Why Writing to Your TpT Email List Isn’t Slapping Words on a Page
Other teacherpreneurs will tell you to batch 4 emails and consider it done. They’ll tell you to send a “who you are” email or a “solve a problem email”. Which is a great start. But if you are taking the time to write these emails, don’t you want to earn the most from them?
Wouldn’t you like to write an email so good you have to silence your phone from all the cha-chings?
If email writing isn’t slapping the words you want to say on the page, what is the strategy behind email writing?
It’s What Your Teachers Going Through
Is she excited to go back to school? Is she scrambling to prepare for holidays and needs something fast? Is she overwhelmed and needs a break? Is she teaching a topic she hates?
Throw your ICA in the toilet and read a few teacher memes. It doesn’t matter if she prefers Sprite over Pepsi, has 2 kids, and drives a Toyota. It matters what she’s thinking (not what she’s drinking). Her favorites don’t matter. Her psychology does.
Knowing your teachers’ mental state helps you mirror that tone in your emails. Which is why this is done for you with the Email and More Starter templates. It takes experience in the classroom as well as research to know how to do this.
Imagine designing the perfect “aren’t you so excited to teach phonics email?”. Only to deliver it to an audience of teachers who teach sight words. Oops!
Or worse—sending that email not knowing phonics is a topic that is difficult for students to grasp. Which means teachers dread that topic more than testing season. And you just threw electronic confetti in their face to celebrate their frustrations.
So. Excited. About. The. Email.
DELETE.
You want to match your teachers’ current mood with your tone. You do not want to create an excited tone to match what you want teachers to feel about your product. That puts your subscribers on the fast track to the unsubscribe button.
Once you know what your teachers are going through, then you can design the email. But not in the way you think.
It’s Designing Emails With Strategy
Once you know what your teachers are going through and how they feel about it, then you need to decide what you want them to do after reading the email.
And for the love of email pick one of those. Not all three.
After you decide what you want to ask them to do, then you have to pick the video, blog, product. How do you decide?
You need to look at your TPT store data. What sells the most in this month? Design your emails around those products because that’s what teachers need and will buy. What gets read or watched the most this month? That’s the inspiration teachers need.
So you know what your teachers are feeling. You know what sells helps the most this month. But how exactly should you write the email? Does it matter?
It’s Presenting the Email So It Gets the Most Clicks Possible
Should you position the email as a list of 3 fun activities for students? Or should you write it as an email that showcases common student hang ups in the lesson? Or should you write it as a last minute, easy to use lesson for teachers who are cracking from stress?
Consider these scenarios:
Scenario #1 Lets say students around the world typically struggle with learning the difference in meiosis and mitosis. It’s a teacher fact that all teachers know. And you happen to have a product that solves that specific problem. Then position your product at the end of the email after talking about that student struggle and how to prevent it.
Scenario #2 Let’s say you have a topic that can be dry and boring, like memorizing the atomic model. Teachers know how to teach the topic. But they don’t know how to make it fun. Give teachers a list of 5 fun ways they can spice up learning atomic models. They will love this presentation because it gets them the information fast and helps them overcome the boring issue.
Consider the issue behind the lesson. Then design the email to solve the issue. Is it too boring, too complicated, a major struggle, or something else? Don’t address that in your email content. Address that issue through your email design.
Building and growing an email list requires more strategy than most TpTers have been taught (Because…umm…we’re teachers, not marketers). But sending emails needs to be strategic, if you want to make the most money from your email list possible.
If you like these tips, look at the Email Starter Templates that build these strategies into email templates that get you writing high converting emails immediately.