?
You also need to think about your ideal client and what is appropriate for how often you should be emailing them. I mean everyone's busy, but there are ... I think of, what did I sign up for? I think I signed up for Poshmark, the reselling ... I'm wanting to buy a little bit more, not just fast fashion and looking for used items and stuff for fashion. I just downloaded the app and I have bought a few things on it.
I was getting an email from them every single day and it was like this thing and I'm just like, "Screw off. I don't need to hear from you, Poshmark, every single day." Of course, I unsubscribed because I'm like, "Were you trying to get me to unsubscribe with all this useless information? You are doing a really good job at that."
I think you really need to look at your ideal clients and you can experiment with that. You can try emailing at closer durations. It might be once a day in the beginning if you have a nurture sequence, meaning when they join your email list. Maybe you're sending three to five emails to really get them to know you a little bit more, to look at your best information on your website.
If you notice that there is a really high unsubscribe rate, maybe you can go and spread those emails out. Maybe instead of once a day for the first five days, maybe it's once every three days, or maybe it's even once a week for the first five weeks. You might go in and after let's say a month or two of doing that, go and look at the unsubscribe rate of that time period versus when you were doing daily.
Part of it is just pushing and pulling with your ideal clients. If you are helping to send valuable information, you are trying to really show them ... And it's not just a transactional, I want you on my email list because I know 1 to 3% of you are going to turn into paying customers. That's not the way to go into an email list. It needs to be, what value can I provide these people? What do they need to hear from me today? It's not about you, it's about serving them.
Is there a blog post that you can link to? Is it helpful for your list to just send out a really quick five things I loved this week? I'm on an email list of a girl, once a week she sends out five things she loves and it's with the five senses. One is the thing that she's heard, one is that she's seen, one she's tasted, one she's touched. It's just super quick to read and I'm like, "Okay, I can manage this, I can digest this."
There's no really quick answer to this is the formula, but I would say nurturing your audience. You have to be consistent. I would like to see you emailing them at least once every two weeks. Once every two weeks, if not, once a month.
If you're going longer than a month between emails, you're more likely to have them not really care so much about you and they're like, "Who is this person and why are they emailing me?" Consistency is really important. I'd say at least once every two weeks.
In the beginning, if you could be emailing your list weekly and you can handle that without being overwhelmed in just your tasks, that would be the best case scenario.
Brittany:
We're kind of framing this conversation as the things that you need to do your homework on and grow before you launch. I think before this stage is really getting to know your ideal client and what makes them tick and their buzzwords and things that are really going to resonate with them. That's probably something that you feel is key to this as well is really knowing your niche and your audience as well.
Ashley:
Yeah. Oh, that comes down to it. This is why I mean at the base of my courses and everything is branding. It's what might work for one person in one specific, like what they're teaching and what their ideal client is, it's going to look very different, if you are looking and you're looking to target millennials or whatever they call them now, between 20 and 25. Not even millennials. Look how old I am, guys. I don't even know. What is it, gen Z? I don't know.
Let's say you're trying to target maybe 18 to 25 year olds who don't have children, maybe they're done post-secondary school, they're working, they're out on the town, they have all this free time, even though they say they're so busy. Guys, wait until if you ever become parents, you will not have time.
It's going to be very different than if you are targeting a 30 to 40 year old mom of three and your entire business is built around supporting people with children. Especially if you think about even emailing them over the last year and a half during a global pandemic, these are people that most likely were working full-time at home while trying to take care of their children full-time because there was either no school or no childcare.
Notice that during that time period, maybe you shouldn't be sending as many emails because they're not going to read them. They can't even have time to wash their hair, much less read your really long email about what you had for lunch yesterday, right? Not important to them.
It is going to vary based on ... And you need to know who you're helping. You need to know what their problems are. You need to know what matters to them. You need to know if it's important that you bring up Black Lives Matter or if that's something that your audience is not interested in or are they interested in it? Are they interested in politics?
At the end of the day, you are your business if you have a personal brand. You can talk about what you want to talk about, but for instance, if your ideal clients are all women, you're not going to be like, "So my husband got this medication. He got Viagra. Let's talk about my husband's Viagra." But why would these women ...
That's a horrible example at the time right now, but you need to make sure you're talking about things that are valuable and useful for that specific person at that specific time period. You're not going to send out emails about, again, they're in a lockdown and it's like ... You can always tell the brands where they really don't have anyone looking at their email marketing because how long did it take some brands?
There were people during the pandemic shutdown, it was like a global shutdown, no one is flying anywhere and there's influencers that are like, "Here's my discount code for this airline." You're like, "Sense the tone people. No one is flying right now." You have to really think about that and the tone and how it's going to be welcomed in that person's life, right?
Brittany:
Definitely. It's about knowing your audience and also having your finger on the pulse to read the room and-
Ashley:
Yeah.
Brittany:
I think we've all learned that a lot over the last year with everything that's gone on.
Ashley:
Yes.
Brittany:
For anyone who is wanting to dive into that, on that note, you mentioned that the whole foundation of everything is branding and all that, where can people go to connect with you further and learn more about what you do?
Ashley:
So you can find me on Instagram is where I think I spend most of my time on social media. It's Ashley Srokosz, A-S-H-L-E-Y, S-R-O-K-O-S-Z. So I'm just Ashley Srokosz. Or you can go to ashleysrokosz.com. I have a website with so much information, you guys. If you liked what I taught you today, my blog and my website is, I have over 55 blog posts that are exactly like today's presentation.
If you are stuck, if you don't know where to go, I guarantee you I have most likely a blog post about what you're stuck on. Feel free to go to my website, message me on Instagram, follow me, ask me any questions. I love having conversations with my people.
Brittany:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing everything today. It was so amazing to have that kind of exercise that people can walk them through to know where they stand in their business. We are so grateful to have had you.
Ashley:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks guys for sticking around and flexing your math muscles today.
Brittany:
Awesome. Thanks, Ashley.
Ashley:
Thanks.
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