We were a good ol' fashioned web design development agency, building really pretty websites and doing some development work off the back of that. The year we pivoted to just being a specialist email marketing agency, everything about newsletters to email automation, to drip campaigns, to anything to do with email, we put our hands up and were like, we're those guys. But we did not have enough clients at the time.

The big thing about email is that I feel like it's the last piece of technology that is completely  agnostic. If you think of where you can build communities, you can build a community on Facebook, you can build communities on YouTube, you can build communities on Twitter, on all these other platforms. But the unfortunate thing with those is you don't then control those audiences. They're not actually yours. 

It's just the process of creating really good, interesting content and sending it to people that obviously want to get that content in a very old medium that works really, really, really well, that you own.

The first thing is, I did this as well, you need to build a list. But you're like, Jason, where am I going to find this? Where, how do I list? It's pretty easy. Go to the email that you currently using and go and look at all the people you've sent emails to as a starting point. Obviously, you don't want to be sending to people you potentially don't know, but pull a list from your friends, your family's family, your colleagues, your clients. Obviously for those that run businesses, your clients, your ex-clients - maybe the ones that ended on a good note, not so much the bad ones. Start the list.

So something simple is, obviously you can just send out a straightforward newsletter. Secondly from that, personalisation is really important. At the very basics, you should have everybody's name. But I think taking it one step further is being able to look at why you're sending out this newsletter and what the purpose of it is.

Automations allow you to set up a whole bunch of pre-programmed things that are going to fire without you actually having to put any manual effort. You do it once, it's set and forget and it just runs. The most interesting or the most straightforward ones to start are when someone signs up to your newsletter.

So MailChimp is obviously one of them, it's a free email platform. My favourite is Campaign Monitor. I think they're the Rolls Royce of email newsletter sending. They're not free, and I think that's why I like them a little bit more because you won't necessarily get some of the riff-raff jumping on there and sending mails where you actually need to pay from the first time you send an email.

I'll start again with the newsletter list, keeping that as clean as possible - that's a good practice to have. And have a practice of, when you're adding someone to your newsletter list or if they're signing up, to do that double opt-in. So they sign up and then they get an email just to confirm the email address. I know it's a pain, but I don't think you understand how higher-quality your list is when someone's confirmed that they got the email from you and now they are added to your newsletter list.

You've got email marketing, and then you got email lead generation, which is still using email, but it's very different. There are differences in that you're trying to send an email, a one-to-one email to somebody to try and get them to do something. Which is, often, you want them to jump on a call with you or go meet for coffee or come to an event.

I often tell people, figure out what your ideal clients has that they worry about when they go to sleep at night. It's not easy to think about that, but if your company or your services solve the problems that your customer goes to sleep at night worrying about, if you can get that in a cold email, that will get you meetings day after day after day.