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Join for freePosted: Tue 7th Jul 2026
In this webinar, expert Minal Patel explores how today's email marketing platforms can simplify your processes, save you time and improve how your email campaigns perform.
You'll gain practical insights you can apply across a range of tools, including Constant Contact.
Minal guides you through what to look for in an email marketing platform, how to design effective emails and the small changes that can make a big difference to your results.
How modern tools can simplify your email marketing
Key features to look for in email marketing platforms
The essential elements of good email design
Ways to improve engagement and results using the right tools
Email marketing top tips
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Amy: Hello everybody, and welcome to today's Tech Hub webinar. My name is Amy. I'm a programme manager at Enterprise Nation, and it's great to have you with us today.
If this is your first Tech Hub session, Tech Hub is a collaboration between Google, Sage and Enterprise Nation. It's been created to help small businesses access the practical technology they need to run and grow their businesses with confidence.
Today's session is all about email marketing, and specifically how you can make simple, practical improvements that get you better results.
Whether you've been putting off sending an email to your list, or you want to get more from a platform you already use, this session is for you.
We are joined by our expert speaker, Minal Patel, founder of Marketing by Minal, who has worked in marketing for over 20 years and has spent the last decade helping small businesses and start-ups build simple, consistent email habits.
Minal understands exactly what it's like to run a business while trying to keep on top of your marketing, and everything she shares today is practical and immediately actionable.
In this session, Minal is going to walk us through how modern email platforms can simplify your marketing, what to look for in a good platform, how to design emails that people actually want to read, and the small changes that will make a real difference to your open rates and engagement.
Whether you're just getting started with email or looking to improve what you already do, there'll be something useful for you today.
Before I hand over to Minal, please add any questions you have in the Q&A box rather than the main chat, so your questions don't get lost. We will answer questions at the end.
This session is also recorded, and we'll share a follow-up email later today with the recording and resources.
Without much further ado, I'll hand over to you, Minal.
Minal: Thank you so much, Amy, and thank you to Enterprise Nation, Google and Sage for asking me to come and talk to you.
I love simple things. When you're working on your own, that is the best way to do things. It all needs to be doable, right? Everything from sending an invoice to email newsletters.
I work on my own. This is me. I do everything. And I go through exactly the same struggles that you do with my time and trying to make everything manageable.
So today, I'm going to go through some easy ways for you to improve your email marketing. No overwhelm, no faff and definitely no jargon.
I want to start with this number that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I read it.
This is from research by Constant Contact that came out last year. Nearly half of small businesses, that's 44%, say that email is their single most effective marketing channel.
The year before that, it was only 23%. So in one year, it's nearly doubled. That's not a small shift.
That's a lot of business owners realising something that, if I'm honest, I've believed for a long time, the last decade and a bit more: that the inbox is still one of the most powerful places to build relationships with people who already know you.
So the question I want you to keep in mind today isn't whether email works. It does. The data is pretty clear.
The question is whether you personally are making the most of it. And if you're being honest with yourself right now, you might already know the answer to that.
That's what today is about. No jargon. Simple, practical ways to improve what you're already doing, or to help you get started if you haven't yet.
Just getting the awkward intros out of the way, as Amy said, I've been in marketing for over 20 years. I've been doing email marketing since 2012, and for myself since 2016.
So it's a topic I think about most days. And honestly, I still really enjoy talking about it, which I realise isn't true for everyone.
I work specifically with solo and small service business owners. That's coaches, consultants, therapists, designers, accountants, HR consultants, photographers, trainers, all of those types of people who are absolutely brilliant at what they do, but who find email marketing overwhelming.
They're inconsistent. It's a bit stressful. And they find it harder than it really needs to be.
Everything I'm going to share with you today will work whatever type of business you run. None of it is locked behind some kind of service-only door.
But if you are a service business owner, and especially if you've got a list, some of this will ring true for you. I'd ask you to pay particular attention to that today. But a lot of what I'm going to say really will apply to everybody.
I'm going to ask for a quick informal show of hands. No pressure if you don't want to answer. It's not necessary, and I'm not going to mark you on this.
How many of you already have an email list sitting there right now that you haven't emailed in the last month?
If that's you, type "list" in the chat. Let's have a look. A couple of lists coming through. Lovely.
Please, this is typical. Don't feel like you're alone in this. You can see that plenty of people in the chat have said "list", and it's typical of pretty much every room that I do this in.
You're not alone. There's nothing wrong with finding this hard.
I want to say that clearly because I think a lot of people in your position carry this quiet sense of guilt about it, as if it's a personal failing. It isn't.
You didn't start your business to do email marketing. You didn't start your business to do any kind of marketing, though you know you have to do marketing.
The things I hear most from people who aren't emailing consistently are: "I don't know what to say." "I don't have time." "I need to do it properly."
If any of those sound familiar, then this is exactly the right session for you.
But here's the thing. None of those things are really about email marketing.
Not one of them is about which platform you use or whether you're a good enough writer. They're about two simple things: not having an easy process to follow and not having the confidence to hit send once you've written something.
The good news is that both of these things are entirely fixable.
You don't need to become a better writer. You don't need more time, not really. My newsletter gets written in 15 minutes a week. That's it. 15 minutes a week.
You don't need any of the things you think are stopping you. They're mental blockers.
You need a process that's simple enough that you can actually use it, and a little bit more trust in yourself. That's it. And that's what this session today is about.
Let's talk about platforms for a moment, and specifically AI, because I know that's something a lot of small business owners are curious about.
We're all leaning into using AI for our business. If we're not using it already, we're thinking about how we can use it.
Most of the major platforms now have AI built in, in one form or another. Used well, I really do think it can help you, especially when you're time-strapped.
You're a small business owner. You have to do everything. You've got 12 different hats, and today it's your marketing hat because you're writing your email. That's where AI comes in really handy.
Take Constant Contact. They've got AI built throughout the platform, but there are two places I want to focus on.
One is the campaign builder. This is where you describe your goal in plain English. You give the AI as much detail as you can. So whether you want to have a sale, attract new subscribers or host an event, you tell it your goal.
Tell it everything about your target audience, what you're trying to do, the messages you want to get across, all of that. That's what people call your prompt.
Once you've done that, in less than two minutes, you can have a campaign.
I know because last week I was put on the spot in a different webinar. I talked about Campaign Builder, and the organiser said: "Can you show us?"
In less than two minutes, with my very scrappy, not very detailed prompt, we had a campaign. That campaign consisted of emails and social media posts, ready-made for you to tweak and share.
The other place where AI is really useful is the template builder.
It's the same idea. You describe what you need, and it creates an email template to match that. You can easily tweak it to match your brand and put in your content.
This is really useful if you're the kind of person who opens up your laptop, opens up your email platform and then freezes.
So two things that can really speed you up are campaign building and template building.
Mailchimp has taken a slightly different approach. They also have AI built throughout the platform. But something I'm finding quite useful in Mailchimp is the AI that sits inside their reporting.
One of my bigger clients uses Mailchimp, and I can get the AI in the reporting to interrogate the numbers for me.
Instead of looking at a wall of numbers and not really knowing what to do with them, you get actual insight. It will look back at campaigns and tell you some trends and what's working.
You can figure that out with the numbers in front of you, but looking at email reports can be overwhelming.
Having AI built into your platform that pulls out those numbers and gives you a bit of a narrative on the trend, or what's working and what isn't, helps you understand how to shape your future campaigns.
Lastly, MailerLite, which I know a lot of small business owners use. I use this for another one of my clients as well.
In MailerLite, they've got a feature called smart sending.
At some point, somebody has probably asked, or will ask in the chat, when is the best time to send an email?
Smart sending in MailerLite uses machine learning to work out the best time to deliver to each individual person on your list, rather than blasting that email out to everyone at the same time, regardless of whether they're likely to read it or not. That is a really useful feature.
Whenever people ask me when is the best time to send, without that feature, the answer is: when is the best time for your list? When are they most likely to open it?
So that's three different platforms and three different ways that AI is quietly making your life a little bit easier: helping you create, helping you understand and helping you land in the inbox at the right moment.
But I want to be really clear about something. None of these tools should be writing your emails for you.
It's very tempting, especially with Constant Contact. You can get it to write your emails for you, particularly in the campaign builder feature. But you want to go in there and make that your own.
You don't want it to write the whole thing for you because your subscribers signed up to hear from you.
They want to hear your voice, your way of explaining things and your personality.
When it comes to being a small business owner, we've got that unique advantage of having our personality shine through all our communications. That's something bigger businesses don't have. They have to invent personalities for their business.
So your personality should really be at the forefront of your emails.
The moment your emails sound like they could have been written by everyone, you've lost the one thing that actually makes people open them. The one thing that's unique. And that's you.
Use AI to remove friction. Remove the friction of starting an email, creating a template, understanding your reports and knowing when to send. Remove that friction, but don't replace you.
I want to show you something that I've been sharing for a few years now, because honestly, it still holds up.
This is my email marketing cheat sheet, and it's free to download from my website. Amy also has the link that she can pop in the chat for you. So don't worry about scribbling all of this down.
This is hands down my most popular lead magnet, the thing that people sign up for. It goes through how to lay out an email really simply for good impact.
A good email doesn't need to be complicated. It definitely doesn't need to be the most beautifully designed thing ever. If that's what you're getting stuck on, please don't worry. You don't need mad design skills to be able to do it.
Let's go through it quickly.
Subject line: eight words or fewer. Short and specific. You don't need to be clever. Please don't make it clickbaity.
You can intrigue people. You can ask a question. Maybe make it funny. But it doesn't need to be massively clever. It does need to promote what's inside that email.
People open an email based on two things. They recognise the sender, and the email subject line makes them want to open that email.
Then there is the pre-header text. This is the little snippet of text that shows up after your subject line. It's usually below it in someone's inbox.
Most people leave it blank or let it default to "view this in your browser", which is a complete waste of valuable space, let's be honest.
Or is it? I thought it was for a very long time until I came across an email marketing expert I follow.
He said that if you leave that pre-header blank, and if you're already using an email marketing platform, AI will tell you how you can leave that space blank without anything showing in it.
Having that blank is a pattern interrupter in people's inboxes, and it makes your email stand out.
I've been doing it for a little while. I don't do it for every email. I do it for important emails.
So test it and see if it works for you. But that pre-header is an extra space for you to trail what's coming up in your email.
You want one clear call to action, and it needs to be above the scroll line.
Imagine that someone is looking at your email on their phone. You don't want them to scroll to reach that call to action. You want them to be able to see it straight away.
It needs to be really visible for people to do the thing you want them to do.
Keep your links to a minimum. This is again from research that Constant Contact did. They analysed about one billion of their customers' emails.
The most effective emails only have one link in them. The ones that get the most clicks only have one link in them. After three links, clicks start to deteriorate.
Fewer links is the way to go, and use them deliberately. Make sure you're creating your email to perform, to get people to click.
When you offer people lots of options, they quite often pick nothing. But if they've only got one option, they will choose.
Keep your images to three or fewer. Remember that some inboxes are not set up to download images automatically, especially on mobile when people are out and about and using data. So three or fewer images is all you need. I really only ever use one.
More recently, I've only been using the masthead, the Marketing Morsel thing that you can see. I've not really been using any other images.
Images affect the size of your email as well.
Make the images you do use clickable. You can click on an image in any email marketing platform. You can select that image and add a link to it.
So if you're sending people off to register for a webinar, everything that's an image in your email should link directly to that registration page.
That way, you're not relying on people to just click on the button. There's a link everywhere in the email, and it all leads them to one place.
Now, this whole thing about writing really long emails.
I see quite a lot of coaches and consultants write long, windy emails where the point is buried right at the end. After the second scroll, I've lost interest because I don't know where this is leading me.
Again, from Constant Contact's research, 20 lines of text or less is the optimum.
Imagine sending an email where you only have to write 20 lines of text. That makes everything so much simpler. You're not having to think of ways to pad out that email.
Nobody's reading your email like it's a novel. Mostly they're reading it on their phone, scrolling and thinking: what does this person want me to do here?
Then apply your brand colours consistently. The moment someone opens your email, before they've even read a word, they know it's from you.
You can see there on the screen, that's my purple. You see a little bit of my lime green at the top of that masthead. People know it's from me straight away.
None of this is complicated. None of it. And that is the point.
As I mentioned, everything needs to be doable. It needs to be something you can fit into what you're doing every day.
The cheat sheet is available on my website, which you can see on the screen, if you would like it.
I think subject lines deserve a special mention, a slide of their own, because this is where I feel people get stuck. I've also just mentioned that this is one of the two things that affects whether your email gets opened or not.
Here's how I do it, and you might not expect me to do it this way. I've always done it this way.
I never start with the subject line. Even if I know exactly what I'm going to write when I sit down, and even if I've got something rattling around in my head and I'm thinking, that would be really good, I don't use it. I make a note of it so I don't forget it.
What I do is write the entire email first, then go back over what I've written to find the subject line.
I read through what I've put down, and I'm looking for that line, that little piece of something that makes me go: yes, that's the bit.
That's the moment, the insight, the thing that I think people will love about this email. It's almost always in there somewhere.
I actually spend quite a bit of time crafting my subject line. It's not something that gets written in two minutes after the email.
I ask myself honestly: if this landed in my inbox, would that actually make me open it?
Not something that sounds clever or marketing-ish. Maybe it's intriguing. I already know who it's from, and maybe they're asking a question that I've been asking myself for a long time.
Would it genuinely intrigue me enough to open that email? Then I turn that into eight words or fewer.
I might go back to the subject line I had rattling around in my head before and tweak it. Or it might turn out that was perfect for that email.
But it's written in plain English. No clickbait. No false urgency. No overselling. And it needs to match what's inside the email.
The reassuring thing is that the subject line isn't something you have to invent out of nowhere, under pressure, staring at a blank screen.
I think that's quite a lot of what stops people from finishing their email, because they think they need to start with the subject line.
Start with the email. When you've written it, you'll see that your subject line is already sitting in what you've written. You just need a little process for finding it.
I want to gently challenge something that a lot of you have probably been told to obsess over.
Mostly, people obsess over open rates, but also click rates. Here's the problem with open rates.
Most inbox providers now pre-open emails automatically for security and preview purposes before a human has even looked at that email.
So your open rate includes activity that was never a real person reading your email. That means it's not reliable.
In fact, Constant Contact has recognised this problem. In its reporting, you can actually see what it calls proxy opens. These are the pre-opens that might make you think you have a huge open rate.
Click rates are similar because bots scan links inside emails. Again, for security reasons, they click on things. That means those clicks have happened without any human interaction.
That is a problem for really understanding what's true and what isn't.
Once again, email service providers have recognised this. Both Constant Contact and Mailchimp, though I haven't come across it in MailerLite yet, now suppress bot clicks. So you have a truer picture of who is actually clicking on your links.
Link clicking, for me, is more important than opens.
Yes, you absolutely need to get your emails opened because if no one opens it, no one's going to click. But the clicks give you more information.
They tell you what your subscribers are interested in. They tell you the things that really make them sit up and take notice. And you start building a picture of your list and who is interested in what.
When that happens, it allows you to do two things.
It allows you to send more of the content that you know your subscribers like. It also allows you to start personalising your emails for your subscribers.
Let's use a pet shop example.
Once you send out an email and somebody clicks on offers for dogs, you know they're a dog owner. You can then send them more emails with your products that have dog stuff in them.
So the clicks are working hard to help you understand what people on your list are interested in.
I'm not saying open and click numbers are completely worthless. I'm saying take them with a pinch of salt.
They're nowhere near the reliable indicator they used to be 10 years ago. Those are the numbers that are still front and centre on every platform's reporting, as if that's the entire story.
So what should you actually be paying attention to?
Someone replies to your email. I love this. I love when this happens to me. It shows that people are actually reading your emails.
It gives you feedback. You start to understand what people really like, what their thoughts are, things that a click can't tell you.
What's more, I use this as a CTA in my emails, a call to action. Not all the time.
I only have one email address, so replies always land in that inbox. It's my only inbox. And I always reply because that kind of response is gold dust.
Another thing is someone books a call. Another really great tangible response.
I use Calendly, and I share my link from time to time in my emails. When that call is booked, that's a real indicator of interest.
Someone is interested in the services I offer. They want to learn more. They want to understand whether they want to work with me or not.
Then someone buys something. That's the thing we all want, right? That's the end goal. And it's a brilliant way to understand if your emails are working.
If you sell products and you've got an e-commerce platform, hook that up to your email marketing platform. Those two things connected will tell you how many sales are coming from the emails you send out. So make sure those two things are connected.
Another thing is someone tells you. Someone mentions your newsletter to you when you bump into them at an event.
That happened to me at a Canva event not so long ago. We were all sitting theatre-style in a row, and a gentleman came and sat next to me. Martha Keith, of Martha Brook, was compering that event.
She asked us to turn to someone we didn't know and have a chat. So this guy and I turned and talked to each other.
When I introduced myself, his face lit up and he told me that he gets my newsletter and how much he loves it.
These are real human signals, and they're the ones that actually tell you that your email marketing is working.
So these are things you really need to watch out for and document. Make those the things that you measure in addition to the things you get in your report in your email marketing platform.
If I had to tell you one single thing today, the change that will move the needle more than anything else we've talked about, it's this: just send more often.
Consistency beats perfection. And it does that every single time.
I've been sending weekly for just over 10 years. I decided when I started my business that I only ever wanted to talk about one thing in my emails. To do that, and not overwhelm people who signed up for my emails, I would send every week.
I've been doing that consistently every Tuesday for just over 10 years.
When I look back at the very first emails I sent, I cringe a little bit inside because they don't look great. But they did a really hard job for me.
That imperfect email that went out was infinitely better than the one I was sitting on, perfecting in draft in my inbox.
Because it allowed me to share content and share that email on social media, putting a link to it so people could see the things I was sending out and I could add more subscribers to my email list.
I did actually send a newsletter a while ago, maybe a couple of years ago, and asked anyone on my list who wanted to see my very first newsletter to reply and I would send it to them. Quite a few people did.
Honestly, everyone has to start somewhere.
While I've been talking about email marketing since 2012, I've really been doing it for myself since 2016.
In 2012, I had a whole team of people who did all sorts of marketing things, and I managed and coordinated it all.
When I started my business, I started from zero. I had to learn how to post on social media. I had to learn how to create effective newsletters. Even though I knew the theory, I had to put all of that into practice, test it and learn.
I had to do everything, and I still do everything myself. It is only me in my business.
So please, if you take one thing away from today, if you're one of those people who said "list" and you haven't sent anything in a month, just send one email this week.
It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be perfect.
It needs to pull out one thing from your head that you know your readers are interested in. A piece of advice, a tip you know they'll love. Then send it to them.
That one email will tell you more things that will help you create better emails. And that whole "practice makes perfect" thing is really true.
The more you do it, the more it becomes a skill, the more the muscle memory kicks in and the more effective your email marketing will be.
If anything I've shared with you today has resonated, especially if you're a service business owner sitting on a list that you're not using consistently, I'd really love you to join my weekly newsletter, The Marketing Morsel.
Because this would not be a session on email marketing if I didn't ask you to join my email list.
Every week, I send one practical, jargon-free email to help you send better emails without overthinking it. No fluff, no filler, just something useful that you can act on.
That QR code will take you to the landing page, and I know Amy also has the URL.
If you've got any questions after today that we don't get to, you're very welcome to email me. Come and find me directly on LinkedIn, Instagram or my website, which has my email address on it.
Remember, I only have one inbox. So if you land in that inbox, I will reply.
Thank you. Amy, I'm going to hand over to you to go through questions.
Amy: Thank you so much, Minal. That was amazing.
We have a few questions, so I'm going to dive straight into them. I've added the links in the chat as well, but they'll also be in the follow-up email later today.
The first question is: how about internal email systems that are very sensitive to links and tend to flag emails that have links? How best do you add a CTA when it might not be better to add any links?
Minal: If you don't want to add any links, a good option is definitely "reply to this email".
You've probably seen it on Instagram. We used to say, "Head to my profile for the link", and now you get things like, "Comment this to get this."
Having that reply is important for two reasons.
Number one, that person is telling you they're interested in hearing about that thing. Then perhaps you can find a different way to get them the link, if there is a link for them to look at or a booking link.
The second thing it's doing is sending a signal to inbox providers that this email is valuable.
This person has replied to it, and this sender is valuable to them. So they are more likely to keep letting your emails through to that inbox. That helps you improve your deliverability rate. It helps inbox service providers know that you're a reputable sender.
So if you're struggling to get emails through to inboxes that won't accept links, ask for that reply and then find a mutually agreeable way to get the link to them.
If it doesn't have to be a link, it could be something else. You could use another way to get them the thing you want them to get.
For example, you could send a screenshot rather than sending them off to a place to look at something. You could put the screenshot of whatever it is in your email.
So think about ways around not having the link in the email.
Amy: Love that. Another question we've had is: how can we determine between bot clicks and genuine clicks? Is it through the platform, for example Mailchimp or MailerLite?
Minal: I haven't found it in MailerLite, but Mailchimp and Constant Contact have introduced functionality on their platforms to suppress those for you.
So you won't see bot clicks in your reporting. The clicks you see in your reporting are genuine clicks.
I haven't seen it in MailerLite yet. I've looked for it, but I haven't found a setting to suppress bot clicks.
But in Mailchimp and Constant Contact, there is that functionality. I think Mailchimp does it automatically, and there's a setting in Constant Contact to do that.
Amy: That's useful to know when selecting a platform.
Another question we've had is: "I've heard that tracking open and click rates makes your email more likely to end up in junk mail, so tangible engagement is better. Is that true?"
Minal: No. Why would there be reporting if that were true? Platform service providers would know that.
I've never heard that. It's not true. My deliverability is great and I track everything.
Amy: We can just say that's not true. Another question is: how often do you go through your database and clean it up?
Minal: That's a Christmas-time job for me in a big sense.
In a smaller sense, every week when the email goes out, I look at the bounces and clear out anything that is a non-existent email. So that's gone every week. It makes the Christmas job a little bit easier.
Amy: How do I start setting up my email list?
Minal: Sign up for an email marketing platform. Any one of the three that I've mentioned today is good.
They all have list-building forms built in, so you can create a form for people to join your email list, like the one the QR code goes to.
It's a good way to do that because then the platform manages everything for you. It will note the permission that people gave you to email them for marketing purposes, and then it will store them in the list or audience you've specified.
You can create a welcome email or welcome series to welcome people to your list.
Once you've created that form, start sharing it in the places where people already know you. So your website, your social media, contacts you've met through networking and clients you already have.
Start in those places where people are already warm to you, and it's an easier yes.
Once you've done that, and I don't think you'll ever exhaust it, but once you've exhausted it, ask in other places.
You could create a partnership with a complementary business. Maybe spend some money on social media ads to grow your list.
There are a whole host of things you can do after that. But start really simply and ask people who already know you, because that's an easier yes.
Amy: Perfect. Another question is: "I don't have a professional website email, just my business name at gmail.com. Do you think that could be holding me back?"
Minal: Potentially. A few years ago, the inbox providers mandated that businesses needed to authenticate their domain name, which is easy to do.
Each email service provider will give you instructions on how to do that if you've got a specific domain name, such as marketingbyminal.com or enterprisenation.com.
But with free email addresses, such as Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook, the email service providers tack on a bit to the end of your sending email address to authenticate it for you.
I would say that for your sender reputation, it's probably better to have a specific domain name and an email address that ties into that domain name.
Amy: Good to know. Another question we've got is: how can you tell if it's a non-existing email?
Minal: Your email software will tell you that it doesn't exist.
In Constant Contact, it says non-existent. In Mailchimp, it's a hard bounce, which generally means this email address doesn't exist anymore. In MailerLite, it's a hard bounce as well.
Amy: Perfect. I think we've run through all the questions, but I've got a couple myself before we close the session.
If someone wants to start sending emails to their list this week, what do you think is the single most important thing to get right?
Minal: Get out of your own head. I would say that's the single most important thing because you can spend ages perfecting your email, and it will never be perfect.
Normally I say it's three parts: point, explanation and action.
What is the point you're making? What's the explanation, where you're expanding on that? And what is the action you want them to do? Those three things.
Then get out of your head, close your eyes, take a deep breath and schedule it or send it. Then watch what happens.
The results are the things you want to look at, and you'll never be able to look at them if you don't send the email. You'll never be able to improve if you don't know what's working and what isn't.
Amy: Great advice. Final question. What do you think good looks like in the first six months for a small business owner who is just starting to send out emails on a consistent basis?
Minal: A lot of people compare themselves to someone else.
I was with a client yesterday at my local chamber, and someone came to their office to talk about joining the chamber. Her business is six months in, and she was panicking about where she was in comparison to other businesses she'd heard about at the same stage.
Honestly, we're all running our own race here.
So at six months, don't sweat the numbers. If your list is 50 people and they're 50 people who always open your emails and always engage, that's 50 of the right people.
That list is more valuable than having 5,000 people who do nothing.
The only person you should be comparing yourself to now is you. So if you're six months in, ask: what was I like last month? What has improved from last month to this month?
Make sure you're happy with the goals you're setting and how you're achieving them.
My list is not big. I'm going to be honest with you. It's under 800 people, and I've been in business for over 10 years.
But I get business from it. People read it. They come to my events. I've got a webinar this week, and 90% of the people registered for it have come from my list.
I've got clients from it for the last 10 years. Because I work quite closely with people, I don't work with very many people at the same time. So it's worked for me consistently.
A lot of coaches would look at my list and say: "That should be 800,000 or something like that." No, because I don't want 800,000 of the wrong people on my list who don't do anything and make my life harder.
I learnt quite early on, towards the latter end of my first six months, that I should not compare myself to anyone else.
I should just look at what I'm doing and make sure that every month I'm improving something, and every year something great has happened. It's improved, it's improved, it's improved.
For the first four years, I kept telling my husband: "If next year isn't better, I'll go and get a proper job." Well, it turns out this is a proper job.
Amy: Love that. Thank you so much, Minal. It's been great, honest, candid advice.
Thank you to everyone who has joined us on today's Tech Hub webinar. We'll share the recording and further resources, including links sent from Minal, in a follow-up email later today.
Thank you again so much to Minal for sharing all your insight, expertise and answering all our questions. I hope everyone has a lovely rest of their day.
Minal: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
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