Meet Glenn
Glen Allen is the go-to CMO of digital course launches. As a multi-instrumental musician turned marketing consultant, he helps entrepreneurs scale five to seven-figure businesses by consulting them and their team through marketing and launching digital courses. He's the host of the Glen Ellyn Show, a YouTube channel about digital marketing, and an entrepreneurial podcast called Unstuck and Unstoppable. He also works as an unpaid chef, housekeeper and, chauffeur for three kids who call him dad.
What is the most effective way to build authentic connections with email list subscribers?
It's to provide value to them. Definitely an imbalance of value over information about yourself or your products or pitches for your products and services. Right now, everybody is having to do a lot of their business online and a lot of that is happening through their email. We are becoming a little bit inundated and saturated right now so it's really important to show up as a person, and not as a product, and to nurture your relationship with the people who have entrusted you with their email addresses and invited you into their inboxes by continuing to give.
For companies or organizations with multiple people, should communications be coming from the brand, or should it take that personal conversational approach?
Let's say you are an organization. I've worked in the corporate space, where we had this challenge of connecting more one on one with our audience and our potential customers and clients and leads, and we kind of had to pick a face of the organization, and that didn't have to be the founders. For a while it was me, and it was another agent of the company who was just best suited to showing up and being on camera or creating engaging content. Sometimes that means me writing in the voice of this person, but basically having a face and a voice that people can connect to instead of a brand or instead of a company is better. One of the ways that I recommend people do this is when you're inviting people to sign up for something like a lead magnet or something that gets people into your email community, and you want to take the relationship to the next level. I am a big fan of things that are video-based, things that have a person on camera, engaging with you, talking to you, showing the values, and projecting those through personality.
What are some of the best ways to attract people into our audience when we're building an online community?
A lot of reasons we're building an online community is number one: it's for the sake of the community. But also we're in business and we're not just in business, for the fun of it, and there is, of course, the commerce side of it, and we want to serve and help people, and we want to connect with people in a way in which it is financially viable for us. So we have things that we want to sell and offer that will help other people. When you're doing this, a lot of people are, you know, nurturing an audience from, say, a social media platform, or a podcast, and we want to bring the conversation in a little bit more intimately and deeper into, you know, non farmed land. Social media is kind of that rented space, whereas we have our community of people in our private groups and our email list. That's ours, especially your email list. So one of my favorite ways to build that, it's having some kind of a lead magnet or freebie that creates value for the people who are the ideal person to work with and serve. To do that in a way that is fully aligned with how you ultimately want to help them through your paid products, your paid offers your service. I'm seeing a lot of upfront mistakes with how they go about that. The best thing you can do for somebody is to solve a problem they have. A very small burning pain, that then gives them a next level, good to have a...
