Unknown Speaker 0:08
Hi and welcome to the motorsport coaching podcast sponsored by motivate Training Management. This is a podcast where we talk to drivers and industry experts to help you maximize your performances. Let's get started with today's show.
Unknown Speaker 0:28
Hello, crew and welcome to episode 125 of the motorsport coaching podcast. I am your host, Belinda Isley, and this week, I'm going to be talking to you guys about the importance of having our newsletter. Yes, our newsletter, but those who worked with me for a long time, have been following me know that I'm very passionate about motorsport being a business. One of the most important things about having a newsletter is the fact that you actually own that IP. So it's something that is yours. Unlike social media, unfortunately. And as we had that incurrent Tibet last year, or the year before, when Facebook and Instagram crashed everyone's life were crazy. And because we didn't own those pages, and we still don't own those pages, so although it is fantastic to grow your fan base on social media newsletter is a type of social media marketing. And it is, again something that you actually own and going forward. And it's also a fantastic tool to have for sponsors. The reason being again, is because this is basically a warm audience, and that that data around that demographic, and really, basically all the analytics kind of things, you can get more information from a CRM, so a newsletter content provider, then what you can from social media. So newsletters are amazing way to communicate with your customers, or subscribers or your fans, whatever you want to call them. But it's a really personal way. It's amazing to deliver your right message at the right time, in and in attempt to engage as well. So again, you own that. So run with it. It's your branding is your voice, what you're actually put in within the newsletter is completely up to you. It doesn't have to be written, it could be a vlog, it could be a podcast. Basically, it's just something it's just a means of communication, of engaging with your fans on a personal basis, as opposed to social media, where it's kind of useful one post generically or the other good thing about having a newsletter is that unlike social media, is that you're actually targeting a warm audience. You will we know sorry that there's lots of social media platforms at the moment. So if you're posting constantly on Tik Tok, where you're you're missing out on fans that are predominantly Facebook, or Instagram reels, or Instagram posts or Snapchat. So you're cutting down your reach to that specific market. If you're having a newsletter, these people are really interested in following you on your journey. And so therefore, it's a lot easier to communicate with them to sell them basically items going forward, to get them engaged in on your journey going forward. And ideally, even possibly, to get them on board to be a spot to go for. And so it's also a better platform to promote your sponsors. For like when they have a sale or a new product launch, that you can send these campaigns out directly to your database is easy to engage with. So send through merchandise or even going forward. In a few weeks here on the podcast, we're going to have a discussion around starting a membership. So how to grow your fan base by starting a membership, which is also going to hopefully get you some money in for sponsors in 2023. You can also set up a tab within Facebook where they can actually go on to your Facebook page. And there's a facility that they they connect up to your CRM program where people can actually go into Facebook and sign up to receive your newsletter. Again, with a newsletter, you don't want to actually call it a newsletter. So this is where your branding comes into it to your voice. And so you want to have something unique other than, you know the motivate newsletter, so I call my the motivate manual. It's not too creative, I guess. But I needed something at the time. But of course using your brand, and what you want to be known for what kind of direction you're wanting to take your brand is how and why you would name your newsletter going forward. And again, as a kid saying that motorsport is a business and so we're needing to continue to list go fans that are going to follow our journey. You know, off social media. We know that our fans love seeing our social media posts, but this is a great way to get A little bit more close and personal with them.
Unknown Speaker 5:04
Excuse me. So as we say fans love to say their favorite athletes perform on the track. And many of these athletes have legions of fans that follow their every move on social media. So it's not unusual for athletes to have 1000s of fans or hundreds of fans that follow them on social media. But if you want to build your own personal brand, you need to keep in contact with those fans. And yes, you can keep doing social media content creation. But again, it's not always going to hit every one of those fans. And also that content creation isn't going to be applicable for each of those social media platforms. So as previous mentioned, that when you're getting started with motorsports, when you're trying to build your brand, it's really important that you just try and identify one or two social media platforms that you want to try and promote. You can go across all the platforms. But of course, if you're not concentrating on one or two, those other platforms, it's just going to be platforms to raise your brand awareness. So what who does how to who doesn't use letters, there are a lot of free resources out there that you can use. And all of these, this information, and the links that have been mentioned will be in today's show notes. So all you need to do after today is go to preferred platform. And here's the show notes, which will take you over to motivate twenty.com.au forward slash podcasts. And you will see today's episode with the show notes with all the links, and as well as a guideline that you can download as well. So what are the services that motivate does offer is setting up your newsletter. And if we do use MailChimp, but there are other service providers like Active Campaign Kajabi, some of them are free, some of them are paid. Again, most of them are free, up to a certain amount of subscribers. So with MailChimp, it's a free platform that you can utilize up until you get to 500 subscribers. So if you're getting 500 subscribers on your database, that is awesome. That's a fantastic stat that sponsors would love to know. And it's fantastic for you to promote your services, merchandise, your sponsors, products and services going forward as well. So within MailChimp, I'm just gonna go through a few services that actually also offer other than just being a CRM. So obviously, they do have email marketing, and they also do automations. And they've got signup forms that you can embed into your social media platforms for people are going to sign up to that newsletter directly. They do assist you with social media ads, they've got online stores, but the great thing that I love about MailChimp is that they do have basic templates available. So if creative design or if knowing where to start is quite daunting for you at this point of time. Don't worry, all of that information is available [email protected]. And of course they do have an analytics session where you can break down all your data. So it's important to know things like when people are joining, when you send out the newsletter, how many people are opening? What time is the best time to send that newsletter when you're going to get most engagement from your fans to see what your message is all about. So what do you include within a newsletter? This is a fantastic opportunity to work on any new fans, Team crew members. Again, these are your peeps, um, you decide what you want to call your fans. And you could simply just call them fans, I haven't haven't as you know, I call you guys crew members. And I also call them team members depending on what platform I'm actually on. But again, find something that's going to resonate with your brand and run with it, call them those things. If not fans are great. This is an option to showcase any of the latest news. So things like your race results, if you've obtained any injuries, or you're coming back from an injury or a bad accident, showcasing that recovery process. If you've got any new sponsors that have come on board since the last time you've done a newsletter, have you lost any sponsors during the last month or so and you want to say your last thank you and and maybe even go into details as to why the sponsorship is ending, or or not. But of course, it is a good avenue to promote those sponsors.
Unknown Speaker 9:16
And also personal details. Other guys do some notes really obviously, and personal information. So obviously personal information that you're willing to share. So like did you get a new cat? And did you welcome a new baby within your family? Did you start a new job, any of that personal information? Again, people are investing in you so they want to know what's happening outside of the racetrack as well. So include that personal information within that new strategy. As mentioned, loads of opportunity to promote your promotions. So for both yourself, so that could include things like your merchandise, you might be running a competition, you might be giving away tickets to the next race meeting. You might have corporate hospitality tickets that you can give away You might be hosting a networking event that you can be, again, providing tickets. But it's also promotions for your sponsors as well. So newsletters are pivotal in driving these kinds of type campaigns. So the newsletter, so the so your sponsors could be having a promotion coming up like a Black Friday sale or Christmas sale, it could be just Father's Day Sale. Basically, anything that you can help promote your sponsors, and to get themselves is going to be ideal in this part of the newsletter. The next thing to record a newsletter is, of course, the events. All right, so your upcoming race dates, whether you put on the whole year of the whole year of your racing calendar in the first one, and you have that or you change it up each month is completely up to you. You could also include some sponsors, meeting greets. So if you're doing a networking note, or if you're doing something with your sponsors, like if again, if your sponsor has got an opening launch of a new shop, and they've asked you to bring down the vehicle, you might want to promote that. He knows, you might want to promote that and have your event section as well. But again, it's your newsletter, you can put whatever you like into that section, I'm discovering some ideas, I thought could go in them. You may also want to have another section purely just around sponsors. So you may do a sponsor spotlight session, where each month you focus on one of your new sponsors. And you can give a little bit of blurb you can do a video with them who get a written testimonial, you can obviously put their link to their social handles or link to their website, you could run a special with a discount code that could give you an affiliate link that you can financially get a rebate for every sales that is made from that league. So there's loads of things that you could do under that sponsors Banner as well. You could do a giveaway section. Again, this is a section for yourself, or for your sponsors to provide things like tickets to the event merchandise, fun things, to kind of get more engagements, like example, share this newsletter with your friend and go into the drawer to win a merchant merchandise pack or it could be corporate hospitality tickets at the next event. So again, there's lots of opportunities there to use a giveaway to get some engagement from your fans as well. And also, you might even want to have fans in the spotlight as well. So if you're really close and personal with your fans, you might want to showcase one of them each month, so I can do like a member of the month, we've got our toolkit, I've got an investor. So we're dealing with an investor off the month and bit of insight into them, and you know their race to their race history. But there's loads of things that you can include within the newsletter, you want to include things with text, photos, and a call to action. So where do you want your fans to go to so ideally, if you're having a giveaway, if you've got a website, you're going to refer them to that website. If you don't have a website, that's okay. There are services or like code about me, which can just give you a single page. Next week on the motorsport coaching podcast, we are going to be talking about websites, we've got a website professional and coming and going to go in more details about what to include in a website. But if that financially isn't where you're at, at the moment, you're just getting started. That's okay. That making sure that there are some links within that newsletter for your fans to go definitely to your sponsor sites, at least, including juice, they are fun, everyone loves to have a look at it funny, Jeff, these days. And of course, you only need to use them if it is part of your brand. So if your brand is fun and engaging the DiffServ code, but if no if it's more serious, and more businesslike and probably not.
Unknown Speaker 14:02
When you are before you send out the newsletter, just ensure that you do preview it on both the desktop and mobile views just to ensure that the layout is the same. Sometimes when it goes to a smaller layout into a mobile layout, you might lose certain content, so you might need to play around with it. But make sure you do that before you press that send button. And of course within the footer, which is the bottom of the newsletter, that should always have your social media handles. So you're at motivate dot t out motivate underscores whatever it is, it should if you do have a website, have that link to your website or have a link to your mobile number wherever so I can get in contact with you and if required to have the privacy requirements. But again, making sure that there's somewhere easy that people can get in contact with you should maybe they'd be willing to discuss possible sponsorship opportunity. Excuse Then, and of course, you want it to finish off the newsletter. Again, these are just some ideas, you can add whatever you want. And of course, a lot of those free CRMs do have some templates that you can follow, you can just plug in and design away within your brand and, or whatever content, these are just some ideas. But with the signature at the end, I always do encourage you guys to have an image of yourself without your helmet on so people can actually see you. Because again, if they haven't seen you for a long period of time, they may forget who you might have crossed paths at the racetrack. And they signed up there and they forgot who you are, or they only met you, or they only followed you on TV. So do have that image without your helmet on. Alright, so how often should you send out a newsletter, what again, it's completely up to you, there's no wrong or right way, I would say minimal at least once a month, that's fine. If you love doing, of course it is time time consuming. So if you don't have the time or the resources, then once a month, but if you do love it, and this is what you're up to, and this is the next step in your career, and you're really looking to take your career and make it into a business and into a full time career, then, you know, maybe do it weekly. But again, it's completely up to you There's nothing wrong or right. But things you do want to look into, as previously mentioned, is to analyze that data. So what time did people open it? How many people actually viewed it? Did it actually get delivered to everybody on that list? How many people actually clicked on to those links. And you know, over a few months, test all of those different elements or test the timing of when you actually send that newsletter, do you get a better engagement, if you send it on a Monday night at 7pm, as opposed to a Friday at 12 o'clock. Spent if you send it out a Friday at 12 o'clock, and you seem to have more than 30% Open it well, then that's fantastic. So looking, you want to ideally have somewhere around about 30% open rate with a newsletter when you starting out. Other things to include within the newsletter is that subject line. So really the subject line is apart from the content of the actual email. If your subject line isn't engaging, and really eye catching, I guess we know that a lot of people get emails every day, and they probably skim through to what they're going to open. So your subject line is really, really important. It is really a turning point for a successful newsletter. And and then a good newsletter subject line, it should be focused on a clear message and statement. Having like the latest updates isn't really good enough so pros that we probably would have done myself out for having motivate trading update a few years ago, but now I do try and have a subject line. And again, when I said about doing that better testing, you can also test those subject lines. So for example, you may send it out Friday at 12 o'clock with one subject line. And you might say that there's a low opening rate, where you might go again and change that subject line and then rescind it on a Monday at four o'clock, and test to see what subject line work best for you. So think of the subject line as your crucial statement that you want your subscribers to really want to engage and to go Yeah, I want to read what's inside of that. So out my line for this week was Do you need more race fans because we have an upcoming social media workshop? All right. So hopefully people are going to read that and going Yes, and then we're going to click in and read the content that we have included in that body.
Unknown Speaker 18:39
So the subject line needs to be enticing clear and should say exactly what the newsletter is about. So yes, my upcoming newsletter is all about growing your social media fans because we do have an upcoming masterclass about that the subject line shouldn't be any longer than six to 10 words. So you do want to kind of keep it as clear and sharp and concise. But you also want to get that point across. There are some tools that you can utilize to help picking the best subject lines. And I'll add those into the show notes. So again, distress how to motivate twenty.com.au forward slash podcast and look for today's shows. And those tools for the subject lines will be included in the show notes. what to avoid, there are certain words that you need to stay clear of because a lot of again, CRM still have algorithms as well. The word newsletter should never be used. So if you can't get creative with the name, certainly don't call it Bob Smith newsletter. All right, you might want to call it definitely not Bob Smith update either. But it could be Bob Smith erasing results. Again, I'll have those links. But of course if you do need any ideas that is a great social media piece that you can actually put onto your platforms. Hey guys, I'm studying I'm thinking of doing a newsletter. I want to know this is a competition. I've got a merchandise pack to giveaway, I want to know what is the name for that newsletter, pop it in the comments below, or DMS or write your answer below. So there's a social media piece that you can do straight away to help you come up with that newsletter, ID. It's also recommended to avoid spam names like free, and certainly don't put the subject line with a capital letters on Okay, so you need to have that mix of capital and small letters in that subject line. And of course, if it's in your brand use emojis, so I love an emoji. So I definitely do use emojis. But of course, it's depending if it's aligned with your brand. If it's not aligned with your brand, then don't use emojis. But you certainly can use the emojis within their subject lines as well. So what should the appearance of the newsletter look like? Well, again, that's completely up to you. Set it doesn't need to be written, it doesn't. It can be a video blog, it can be a podcast that's put into that newsletter. But basically, it's that point of communication. With those fans that love you. You need to obviously brand it accordingly. I'm doing a video and I'm just waving my head around. So don't worry if you're watching the video, get it. But if you're listening to this podcast, obviously you won't, but branded to you. So obviously motivate colors are red, black and white to our newsletter is red, black and white with all the colors of the services that we offer. That's why it's another important reason to develop your brand. If you haven't already developed a brand, I get up, put some tools into today's show notes that kind of work with you, I will help you identify what color scheme to use. Again, I can help you identify the logo. If you're wanting to play around with your own logo designs. Again, there's a free resource called canva.com ca nba.com. I'll put that link in the show notes that you can certainly go there you can even play around with those color schemes. And you can even make yourself a logo. There's some templates in there. But again, if you don't have a brand, this is a perfect opportunity to start working on that to get started. Guys, that was all I have. I was just going to do a quick one it turned out to be 20 minutes, but that's okay. I hope it's some coaching points to get you started about developing your newsletter of course at any time. If you need any assistance, please do getting in contact with me at win at motivate training.com Au. As mentioned, a motivate does offer the service of setting up these newsletters for you and actually during your monthly newsletter. So if you are quite time poor, and resource poor, we can assist during that monthly plan also includes through social media, social media content planning. I'm losing my voice this week, and also a monthly coaching call and 12 month access over onto our membership site called the toolkit. So I'll put the links onto that service if you are interested over in today's show notes. But of course they are available, motivate training.com.au forward slash and management services.
Unknown Speaker 23:11
As mentioned, we do have an upcoming grow your social media masterclass. This Wednesday, the 31st of August at 7pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, I've got Ed Smith coming from a social sandwich, we're going to be talking about the latest trends with social media marketing, and how we can use analytics for your diner, for your marketing and for sponsorship, but also to answer any questions that you have about increasing your fan base over on your preferred social media platform. So if you're interested in training that webinar, it's motivate training.com.au forward slash grow your fans and see so grow your fans MC but of course you can find it over on our website. And in today's show notes. The replay from our last episode 10 things you can do now to get sponsorship is still up and still available. So there is that replay as well as the workbook so if you haven't already, I'll put that link in the show notes. Don't worry guys, I'm really sick of saying it. So I'm sure you're getting sick of hearing it. But it is are there as well as today there will be all of his information into a workbook and with how to set up your MailChimp account from scratch for that free account. So please head over and download that PDF and get those newsletters up and we'll be happy to be one of your first subscribers and offer you some feedback as you go along over the next couple of months. Have a fantastic week. Stay safe and hope you can join us next week when we talk about what to include in a website.
Unknown Speaker 24:47
Well, thanks everyone for listening to this week's show. I really hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. Now remember all the show notes with the links and the specials mentioned in today's show are available. overwrap motivate training.com Today you if you haven't already, I'm really proud Chad if you could head to iTunes or Stitcher typing motorsport, coaching SUBSCRIBE And leave us a review each week or read them out and you're going to monthly George would a fantastic price. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at motivate train.com Today you are head over to our Facebook page at motivate t until next time, take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
