This week’s blog is slightly less related to the specifics of email deliverability. Instead I’m going to share my reflections after delivering a lot of training material in a fairly short period of time.
The last week or so has been crazy for me, with several one-hour presentations where I’ve been introducing the foundations of email deliverability to new audiences, as well as preparing and presenting the Five Day Email Deliverability Workshop that I’m co-presenting with Evan Samurin and Mark Penney.
Even though I spend so much time working on the development of my software, and working deep in the detail of email deliverability, continuing to do one-hour presentations on email deliverability is vital for me.
There are several reasons for this:
Firstly, it’s the best way there is of making sure that I stay on top of my game.
Secondly, because my presentations aren’t scripted and I’ll always go with the flow, responding to audience feedback and questions, it means that no two presentations are ever the same.
Thirdly, every presentation that I do is better than the previous one, and I often include nuggets of information that I’ve not mentioned before.
A great example is when I was talking about SPF in a presentation that I did last night (at midnight my time, for a mixed US/Asian audience!). Someone on the call mentioned that they usually just use SPF on the beach, and I came up with a whole new line:
“If you don’t set up your SPF right, you’re going to get burned”.
Maybe I should start a new career in deliverability-related jokes… or maybe I should stick to my day job!
On Monday of this week I also started presenting the 5-day Email Deliverability Workshop with Evan Samurin and Mark Penney. As I write this, we’ve finished Day 3 and I’m really looking forward to presenting Day 4 later on. This is partly because I’ve loved sharing so much content and can’t wait to share more today, and partly because today is all about my favourite part of the RACE model – Engagement.
I’ve learned many things during the marketing, preparation and delivery of the workshop and thought I’d share a few of them here. You may know some of these already, but I’m sharing them because we can all do with a reminder from time to time, and also there might be something in there that you hadn’t considered, and which might apply to you.
Firstly, when you’ve got the right offer, selling something is easier than you might think! When I created the offer for the workshop, I only offered it to a small subset of my list and didn’t spend much time on the sales page as the negative voice in my head told me that only a few people would be interested in it. I was wrong! So I shared the offer with my entire audience and I’ve been delighted with the response.
Secondly, when you prepare the material for any kind of training event, it’s a great way of forcing you to re-evaluate everything that you’ve done before. What’s worth keeping in there, what’s best to change or remove completely? How can the material be simplified? Do I really need a slide for this part? Do I really need this much structure? Or can I make things more open-ended and be able to respond to the needs of the attendees as we go?
Thirdly, do you really need to plan every last point you’re going to make during each session, or can you deliver it as much as possible “from the heart”? Because I’m presenting on a subject that I know inside out, back to front, I find it much easier to ad-lib as I go, using slides or other plans as a very rough framework but not much more than that. This means that what I’m sharing can “flow” so much better.
Finally, don’t spend too little time on the “basics”. I was slightly surprised just how many people who signed up for the workshop (and therefore have mostly been receiving my emails and blog posts for a while) weren’t all that well versed in the basic fundamentals of email deliverability. So, where I was expecting to go more into the detail, it turned out that the majority of the content that I’ve shared so far is the very simple, yet totally essential aspects of deliverability. Sure, we’ve gone into more depth in several areas as well, but it really is vital to get the foundations right first before getting right into the detail.
I know that most of what I’ve shared today doesn’t relate directly to email deliverability, but I’m sure it will resonate with many people who read this post. And, since the biggest reason that I’m on this planet is to help people, regardless of what it is that I’m actually helping with, I thought it would be good to share my thoughts.
Can you take one or more of the things that I’ve learned and apply them to what you do in your business? I’d love to hear from you if you’ve found today’s post useful.