#91 BTS With Emily Claire, Founder Of The 10k Email Club
In September this year I went to a women's business retreat in Portugal and I met a woman named Emily Claire. She was handing out email strategies to attendees left and right and I quickly became obsessed with her. You know that feeling when you meet another entrepreneur and you're like ohhh we're going to be business friends? That's Emily.
Emily has been building a membership, The 10k Email Club, and I'm a huge fan. She is using a service membership-model to scale her copywriting services ... and it's getting her members HUGE results.
I'm trying something new today and I'm sharing an interview I did with Emily about her membership. You'll learn:
How long it really takes to see traction
What has worked to re-engage disengaged members
What marketing strategies have worked best for her
Let’s get into it –
What is your membership? Tell us the elevator pitch!
My membership is The 10K Email Club, a marketing community for female founders that gives their email newsletter a plan, a purpose, and a professional copywriter, every single week.
The 10K Email Club is the perfect “Done With You” solution for founders who aren’t seeing results from their emails but don’t have the budget to outsource them to a super fancy agency.
How many members do you have?
I have 35 incredible founders in The 10K Email Club right now, including a brand-new entry-level tier for founders just getting started!
What made you decide to build a membership?
I spent 7+ years writing emails for big brands, but I kept wondering how I could work with smaller founders, so I could have a bigger impact. Every time I talked to small business owners and founders, they were SO eager to write and send better emails. What was standing in their way? BUDGET.
It was wayyyyy too expensive to hire someone like me to do their emails for them. So I figured, why not build an affordable system that does it with them and gives them a community along the way?
Did you try any other digital products before launching your membership?
Yes, I’ve always been a massive fan of communities that connect founders. But nothing that was email-related. There are a few communities that give you email ideas but none that give you hands-on edits from professional copywriters.
The 10K Email Club is unlike anything else on the market… for now 😉
Were there any unexpected challenges or turning points in building the membership?
Oh gosh, yes! I launched a “club” with one member and had to really get clever to attract my second. It took about 5 months to REALLY see traction, I won’t lie. In the beginning, it definitely felt like I was building the plane while flying.
But the best thing I did was listen to members, send them a survey after 2 months, and figure out how I could make the club better for them and not just me.
We have weekly workshops in the Club, but we have members in California, Europe, and Australia… how the heck do you find a time that works for everyone?
The most recent challenge has been figuring out how to scale sustainably, without sacrificing quality. I’ll let you know when I’ve nailed that one!
How do you foster a sense of community among your members?
My favorite part of the 10K Email Club is the community feeling. Whenever I new member joins, I immediately call out 3 other members they should schedule a coffee chat with.
In addition to weekly workshops which are highly interactive, I do challenges every season, to foster a sense of teamwork towards a common goal. We just wrapped up a Fall Growth Challenge, where the winner (the member who saw the most subscriber growth, percentage-wise) received a spa gift certificate!
These things sound silly, but they make a BIG difference!
Oh! We also have a shared channel for weekly wins, which is literally a weekly dose of mood-boosting!
How do you handle members who become disengaged, and what have you found effective in re-engaging them?
I’ll start with a personal DM and see what’s going on with them.
All members have monthly email planning sessions with me, which keeps our contact regular, so I typically have a pretty good handle on how they’re doing. If somebody is super disengaged, it’s typically because something else is going on in their life, and I’ll offer them a quick call to chat about it.
How do you gather feedback from your members, and how has it influenced your membership offer?
I send an anonymous survey to members after two months and it’s awesome to see what works well and what isn’t useful for people.
Additionally, my team and I frequently poll members to see what workshops they find particularly useful or not.
What has been your biggest lesson about building a membership-based business?
It’s so much work, but once you get to a certain level of members, the community starts to take on a life of its own! I returned from my honeymoon (my team ran the club while I was gone, don’t worry lol) to see SO much life and energy. People responding to each other’s questions and celebrating wins, completely unprompted! That was an awesome moment, realizing that I didn’t have to breathe life into everything, but that it had taken on a life of its own.
Can you share a member success story that deeply impacted you or validated the mission of your membership?
Yes! I have two founders who joined the 10K Email Club with large social media followings. They joined because they were frustrated by the Instagram algorithms. One member joined the club with 138 subscribers and no email plan. She now has almost 2,000 subscribers, sends emails 2x per week, and generates more sales from her newsletter than from her 25,000 followers on Instagram!
Her success in the club is mind-blowing.
What marketing strategies have worked best for you to attract and/or retain new members?
Live workshops continue to work best for me, either with hands-on copy coaching or general email best practices catered to small business owners. Typically people know that they need help, they’re just not sure if I’m the person to solve their problem. Live workshops give me the time and space to really connect with people and showcase my insane enthusiasm for emails. And they convert really well!
👋🏻 Becky here! Let's breakdown what I love about Emily's approach:
She's scaling slow + steady – building community is a long game. There are a lot of cons to bringing in hundreds of people into a membership all at once. It's a lot harder to foster real connection between members at scale, so growing slowly is the best way to do it with intention.
She launched a service level membership first – If you have a smaller audience this is a great way to get started because you charge more if you offer a service, and then you can add a lower tier when you're ready to scale. She just added a tier for earlier stage founders without the 1:1 service that would benefit from the resources, workshops, and office hours.
She uses member feedback to drive programming – I'll die on this hill ... if you want your membership to be successful you need to co-create it with your members. Find out what their challenges are and leverage that to design your workshops, challenges, etc.
She has a quarterly engagement strategy – The 3-month mark is typically when you'll see member drop-off. Emily offers a quarterly challenge which gets people excited and engaged. Most importantly, it drives results for members.
She is focused on member results – She didn't share this in the interview but I know that she has members track their email performance each week so that they can tangibly see the results of being a member of her club. She designs workshops, challenges, and 1:1 strategies to help make sure her members see the results they're hoping for.
That's how you build a community-driven business –– keep killin' it, Emily! If you need help with making your emails work for you, or accountability to get them sent, I highly recommend checking out the 10k email club. (I'm not an affiliate, just a big fan).
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