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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems, I'm your host, Miranda, and thank you for joining me again on this lovely Friday.

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It's actually really cold where I'm at, so I am enjoying a hot chocolate tonight.

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Tell me, what are you drinking? Pull up a chair, grab your favorite drink and let's talk about automations in your business.

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If you don't have any automations in your business right now, I don't know what you're doing, but you're doing too much. There are so many ways that you can either personalize your business or automate your business just to make things easier for you. And we're going to talk today about doing some little tweaks and some little things to personalize your business and help you stand out. And also, it's going to help take a few things off of your own plate so you can worry about some other stuff, too.

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So we're going to go through five things that I have on my list today.

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And there are so many more things than this. But this will get you started. This will get you in maybe the correct mindset that you can do so many different things, whether it's touching your customers in a way that they haven't been touched before by a marketing standpoint, or whether it's just that you need to stop doing things by hand and reaching out by hand, because even though it's automated, it doesn't mean it's not personal still.

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Right. So that's probably a mindset thing, but that's a whole nother conversation for a different time. So for today, I'm going to touch on these next five things. I want you to grab a pen and paper, jot these down if any of them sound like something you might want to do for your business. I want you to take action this weekend and try to implement at least one of them or the best one that you think fits your business.

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So let's get started. The first one is going to be doing a personalized video message. Now, when you have new customers coming onto your list, you can greet them with a personal video message. And there are a couple of companies that can handle this. Bonjoro is one that comes to mind. And there's also a new one called Warm Welcome, which is currently a deal on App Sumo's.

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So if you think that this is going to be something that's perfect for your business, I want you to head on over to the link in the show notes there is a link for this App Sumo deal Warm Welcome. It includes chat bubbles, video messaging, welcome videos that you can send to your new customers. And this is going to depend mostly on the size of your business right now, whether that is, you know, if it's just you or if you have a team or if you have a few people that can help out with this, or it's also going to depend on the size of your sign ups.

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Right. Because if you have a hundred times a week, this might not be a good option for you because you're going to be doing a lot of videos. Now, if that is something that you don't mind doing, maybe you set aside one or two days during the week for 30 or 40 minutes. You can bang out a 60 second to two minute video per sign up and then that's what you do. I know Pat Flynn and his team did this.

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I don't know if they still do it, but he did do it at one point and that's what he would do, just sit down and bang out a bunch of these welcome videos and you just go through the list, find out how many people signed up, create a quick welcome video for them. You can script it out. It could be the same thing for everyone and you just change the name. So if that's something that would work for you, that's a really great option.

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Number two, you can segment your sign up forms. Now, I have tried a version of this by inserting the links in my welcome email for new subscribers so that they could click their interest. I would ask them, what are you interested in? Why did you sign up for my lists and give them like three options? And what happened when they clicked? One of those options, my email campaign provider would go ahead and tag them. Now, that works well, but I have to say, I did check the numbers on that and only about eight to nine percent of my lists were clicking the email.

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So it doesn't capture everyone.

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So if you want to try something different, I would suggest doing it at your sign up form level. So if you have a segment that you can distinguish between whether it's do you have a new business or an existing business, if you have something like the. That you want to be able to segment to, I would go ahead and put that on the form, make it something super easy and something that they can click just or one click, not something that they can fill out because we still want to keep it with just a little bit of friction, you know, first name or just email and one click.

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The more things you add to the sign up forms, the more friction you get and the less likely that people are going to start filling out your forms. So one to three things on the form is probably the most that they want to do. Keep it like keep it easy, but also make it relevant. Once you have those segments, you can then send relevant educational or marketing emails that would appeal to that user more and then they would more likely stay longer on your list.

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Number three, along those lines of segmenting, you can also segment your list by location. And one of the big reasons to do this is maybe if you are talking about holidays, if you're based in the US and there's some United States holidays that other parts of your world aren't celebrating, maybe you want to send messages based on certain holidays or you can send messages based on certain times of the day so that your email click rates are increased.

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Because if you are sending your emails out at 10 a.m. US time, but you have people on the other side of the world, it's going to be the middle of the night and you're click rates for them might not be as high. So you can segment them by location. If you have a good email provider, they already do this for you. I use active campaign. I know exactly where all my people are signing in from, unless they're like weird hackers and they use some bounced IP address, which I doubt my people are doing that.

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But if you have a good email provider, they can do that for you. You can segment your list that way. Number four is if you sell services and products, you can implement a review or feedback and testimonial sequence after their purchases complete or their services are complete. Why? I suggest this is because you might feel weird asking people directly, especially if it's for services rendered versus a product. So if you set up an automation for it and it's out of your mind, it's less likely that you're going to either forget about it later or check it out.

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You might think. I'm not sure if Sue really she doesn't seem like the review type, so I'm not going to send it to her. We don't really know who's likely to leave a review. So this way you send it to everyone. You'll have an abundance of testimonials and reviews for your items and you can choose what you want to put on your website. But it's going to be great for you to have a pool of stuff. You want to send a sequence like a thank you after they purchase, wait a few days, wait five days to a week or so, and then send a request for a review.

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Some people will fill it out, some people won't. But you'll at least have a pool of things to pull from. All right.

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And the last one that I want you to think about is birthday goodies so you can send out birthday emails to your customers. And this can include maybe a coupon for being a loyal subscriber or if you don't have services that you normally try to discount, just sending a birthday wish can be just enough to put a smile on someone's face.

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Even if you just say, I know it's your birthday, happy birthday. I smile. Every time I see those come through in my inbox, my dentist sends them and I'm like, Oh, that's so nice. My dentist sent me a birthday card. So even something just as small as just saying Happy Birthday can go a long way to make you stand out because we are on so many email lists and just one or two of these coming through on our birthday is just so awesome.

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If you want to take it up a notch, here's one way that you can take this up a notch if you have group programs or higher ticket memberships.

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Now, I wouldn't do this for just your email list, especially if you've got thousands of people on your email list.

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But if you have group programs or higher memberships or one on one coaching, you can set up Web hooks to send out personalized handwritten cards from companies like Handwritten. And I'll drop that link in the show notes and I'll put a couple of more websites where you can find this. You can set up a Web hook to set up a date automation that when that date comes, it's going to. Trigger an order to be activated at that company to send a card to the customer so they will handwrite a card, mail it, stamp it, send it out for you, you never even see the thing.

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You just set up the automation, put what you want on the card. The first name is going to be on the customer contact when they sign up. And it's going to be somebody that's already in your membership or somebody that you're working with. So it's not going to be one of those fake email customers. And then the handwritten company is going to write that card for you and send it out. And you never even have to deal with it. It's all going to be automated once you set it up.

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So, again, you could set something up like that, maybe check in that everything's firing correctly and check your budget maybe every quarter to make sure that you're staying on track and you don't have like five hundred of these things going out. Again, it's probably not something you want to do just for every single Joe flow on your list, but that's your call. If you want to be if you've got money to burn and you want to keep these people and nurture them and go the long game, you can totally do this for anyone that you would like.

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OK, so those are the five things that you can do to personalize and automate your business. I want you to pick one of those or something similar. You can find your own and just add one new automation to your business this weekend that will make your business stand out and personalize your business to your customers.

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All right. So that is it for this week. I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode and would love to continue mastering your workflows and processes, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and join me here next time.