.png)
Productivity with Zest
Productivity with Zest (formally Productivity Hacks) – The podcast for busy business owners and professionals who want to get more of the important stuff done....without burning out.
If you’re juggling a never-ending to-do list, constantly feel like there’s not enough time, or just want to make work (and life!) feel lighter and more manageable, you’re in the right place.
I’m Jasmine Clarke, a Productivity Strategist & Business Coach, and I help overwhelmed professionals and business owners create systems that work for them so they can get more done in less time and still have space for what really matters.
Each episode is short, practical, and packed with actionable strategies to help you work smarter, beat procrastination, and find a rhythm that actually feels good. No hustle culture. No rigid routines. Just realistic, effective ways to be productive on your terms.
Hit subscribe and let’s bring more clarity, focus, and zest to your work and life!
Productivity with Zest
30 | You Don’t Need to Be Everywhere. Just Really Good Somewhere
What if the secret to more sales wasn’t doing more... but doing less, better?
After chatting with this week’s guest, I found myself seriously rethinking how often my love of efficiency turns into just ticking things off the to-do list, without enough thought, intention, or breathing space. Lisa York challenged me (in the best way) to slow down, get clear on what actually moves the needle in my business, and then do those things really, really well.
Lisa is a digital sales strategist and the founder of Sell More Stuff. She helps small business owners to transform their marketing efforts into sales by optimising their sales funnel and creating emails that people actually want to read.
She doesn't use social media in any way, shape or form,
That’s right: she doesn’t use social media. At all.
Instead, she cherry-picks her marketing channels, keeps things intentional, and runs a tight ship with a small but mighty email list that converts like a dream.
This conversation is full of gold (and confessions from me) especially if you’ve ever felt stretched too thin or caught in the trap of trying to be everywhere. Lisa proves you don’t need to do it all. You just need to focus on what works… and then do it brilliantly.
This episode is for you if:
- You want to build a business without relying on social media
- You’re tired of half-doing too many things and want to focus
- You’re curious how email can actually become your best sales tool
- You love the idea of being productive without being busy
Want to see how she does it? Head to her website Sell More Stuff!, join her email list and experience her high-converting, high-personality email strategy in action. One list, one click and plenty of inspiration.
Join the FREE five day Fierce Focus Challenge
Let’s Stay Connected!
Loved this episode? Let’s keep the conversation going - connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook.
Grab Your Freebie: Productivity Mini Fitness Test - How fit is your Productivity? Take the quiz now and take targeted action
If this episode helped you, I’d love it if you could rate it and leave a quick review - it makes a huge difference! Just drop me a note if you do at jasmine@zestproductivity.com so I can say thanks.
🔔 Don’t Miss the Next Episode! Hit Follow and share this with a friend who needs it!
Hey and welcome to Productivity with Zest, the podcast that helps you get the important stuff done without burning out. I'm Jasmine and I live and breathe productivity strategy, the kind that gives you life and helps you get the important things done in a way that works for you. Here I like to keep it real and practical no fluff, all zest and no pick, just simple, doable strategies that help you focus, get organized and actually move forward. If you want to figure out what area of productivity is holding you back, take my quiz at wwwzestproductivitycom. Forward slash quiz. Now onto today's episode. Today's episode. Goodness me, you are in for a great episode today. My guest this week is Lisa, and she's going to blow your mind in lots of ways, but the thing that really stands out for me is there are so many things that we can do. Whether you're running a business or you're working in corporate, there are so many things that we can do. But Lisa gave me a reminder that, although there are lots of things we can do, we need to choose the things that we want to do and then do those things really, really well. So, without further ado, here she is.
Speaker 1:Hi, everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Productivity with Zest, and if you have ever shouted I hate social media while scrolling Instagram for the fifth time today, then this one is definitely for you. I am here with Lisa York, who is the founder of Sell More Stuff. She's a digital sales strategist, helps women ditch the stress and sell through email instead. She's built her business around saying no to social media but yes to results. So I'm really excited about speaking to her today and seeing how she gets the stuff that she needs to get done in her business without burning out, and hopefully it will help us all take some stuff away about how to actually sell through our emails and not get caught up in that social media algorithm. So hello, lisa. First of all, can you just introduce yourself, say who you are, and then we can keep going.
Speaker 2:Oh hi, jasmine. Well, thanks for having me on the podcast and thanks for the lovely intro. You're quite right, I'm not a social media fan. It's not that I've got anything against it. I think it's a brilliant marketing channel, but I just personally don't like it, and I've realized from talking to my audience that they don't like it either. A lot of them don't like it. So, yes, I do base my business without social media, but in my private life, my life is very busy. This is a productivity podcast, so you know I love talking about productivity.
Speaker 2:My mum says Lisa doesn't do things by halves, and so I've got four children. I had them all in four years and eight months, and since I've become a mother my eldest is 15 now we've moved house eight times and we've batted back and forth between different countries multiple times Australia, cambodia. I'm now based in the UK, in Lancaster, and during that time there've been all sorts of dramas and things going on. My husband's in the military, so he works long hours. He's often away. My eldest has autism. My second eldest has ADHD. There was a time when my third eldest had leukemia when my daughter was one years old. It's all been really crazy, and so I've learned to become very productive and very efficient. So I've learned to become very productive and very efficient and I've always run small businesses around all the chaos of family life.
Speaker 2:Having a business is me. I'm not mom, I'm Lisa and I really love that and I really find that fills me up. So, yeah, this is my sell. More stuff is my third business and, like you say, I really talk about the power of email marketing and how I create a system around that to work really hard for me, because I can only give myself maybe 15 hours a week to work and so in that time when I do work, I have to be laser focused and we are businesswomen, we need to make sales, and so I have created a system whereby my sales come through on autopilot with the big bonus. I don't use social media because I don't like it. My business works really well for me and I really love it. It fills me up.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. So you must have to be super efficient. You've said you have to be very laser focused. So when I say the word productivity, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 2:I think the first thing that springs to mind is efficiency. I love being efficient and I love getting things done at specific times. I allocate certain times to doing certain things, which means that my big picture is always how can I make sure those 15 hours when I'm working on my business, how do I make sure there is nothing else going on? I don't think, oh, I'll pop off and put the washing machine on, because this is one of the things that can happen when we work from home. Or I'll just quickly answer that email. Because I learned very early on, when I had my first child and I was pregnant with my second, I was doing a degree and at nap time I would be like, oh, it's nap time, oh, I'll just do an email and I'll just put the machine on and I'll just, you know, prepare dinner and then, before I knew it, I'd sit down, I'd start work and where the baby would wake up, dang, I've just lost my work window.
Speaker 2:So what I make sure I do in my life is I do everything I need to do, because we've all got that minutia and the boring admin, I get all that kind of stuff done. So then I allocate my work time and when I sit down for my work time, I've done my thinking, because I allocate time to think as well. You know, what am I going to sit down and do at my laptop today? And then I'm on fire and I get my work done and and I have two hours every afternoon, between one and three generally. Sometimes during the week I can grab a morning here or there, but I just make sure that that time that I allocate for work is just for working, and a big focus of that work is making sure that my business creates sales on autopilot, so I don't have to be thrashing around on social media.
Speaker 1:Amazing At the start of this, guys, if you'd have seen the bloopers and the outtakes. It took us half an hour to start this interview because my tech was not working. But one thing that really stood out to me with lisa was she said oh you know, it's fine, I can do it in a little bit of time if I need to go and do my mic, but she's like this is my work day. That really stood out to me because it was clear she allocates time and chunks time and blocks time for stuff and that is so, so crucial. You want to make your sales automated. You want that to be the easy, simple side. How on earth do we do that?
Speaker 2:well, I always think about it as a journey your prospects, your leads, the people that you want to become your customers. You take them on a journey with you, and so the first part of that journey is your marketing. So a lot of people choose social media, and I think that's great, but that's that first point of call that you have with them. I don't choose social media, I choose to do things like this. I love chatting to people like you, Jasmine, on their podcast, People hear me speak, but whatever marketing antic you have, you should always be doing one thing, and that is driving people to your website and from your website, you're trying to get them onto your email list and from your email list you're sending them through a welcome sequence and you're building a relationship with them with the intention of selling. Now it sounds quite simple and straightforward. It's actually quite nuanced, because what you need to do through that journey is take them step by step, incrementally, nudging them towards a sale and sales can often be a dirty word. I think particularly I hate to single out us women, but I think particularly with women we get all a bit icky and like, oh, I don't want to sell the thing and the way I look at it is we're not trying to flog them something you know we're not used. Car yard salesmen coming oh, hello, darling, you know, buy this old motor. Car yard salesman coming oh, hello, darling, you know, buy this old motor. What we're doing is we're giving them a solution to the problem. People wouldn't follow us on social media or listen to us on podcasts or come to our website or join our mailing list unless they were interested in the thing that we're offering. And our job as marketers and small business women and you know Our job as marketers and small business women and you know salespeople is to show them that we can help them.
Speaker 2:And that's what that journey is all about from the marketing through the website onto the email list and then building that relationship via email. You're just taking them through, guiding them by the hand, making it fun by the hand making it fun. I mean, I know that you're on my email list, Jasmine, and I get so much fun out of writing my emails because they're not stuffy, they're not like you know. Bye now, before time is up. I just make it quirky and interesting and I make it me. It's very me Like. If you speak to me in person, you'll realize that I'm probably very similar to the way that I am in my emails, because I'm just being true to myself and I'm having fun while I run my business, which is why it fills me up and I love it.
Speaker 1:Love that. Yes, I am on your email list. I listened to you on another podcast and you did a really good offer, I think, and it was like, oh, yeah, I want that. And I think it was if you were the 50th person who signed up and I was like, oh, come on, I'd be the 50th. I wasn't, but I'm on the mailing list and I feel like I got to know you through that mailing list.
Speaker 1:Like this is the first time we've actually interacted, but just reading your emails, I feel like I know a bit about who you are, because you're open about life, You're open about family, you're open about your circumstances and that is beautiful and very different than a lot of emails. And it's challenging to me, because it's not that I don't want to share that stuff. It just doesn't come naturally, it's not my natural instinct and that's what I want to get more towards, because I I love my podcast. That's my favorite part of my business, because this is me, this is 100% me.
Speaker 1:If you were to meet me in the co-op around the corner, you would get the same Jasmine as you get on the productivity with zest. And I was at some networking this morning and this beautiful lady came up to me and she said I met you before your podcast and now I've listened and you're exactly the same. And that was such a compliment, because that's what I want to be. I want to be that authentic, consistent, but I definitely feel like my emails need a bit of work. So what are your top tips if someone comes to you and says I think my emails need a bit of work?
Speaker 2:I think it's about relationship building, because people buy from people, and so the job of your emails is to build that connection. They may not be ready to buy when they join your email list, but if you can build a strong enough connection when the time comes when they want to buy something, they don't think, oh, I'll go off to Google. You know I sell how to make sales. People don't think, oh, I'll go to Google and like, oh, you know I need someone to help me make sales. No, they go, oh, I'll go to Lisa York. Just the same with you, jasmine. People would get onto your email list and they'll just say, if I need help and advice with being more productive, then Jasmine is the girl for me. You know it becomes a no-brainer because they've got to know you over time. You don't have to share anything in your emails that you don't feel comfortable in sharing. But actually, when you turn your mind to it, when you think about what you might say to your people, there's actually a lot that you can say. There's loads and loads of things that you can say to them, and it doesn't have to be too personal. You're not telling them all the explicit details of your life if you don't want to, but you can be personal in the way that you're saying it. So, for example, this Friday I'm doing a launch. I put an email out yesterday because I'm doing a call on Friday, and I put an email out saying at three o'clock I'm closing down the cart. After that I'm going off to pick up my daughter, lizzie, from school. And they all know who Lizzie is because I use her name. That's something that I choose to do. I don't mind using my kid's name, picking up Lizzie from school. Then, from four till five, I'm going to be doing the call and if you want to join, come in. There's my little call to action, Because at 5.30, I'm pouring myself a glass of wine. Although I've given them a hard deadline and I've got them to buy. My personality is oozed through that.
Speaker 2:What if I told them? Well, I haven't told them anything deeply personal. I've just told them I'm a mum because I'm going on the school run. My kids still need picking up from school. So therefore, I'm doing this within the boundaries of school time and motherhood and all the rest of it.
Speaker 2:And they know that I like a glass of wine on a Friday. They know what wine I like Pinot Grigio, because I like a big glass of Pinot Grigio with ice while I put the pizzas in the oven. They know that Friday night is pizza night. So, without saying all those things listing them out, because that would be quite boring I'm actually making it a fun experience being on my list, but at the same time I'm making the sales and I always just think if they're interested in it, they'll come, they'll buy it, and if they're not interested in it, I just think it's all just fun. I don't care, it doesn't matter to me whether people buy or not buy, but people naturally do because they like that. They've been on my email list and they feel like they've got to know me and then when they do meet me in person, they're just like you were saying in the co-op. Oh yeah, you're just the same in real life as you are in your email. So it's about relationship building.
Speaker 1:I love that word ooze. Well, I don't love the word ooze, I'm not going to lie, but I love the way that it builds up that picture throughout your whole email. Your personality oozes through it and it's unmistakably you. When I read an email, if I hadn't have seen who it was from, I would know it was from you by the tone, even by the way you space things out in the email. That's different than other people. It's your personality in the email and that oozing through and you write. You know you're not spilling your deepest secrets, but people are getting to know you and who you are and that you like a glass of wine on a Friday night. I love that.
Speaker 2:Yes, I do. Yeah, and that's the purpose of it. You know every email. People should get to know you just that little bit better. And the other thing about it is people can't steal your work. No one can copy and paste. I mean, people do, and I know that they do, but you can't copy and paste my story, my story's my story, just like yours is yours. And so if we can all just write to our own stories and yes, I've had exciting lives, you know like I've lived in Cambodia and it was just epic but people don't relate to that, people don't understand that, so I don't really talk about that too often. I talk about the school run and pizza night on a Friday and the woman who accosted me in the park because a dog came and sniffed me, or just mundane everyday things, but making it into a story.
Speaker 1:I love that. I feel like I separate my business from me a bit too much in my emails. I don't think I do it in other places. Maybe I do, and it's not because I don't want to share who I am. I just feel like I am my business and that's the most interesting thing about me sometimes, and maybe that's why I hold back a little bit. So you've given me a bit of a thought. I think I need to put some habits in and some intentional stuff there. At the moment I send one email, usually a week, sometimes two. If I'm launching something it's a little bit more, but they're very structured. I would say Probably they're not very storytelling. If I want to make that shift, how do I do it? Do I just start? Do I tell my mailing list I'm changing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would tell them that you're making some shifts. I would say to them I'm switching out how I do my emails and this is what I'm doing. I personally always take people along for the journey. So I'm very upfront with my email list because this is my third business. But it's a new business, it's young, I only launched it in January. So I take my people along for the ride. I'm like this is a really small list and there's only a few of you on this list. So you know I'm going to be very open about what I talk about. You know, I just take them along for my business journey and so, yeah, you can tell them if you're going to make the shift I think that's a good thing and tell them why you're making a shift, like what inspired you to make a shift, and then start writing into that.
Speaker 2:We've just met this morning in person for the first time. I already have stories. If I was you, I've got stories and I can see your eyes widening. Like what stories? Well, I know, for example, that your husband is home today and I'd be thinking, oh, did he have a day off? Does he work from home? Do they work together? Like they're questions you may not want to talk about those in your email, but they're questions that I would have. There are already stories, there are already things about you that intrigue me. I know that you shop at the co-op. I think why does she shop at the co-op? Is that because it's walking distance? It's a local store? Does she drive? Does she do a big shop in Tesco? You, you know like these things are all just things that you would do, but once you start to tap into the fact that you're going to share those things in your email, you would be surprised how many ideas come into your head.
Speaker 2:And there is a bit of a rule one thing per email. So what I do is I start with a story or a hook or an anecdote or something that I think will be interesting. I make a segue to talking about the thing that I want to sell and then I segue to that thing. I make a sort of a correlation between it. So, for example, you know your husband came in and he sorted out your tech and you can say, whilst I might not be great at fixing my microphone, I am good at productivity and whatever it is you want to sell, and lead that into your call to action. Now, the other thing I always do in my emails is I sell something or give a call to action. In every single email. What I'm doing is training people. As such People expect now to see a link to something that I'm going to sell. It's not always a sales thing. So, for example, when your podcast, this interview, gets launched, I'll write an email. It will be a separate email just for your podcast and the call to action will be to click through and listen to the podcast. So that's one email in its own right.
Speaker 2:Some people do newsletter style this week's news. I did this, and then I did an interview on a podcast. And here's this post on social media. And don't forget to click on my blog. It makes your head explode, because now you've given four different call to actions, not one. So I would make those into four different emails. If you've got four different things to say, what happens then is you realize that hang on, I've got actually more things to say than I have weeks to say it in. So you start emailing more frequently.
Speaker 2:Now, again, people get a bit rabbit in the headlights, like I don't want to annoy my list by emailing them too frequently. What I would say to that is do you read the news every day? Do you watch TV every day? Do you scroll on social media every day? Yes, you do all those things.
Speaker 2:People aren't opposed to doing things daily. If it was a daily email. People aren't opposed to looking at your emails and reading your emails. What they're opposed to is reading boring emails and, unfortunately, most of the emails that I open up, I just like, oh God, this is so boring and I delete them or I unsubscribe from them because they're not interesting me. Back to that whole productivity thing. What do we focus our time on? We focus our time on the things that we are interested in In terms of email. You're never going to sell anything from an unread email, so the job is to get them read, and the way that you get them read is by sharing little morsels, juicy tidbits, things about not necessarily your life, but your business or whatever you think might be interesting.
Speaker 2:Think of yourself having a coffee with a friend and she's like oh Jasmine, I haven't seen you for a month. What have you been up to? You tell her some stories and you dig through and just go. What are the key things? What are the interesting things that I would share with my friend that I haven't seen for a month, and it's the same as your emails. You were saying you feel quite detached between you as a businesswoman and what you put through into your emails. But if you can try and merge those together so your audience get to know, like and trust you, and do that through your writing, that's the key to starting to sell, because once they feel like you are a friend and you know they trust you because the other thing is you want for people to revere you. You want them to know that you are the person that can help them. You know, through the thing that you're going to sell, you are the person that can help them. And so it's that building of that incremental relationship, building it up slowly through time.
Speaker 1:I love that if you're on my mailing list, those people who are listening expect some changes and if. I don't change anything. You have to make me accountable, Call me out.
Speaker 2:Yes, Hit reply on Jasmine's email and say this is boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah or do I might edit this bit out and then I don't have to do it. No, I will. And you've challenged me as well on my frequency of emails, because it is that battle between. I don't want to be annoying, but you're right, if it's an interesting email, then that's fine. I've got a couple of people who email daily and I read them most days. They're quite interesting. Like I haven't actually bought anything yet, but I will do when I know it's the right time, and I think that's a big challenge for me now to bring my personality and who I am to my emails. Because my temptation is because I have a weekly now bi-weekly podcast. That's my email for the week. It's the podcast. And then I am doing several calls to action because I'm doing a different one in the PS. I'm doing one at the start listen to this. Then I'm doing do this, and I'm confusing everyone.
Speaker 2:Yes, they start at the top of your email and you say to them listen to the podcast. They'll think to themselves, well, I'll finish the email and then I'll go back to the podcast. If you've now gone on to start talking about something else, they will forget about your podcast and they won't listen to your podcast. So it's actually better to have that rule of one thing per email, including the PS. Now I know your English teacher would probably slap your wrists because a PS technically should be an additional thing.
Speaker 2:Ps, this is an extra thing, a different I'm going off on a different tangent to what the rest of the email is about. That's what a PS should be. But actually, really, in your PS you should just summarize your email, because what often people do is they read the opening line, which is also super important because that hooks them in, and then they go straight down to the PS. Now if your PS is something different to what you've got in the body of your email, in the body it could be listen to the podcast, but in the ps you've got going onto this linkedin post and have a read. They're going to miss all the other stuff. So the ps actually should mirror the email, even by the letter of the law. Grammatically it's not technically correct, but you know poetic license. We're business owners. We can do whatever we like, can't we? Yes, we can.
Speaker 1:We are the boss. I love that you're giving us a bit of a formula here for emails, because I love a formula, I love a system tell me what to do and I'll do it. And having that opening hook, really strong first line, the ps that summarizes, and then throughout it you've got the story, the segue and then the kind of back into the story and almost like the full circle, and then just one thing, one call to action, one thing rather than this Excuse me, frog in my throat Rather than this newsletter style. So I'm on a list with somebody in America and she has just switched to more of a newsletter style. It's very mixed. There's lots of different sections, there's random stuff in there, like about tv that she's watching, and it's good because I feel like I'm getting to know her a bit more. But it feels a bit chaotic and it's a bit too much. I preferred her old emails than this new style, but I do like that. I'm getting to know her a bit more yeah, and it's fine.
Speaker 2:You know, the getting to know you bit has to merge into the what it is that you want them to do, so primarily, like 98% of the time, the thing that you want them to buy you've got to find.
Speaker 2:This is where the segue is important, something that connects those two things together. So the story can be any old random thing, like I told a story in one of my emails about my son, who's a bit of a handful, and he came in and he got all stroppy about dinner because he didn't like it and I was telling that story and then I kind of go away and just think how the heck can I sell something out of that? But what I did was I used the segue. I was saying you can't choose your kids. You know you give birth to what you give birth to and they're yours and you've got to keep them. But you can choose the people that you get onto your email list through your opt-in process. There was my segue that made that completely random story into something that became a lesson and something that I could then sell.
Speaker 1:I love that. So you write the story and then you create the segue.
Speaker 2:Yes, I always start with the story. I think what is it I'm going to sell? Or I have a range of things that I'm going to sell. So I often write the story and then I go away and when I'm cooking dinner I'll go light bulb, moment, that's there. There's I'm cooking dinner. I'll go light bulb, moment. That's there. There's my segue and I'll come back to it and I'll write that in and then, once I form the email, then I'll do the PS and then I'll write the subject line, because sometimes I used to start by writing the subject line and try and shoehorn my email into the subject line. I'm just like this isn't, this isn't working, this isn't where I want it to go, because when I write I want to be creative and fluid. So then I always write my subject line towards the end and then I go back and I double check that opening statement, like what is going to give that pow? So people want to read, and I'll give you a clue what isn't going to give them a pow. So people want to read, and I'll give you a clue what isn't going to give them a pow.
Speaker 2:Hello friend, how are you? Hasn't the weather been nice today? I'm just like you lost me a hello. So personally, I never use a salutation. I do collect people's first names, but I use them in merge fields. What it means is that you put them into the context of the email, but I don't make it cheesy, I don't say you know. So, jasmine, would you like to buy my product? The other day I was talking about using AI to write emails and I was saying this email has been written by Lisa Bot, and so towards the end of the email I put in a merge field that would make it come out saying Jasmine bot or Sarah bot or Heather bot or whatever bot. You know, I used the name, so it's personalized, but I used it in a funny way. But I would never, ever, ever and you probably noticed this as well I've never opened my email by going hello, jasmine, how are you? Because I know I'm going to lose. How are you? Because I know I'm gonna lose you with that, because it's boring.
Speaker 1:I have not noticed that you don't do that, but I did notice. Jasmine bot.
Speaker 1:Yes, I honestly, I did, I loved it. I was like, oh, jasmine, bot, yeah, so that's really cool, I really like that. And so the thing that made me originally reach out to you, lisa, I love your emails, I love that work, but it was this no social media thing. And we cannot go further in this chat without addressing the elephant in the room. That is because all the teaching I seem to come across is yes, build your email list. We need to have an email list, but the way you do it is through social media and lead magnets and all that kind of stuff. You need to be using Facebook ads. That's the way to build your email list. And if you're not doing that, how are you building your email list?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really interesting when people say you need to be XYZ. What that is code for is I am selling X Y Z. Therefore you need to be using it, so that's fine. You know I'm capitalist. You know I want to make sales. We all want to make sales. I love that. You know there's lots of people out there.
Speaker 2:But I think the first thing that you need to understand is the distinction between marketing and sales. Now, in my mind and this is based on experience I've been a solopreneur my whole life. This is my third business. I've been creating sales for myself for 30 years and I am now applying all that knowledge to my business and what I've learned is that email is by far and away the thing that you need to make the sales. This isn't the marketing, this is the sales, and I'm doing the same thing. You know like you need email to make sales, but actually, if you just go on to Google and look at the stats, people buy things from email because they've got that relationship. So in my mind, because they've got that relationship, so in my mind, using email to make sales is the no-brainer. Then you've got the marketing. Now the marketing.
Speaker 2:There's a whole buffet of different things that you can use. There's a whole array of things. What I would say is pick one or two, test them out. I'm a big fan of doing stuff in your business that fill you up and that you really enjoy. So, yes, facebook ads might work really well and they do work really well, and I wouldn't ever deny that they don't Same with social media, just that I'm not interested in using that as my marketing tool, just the same as I'm not interested in using social media as my marketing tool. So you can cherry pick, you pick and choose the things in your marketing. I do it based on, like I say, what I enjoy, but also based on what works and also where your audience are. Social media is a brilliant, brilliant platform and I would never dismiss it as a good platform. I would just rather spend my writing time writing killer emails than I would writing social media posts, and I hear people saying all the time it's a numbers game. In fact, I wrote an email about this yesterday. It's not a numbers game If you can increase the percentage of sales that you get off a small list. So my list. I have only 100 people on my email list. I've started.
Speaker 2:In January, I switched my marketing on. I was doing things like this, podcasting or what have you. My sales funnel worked so effectively that I got such an influx of sales. I completely switched my marketing off and I haven't had my marketing on since March. So therefore, I've purposely not been growing my list and the reason why is because I've still been getting through the backlog of clients that have come as a result of that and I crunched the numbers yesterday 30% of those 100 people on my list buy from me. Now, in my mind, that is a lot easier to get 100 people and get 30% of them to buy from you than it is to thrash around on social media and try and get 3000 people to get the 1% sale which is quite a standard amount of sales off the standard list. It's a better focus of my time not using the social media and instead plowing my time into the emails, because that's the sales, and I do plan to switch my marketing back on. I'm going to do that come September because I've got plans. Then this is summer holidays, where mothers, it gets all crazy. And then September I'm going to start to increase my marketing and that's where the scaling comes in.
Speaker 2:But really back to your question how do I do it without social media is. I use other marketing channels and as a solopreneur, we have to be happy to leave stuff on the table. I know that there are a gazillion people out there on social media who would all love my stuff. They would all join my list, they would all probably my stuff. They would all join my list, they would all probably buy from me. But I'm just like meh, you know I can't do it. I can't do it all. I don't have enough hours in the day to do it all, so I'd rather focus my time on doing something like this.
Speaker 2:I'm coming onto your podcast. That's my marketing channel. I'm piggybacking, if you like, off of your audience. You've got an established audience of women who are really into productivity and a lot of people on your list to have their own businesses and I come in and I'm having the time of my life right now. I wouldn't be having the time of my life if I was on social media challenges.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of small business owners because they think they need to be doing all the things, because people are saying you need to do social media and you need to do Facebook ads and you should be on Instagram and you just have to go. I can't do. I can't do all the things I will never be able to do all the marketing. We'll save that for the big corporations who've got a marketing team. We don't. It's just me myself and I. But you just have to sit easy with just going. Well, I'll reject the things that I don't want to do in my business, but you do have to have a strong, high converting sales funnel in order to make the sales. So, yeah, that's how I get by without social media.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is so efficient. Thinking about that list of a hundred people and 30% buy-in, thinking about my list and like, oh, I would love it if even 20%, 15%, were buying from me. It would be amazing. So I think you've really challenged me and hopefully this has been really helpful for my listeners who are running businesses to put more time on doing emails. And I think what I fall into the trap of I want to get my email done and, just going back to what you were saying, you leave space between them, so you write the story and then you're cooking tea and then the segue appears like magic in your brain and then you go back to it and then you go back to the start, look at the hook and then you write the subject and it's. There's thinking time and creative space in that writing process. That really struck me.
Speaker 1:Whereas I write an email and I want to get it ticked off the to-do list, I want to be like email for the week done, scheduled a week in advance, don't don't have to worry about it, because I'm all about automations. I don't want to be tied to my business. A lot of my things run automatically. I've got lots of apps that talk to each other and tag and zoom and ping and you know, do all that kind of stuff. But I think I've been so focused on getting it done as a tick on my to-do list that I've removed the creativity out of it. Because if I am looking at my to do list and go right, I need to write an email now, I'll do it, I'll write it, I'll write the subject line first. I use AI quite a lot but my, my AI knows me very well because I use it so much, I input so much, so it helps me with my emails, in my tone and that kind of stuff. But I'm now challenged to stop leaning on my best friend, chat, and actually write more stories, because I think that's where I've become detached, because I'm not writing it from scratch.
Speaker 1:I'm being very honest now with you, my lovely audience. I'm not writing it from scratch like lots of us do. We're efficient and we tick it off and it's done and it's written, and I've had five subject lines to pick from, from the content that we've written together, me and my best friend, chat, and I'm feeling very challenged, which, if I'm feeling challenged, hopefully those listening are feeling challenged as well. I'm committing to change the way I write emails and to give more space for the creativity, because I do that in my business in other ways. I will mull over a project for a while not forever, I'm very quick at getting going with things but I will think about it and I will have headspace and the ideas come when I've got half term with the kids and I'm cleaning and I'm sorting something out or I'm at a park with them.
Speaker 1:That's when the ideas come and I think I haven't been treating my emails with the same headspace that I treat lots of other parts of my business. So thank you for that challenge and that's what I need to do. I want to give more value. I want to be more personal, more value. I want to be more personal, storytell more and hopefully sell a bit more in my emails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then it'll also become fun, rather than you sitting down opening your laptop and going, oh, what can I write today If you can make it fun and interesting. A lot of my thinking time I do on the school run, on the way home from the school run, because I don't have kids in my ears. I can't think about anything on the way to the school run, but when I walk home back through the park I do an extra loop around. I think to myself right now I'm going to think about emails, and the ideas come. The key thing is write it down, because then two hours later when you come to open your laptop, you'll think what on earth was it I was thinking about earlier? So I have a list just on my notes app on my phone. Often I quickly send myself a little audio message. Sometimes I audio myself and then transcribe it and then paste that into an email. That's a really good way of getting that thing out there.
Speaker 2:Because you're right, the thing about AI and increasingly people are using it is that it can start to sound robotic, jasmine bot. You can start to lean on it too much. I think AI is a really brilliant tool. I think of it as a really smart junior assistant who I don't have to pay. Thank you very much. Because you know I thrash ideas back and forth with AI all the time. Because you know I thrash ideas back and forth with AI all the time and I might write my email and then take a sentence and just go give me ideas to rewrite that. I know it's clunky, but I can't quite think why it's clunky. It needs to pare it down, or what have you. And then I'll go can you give me a couple of iterations of this sentence? And then, once I finish writing the whole email, I'll always plug it back into AI and I'll say give me constructive feedback. And sometimes AI will go here's a rewrite. I'm like no, no, no, I didn't ask you for a rewrite. And this is the other thing I like about AI you can really tell it off and it doesn't get offended. You could be really mean to it. It's like no, I didn't say that to you, I told you to do this. But I always go back through and say give me constructive criticism or feedback on this email. And it will come back through and it will say this is a good opening, you could tighten up this line. And then I change it and I feed it back in and say do a grammar check.
Speaker 2:So my email writing process happens over multiple days. The ideas come in, I do a bit of writing, I go away, I think about it, all the things that you've said, and even once I've completed the email, I think it's ready to go out. Another filter I put on is is this worth the reader's time? I'm coming into their email inbox. It's a very private space and they're going to be reading my email. Is this worth their time?
Speaker 2:And if it isn't, you have to be ruthless and just go well, gonna scrap it. So what I do is I send myself a preview but purposely don't read it straight away, and I purposely also read it on a different device. I always read it on my phone because it looks different on the phone, so I put in extra paragraphs and extra white space, and I do like little kooky things with the way that I word things and sometimes I use really small font and sometimes I put big font in just to make it fun for the reader, and so then I'll go back to it again and I'll amend it on my laptop. There are quite a few iterations that go on in the process of writing an email, but in my mind it's so important because that is the key to the kingdom with your business, because the business must make sales and email is where it's at in terms of making the sales.
Speaker 1:Right, I feel challenged thoroughly and I want to really thank you for that. So that's been wonderful. I feel like I could talk to you forever Before we finish. Have you got anything that's a major do or don't in terms of getting more sales?
Speaker 2:so I think probably the most important thing I would say is start doing it. Get out there, make your fluff ups, apologize in the next email, laugh at yourself. I'm very self-deprecating in my emails and I'm just like I made a stuff up of that, or and I tell people I tried this and that failed. But then when I tell them I've tried something else and it was a success, then they believe you. So I would just say get on out there, do it, go for it and you can evolve as you go.
Speaker 1:So if people want to check out your emails and peek into your world and connect with you, where do they need to go?
Speaker 2:Okay. So go to lisa-yorkcom and I want to make a lesson out of this as well, jasmine, because this is what you should do when someone says, what shall I do? Give them one thing to do, and that one thing is send them to your home page, your website. So mine is lisa-yorkcom, and then I know that when they get there, the rest will just unfold, because when they land there, they're going to see a slightly unusual home page, and then from my home page, I hope, to entice them onto my email list. They'll see the emails that are coming through and the journey starts, the relationship building starts. So a lesson and a call to action Send people to your website. My website is lisa-yorkcom.
Speaker 1:Efficient. A lesson and a call to action. I will pop that in the show notes as well, so that you can click straight there and start that journey. I do recommend getting on Lisa's email list, Even if you're just curious about how it might be a bit different. Get on there and I dare you to resist her and her charms.
Speaker 2:I dare you not to buy from me.
Speaker 1:I'm literally like oh, lisa, we need to stay on after this call. That has been wonderful. Thank you so much, lisa. You have been a breath of fresh air. I love your style. You are the same on this interview that I thought you would be from your emails, so I love that consistency and I really hope that my lovely listeners have got something great out of it today and I'm looking forward to working with you again in the future.
Speaker 2:Thank, Thank you. Thanks for having me, Jasmine.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, I feel seen. My key takeaway is definitely do less, but what you do, do it well. Lisa reminded us that not everything needs to be rushed, automated or crammed onto the to-do list automated or crammed onto the to-do list. And if you want your emails or anything in your business, in your work, to truly work, give them space. Let your personality ooze through, because your story, your style and your you-ness is what builds that connection. And that's all for today. Thank you for joining me on Productivity with Zest. If you want to figure out what area of productivity is holding you back, take my quiz at wwwzestproductivitycom forward slash quiz and I'll give you some tips to help you along the way. If you've enjoyed this, hit, follow so you never miss an episode. And if you're feeling generous, please leave a review, because it really helps. If you want to hear more, head to wwwzestproductivitycom. Until next time, stay focused, stay balanced and keep bringing the zest to your productivity.
