Episode 259: How Building an Email List Helped Increase my Revenue 10X With Sena Wheeler
Being a CEO is no joke. If you are running a business, you are a CEO. You may not think of yourself that way, but when you're a CEO, you must learn specific skills to make the business grow and remain healthy and strong.
Today’s guest Sena Wheeler has the best story about the one skill she doubled down on to increase her revenue to keep her family's business afloat. And it's something she still uses every single day. Her family's mission is to make sure that we get really healthy, pristine, beautiful food, specifically fish on our plates.
Sena is part of a fifth generation fishing family and the co-founder of Sena Sea, which brings wild Alaskan seafood direct to your door.
She's passionate about sustainability, helping busy families eat healthier and educating people about the brain-boosting benefits of wild fish. She has a master’s degree in Nutrition and Food Science with a specialty in quantifying omega 3's in fish and determining preferred handling practices for premium quality.
One of the things she shares is not only does this business just feel organic, but also she realized that this was going to take more than putting up a website and doing the old “if you build it, they will come.”
Joining the family fishing business
Sena says her career path only makes sense when you look in reverse. But the business is her life, and the idea of being authentic and “who you are” resonates. After getting her Master’s degree in Food Science, she worked in corporate for about eight years.
“That was what I consider my dream job, and I loved it,” says Sena. “My husband at that point was fishing … And I'm just like, selling fish on the side because why wouldn't I share our wild Alaskan fish that we have in the freezer?”
It was on an eight-hour drive to Thanksgiving dinner, where she was talking to her husband and suggested how to market his fishing business, and he reeled her in.
It was a good fit; Sena had studied onboard handling techniques that correlated to flavor and quality attributes. She knew how to market the Copper River salmon he was catching.
“I took [Marie Forleo and Laura Belgray’s] B-School and just set up the business while we had the site going and we were selling fish by the time he left for Alaska. … So it was actually like a pretty, pretty fast,” says Sena. “And if it hadn't gone fast, I think I probably would have overthought it.”
Trial and error on business launch
Sena says despite the speed of setting up the business, there were some learnings and bumps along the way. They had help setting up their website, but at launch realized, they needed to do more. No one knew the website they’d just invested in existed.
They sent an email to their family and friends with the site to let them know they had launched. This hurdle proved helpful because they hadn’t yet figured out the best way to ship frozen fish to their customers. It was also the start of a profitable email list.
“Thankfully, a lot of those first people were our friends and family. They still loved us even though we had, you know, shipping hurdles,” says Sena. “You know, it has to arrive frozen, and it has to be the fish they ordered.”
Sena says that first summer was a lot of trial and error on shipping. There were weeks where Sena was tempted to quit, but she says her husband telling her, “you’re the CEO” helped change her mindset. She would ask herself, “what would a CEO do?” when she felt like she wanted to quit.
“It forced me to be like, have we exhausted every avenue? Is there something else to try? Let's try this.”
They’ve since streamlined the process of the logistics.
Learning to write increased revenue
When Sena started the internet business, she didn’t realize she’d need to write. She wanted to sell fish. But by the time the website was done and her business school complete, she realized she was writing. Every. Single. Word.
Copy on the website. Creating an email list. She started writing emails for her small but growing list every other week.
“I would get like $500 of sales on an email,” says Sena. “Very early on I could see that that was the needle that's making the business move, you know, when not many other things are.”
She leaned into writing and did the Copy Cure. It took a bit of time. Sena says when you’re writing to a list there are levers, how good the email is and how many people are on the list.
“My best emails, I sit down to write one thing and I write something else, and something else just comes out and, and it just starts going in a new direction,” says Sena, who finds consistency in imperfection. Getting a first draft done, even a terrible one, is better than not writing at all. Now she’s sending emails every Monday, and started a Fish Friday email, which just includes a recipe and link to the fish.
“I'm going to say like 30% of the time I'm like, 'oops, well, this is the email that came out. So this is what we're doing.' ”
Connection around food
Sena says she sets a challenge for herself to see what she can tie back to her business when she writes. Writing helped open the door for people to understand where their food is coming from.
The connection alone provides value.
“When we have kids over, I'm going to feed them fish, right? … I will talk about Rich and how he caught it. And maybe my kid’s right there. They were out on the boat, too,” says Sena. “Just bringing that connection immediately changes how they how they perceive the food.”
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