Jeff Felten is an email marketing strategist for the last 4 years, and a professional copywriter for 3 years, helping service-based business owners leverage their inboxes in non-sleazy ways to grow their businesses. He has cracked the code of making a Welcome Sequence successful by being authentic. Since 2018, Jeff has written dozens of email campaigns and +1k marketing emails and helped clients drive more than $100k in email revenue. Jeff focuses on having a human-centric approach to email marketing instead of a traditional corporate approach. Looking at the way we write “copy & subject” lines, the content we share, the way we talk about our offers, and the way we sequence automated emails. He understands that people long to connect with other people, not companies or departments.
Soon after Jeff graduated from college, he was involved with the opening of a coffee business. After gaining experience, he went on to establish his own coffee roasting firm and decided to pursue marketing and brand building full-time. Copywriting was the means by which he accomplished this. He traveled to Nashville in order to complete his education and become a story brand-certified guide. He focused on email marketing because of all of the different kinds of copywriting which was what he most enjoyed.
In 2022, he made the decision to concentrate his efforts on proprietors of service-oriented businesses. He believes that gaining people’s trust should be the primary priority because it is the most significant factor overall. Before someone will engage in a conversation with a salesperson, there must first be a significant amount of trust established between the parties. The first objective he has set for himself is to initiate the connection by gaining their trust and the length of time between sales gets cut down significantly as a result.
There are six components that make up a human-centered strategy for email marketing. Copy is certainly one of the most important things because individuals want to connect with other people more than they want to engage with organizations and departments. Both the manner in which you write and in which you portray yourself to others are greatly important. Getting people to engage with you is the ultimate goal for service-based brands, and presenting yourself as a real person rather than a department. This will increase the likelihood that people will let their guard down and start talking to you. People long to strike up conversations with other humans.
The second factor is appearance, namely the way that your emails get received. Keep the email design really simple because it feels more human. Trust is the third component in a strategy for marketing that is oriented toward people. There are a lot of various strategies to build people’s trust, but Jeff’s number one choice is generosity. Give time as much as you can to teach everything freely and create content that is super helpful.
The way you sequence your emails is the fourth component of effective human-centered email marketing, to mirror the real-life conversations you’re having. The actual content of the email constitutes the fifth component, value-based, value-driven, helpful tips, and case studies add value to the readers. The last tip is how you pitch your offers, making your offers when they’re relevant in the conversation. Don’t make the email completely focused on sales straight away.
Jeff focuses more on psychographics rather than demographics. Identifying what it is that your customer really wants or needs by doing your research and writing targeted copy that actually feels like it’s written to a specific person and not to a mass general audience.
In this episode:
[02:42] Jeff explains how becoming a story brand certified guide helped him write persuasively.
- Deciding to focus on service-based professionals because the resources on the internet for email marketing are geared towards e-commerce or retail brands.
- Service professionals require a relational and human-centric approach.
[04:57] The first step into writing a great email in order to get a sale.
- The most important is to focus on earning trust first and foremost.
- Face-to-face interactions are hard to replicate through email or social media.
[07:05] Jeff goes into more detail about his one big tip.
- The use of testimonials as social proof.
- Speaking to human beings and relating to the emails that they receive.
[09:55] Talking about ways you can earn trust.
- Be generous with your time as much as you can to teach and give content freely.
- The fourth aspect of human-centered email marketing is the way you sequence emails.
[12:00] The last tip is how you pitch your offers.
- Make your offers when they’re relevant to the conversation.
- Defining your avatar work.
[15:50] Being a multifaceted writer who can shift from one client’s needs to another.
- Jeff’s messaging training helps him to identify a broad framework to be able to leverage the subject matter expertise of a client.
- Focusing more on psychographics than demographics.
Watch the Interview:
Learn more and reach out:
- LinkedIn: Jeff Felten
- Website: Content Remedy
