The Deliberate Email Method
Stop white-knuckling your way through email strategies built for online coaches and build a system that actually fits the credentialed, relationship-driven business you've spent years building.
The Deliberate Email Method is a three-stage framework developed by Bev Feldman of Your Personal Tech Fairy. It guides credentialed professionals such as therapists, healthcare practitioners, educators, and financial advisors through a structured process of building a consent-based email marketing ecosystem that is aligned with your business.
For many business owners, “You need a newsletter” or “You should have an email list” are common refrains repeated throughout the online business space.
And while I generally believe a newsletter is one of the best things you can do for your business, this advice is often handed out in a vacuum, without any understanding of your business. That leads to skipping some really important steps – like picking the right software – or deciding you should be emailing multiple times a week, or building something that’s wildly misaligned with how your business actually operates.
For many experts like you, who built your business from your degrees, certifications, and years of relationship-building, a lot of the email marketing and newsletter advice tossed around the internet wasn’t actually designed for you.
If anything, it was designed for “newsletter operators,” where the newsletter itself is the product, or for online creators selling digital products and running promotional campaigns. For both, the focus is list growth – growth at all costs.
That’s why I created the Deliberate Email Method.
It’s pulled from years of supporting business owners – many of whom are accidentally business owners, not marketers – who have come to me after following the advice of an online business coach preaching a way of doing email marketing that’s actually antithetical to how their business runs, or who have felt turned off by advice that reads as salesy, spammy, and annoying.
They’ve also come to me after building an email marketing system piecemeal, and now feel like their email marketing “isn’t working.”
The Deliberate Email Method is a three-phase framework that will help you create an email system designed for your business – one that centers sustaining and building relationships over list growth, and takes into account what’s sustainable and realistic for you to maintain.
Phase 1: Define
People often like to skip right to picking the right tool. But before you can do that, you need to determine your actual goal when it comes to email marketing.
Because email marketing exists on a spectrum – ranging from purely informational to purely selling – I’ve created the Newsletter Identity Profile. It breaks newsletters for credentialed professionals into three styles: Founder, Brand, or Hybrid.
A Founder Newsletter is geared more toward organizations, executives, peers, collaborators, or referral partners – people you want to stay top of mind with, but who aren’t necessarily going to hire you (or whose hiring happens through relationship building). You want to be seen as a leader in your industry, with a simple way to stay top of mind and demonstrate your expertise.
A Brand Newsletter, more geared toward consumers, is less about the founder(s) or people behind the business, and more about the business itself and what you’re selling.
A Hybrid Newsletter is a mix of both, where subscribers are made up of potential clients or customers, but also people in your network you want to stay in touch with.
From there, you can pick your software.
It’s tempting to treat many platforms as interchangeable – for example, I’m often asked if people should use Substack or Kit for their newsletter. (Spoiler alert: one lets you focus on selling, the other doesn’t.)
Which tool you pick is impacted not just by whether you’re focused on thought leadership or selling products and services, but by the features you need (like the ability to segment your subscribers and send automated emails) – and whether you’ll actually use it.
(While I’m personally a huge fan of Kit, and have gone so far as to become a Kit Certified Expert, I don’t believe it’s the “right” platform for everyone. If it doesn’t work for your brain and you hate being in it, there’s no point in choosing it.)
Phase 2: Design
Once you’ve determined your newsletter type and your software, you can move on to strategy and designing your setup.
The first step is to map out your Subscriber Strategy. In this step, you identify the group(s) of people your newsletter is for, what information you know or need to know about them, and how to organize them inside your software.
For example, if you have multiple offers geared toward distinct audiences, how will you identify which bucket someone belongs to, and what do you need to know about them so you can send them the right offers?
Or, if you have referral partners and former colleagues on your list separate from the people you’re selling to, how will you identify them – and do you need to separate them by industry, or by how you know them?
From there, you’ll identify your Entry Points: the way(s) people subscribe to your newsletter. For example:
- Are you sending direct invitations to people in your network, and will you have a dedicated landing page just for them?
- Do you have a newsletter sign-up form on your website, and where on your site will that live?
- Do you have a lead magnet? And if so, what happens if you have multiple lead magnets?
- What happens if someone books a call with you?
- Will you have different sign-up forms for different sources – one for LinkedIn vs. one on your website vs. one for speaking engagements – so you can track how people are coming onto your list?
If you have multiple entry points, you’ll also need to decide whether each gets a separate onboarding email series, or whether there’s a hierarchy of emails for people who sign up for multiple things at once.
As part of this process, you’ll decide whether your entry points need a double opt-in. This depends on a variety of factors – from where you and your audience live, to whether you’re giving away a lead magnet, to whether those sign-ups are coming through a third-party tool like a quiz builder.
Finally, your Subscriber Strategy will inform what information – beyond name and email address – you need to collect right at sign-up.
Once you’ve made these decisions, it’s time to think through your Cadence: how often you should be sending your newsletter. (And if you have multiple segments – say, referral partners and colleagues and potential clients – you might need multiple cadences.)
It’s tempting to send your newsletter based on a cadence you heard was “best practice,” but frequency is actually impacted by five different dials that turn your cadence up or down. My Cadence Calibration Framework helps you figure out which is right for your business.
Phase 3: Implement
Once you’ve worked through the strategy, it’s time to build out your lead magnets, landing page(s) or forms, and any automated emails.
The ALIGN Framework is my five-step framework for mapping out and building the journey you want new subscribers to go on.
First you need to Affirm Consent, or make sure you have their permission to start emailing them, and that your website’s privacy policy is front and center.
From there, based on your Subscriber Strategy, you’ll use your sign-up form or page to Learn from Questions – asking any additional identifying information you need, like what industry they’re in or what topics interest them most.
Next, you’ll Implement Tagging and Segmentation – the most technical of the steps, where you connect the information you’re collecting about subscribers, beyond name and email, inside your software.
After that, you’ll Guide with Gratitude by redirecting people to a thank-you page or customized message that thanks them for signing up and tells them what’s next (generally, to go check their inbox for an email from you).
Finally, you’ll Nurture the Relationship, sending an automated email or series of automated emails based on what they signed up for.