EP 478 | A Simpler Way to Sell Digital Products featuring Dama Jue [Empire Exclusive]
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The Funnel Fix Sessions 🛠️
A 3-part, pre-recorded video series where we uncover why your email funnel isn’t bringing in sales of your course or membership, and exactly what to fix.
In this Empire Exclusive episode, Allison sits down with funnel strategist and Thrivecart expert Dama Jue to talk about a simpler, smarter way to sell digital products without making your business feel like a never-ending launch machine.
Dama shares how she uses “subtle selling” inside her emails, why your audience actually needs to hear about your offers more often, and how she repurposes her best sales emails into an evergreen funnel that keeps working even when life life’s.
TAKEAWAYS:
Subtle selling is not about being pushy; it’s about consistently connecting your everyday thoughts, stories, and expertise back to the offers that can actually help your audience.
Dama’s “Evergreen Forever Funnel” shows how your best sales emails do not have to disappear after a launch; they can be cleaned up, repurposed, and turned into ongoing sales assets.
Your emails can train your audience to expect value and offers at the same time, which makes selling feel more natural for both you and your subscribers.
Data matters, especially when you’re deciding where to spend your time, energy, and money. Dama shares how tracking her leads helped her stop relying on platforms that were not converting.
There is no one “right” way to do email marketing. The real magic happens when you combine best practices with your own voice, your actual results, and the way you naturally sell.
Resources:
Get on Dama’s email list to see her emails in the wild by clicking here.
Go hang out with Dama on Threads.
Funnel not selling? Then you need to watch the recordings of the Funnel Fix Sessions! Over the course of 3 sessions, Allison will help you to dig into your existing email funnel, understand where and why it's not producing sales of your course or membership like it should be, and exactly what to fix so that it becomes a money making machine. Click here to get accesss.
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Transcript:
Hey Dama. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you! Hi. Can you first for our listeners, because I know probably many of them know you, but many may not. Can you paint a picture and tell us a little bit more about you and your business? Yeah, sure. Hello, I'm Dama Ju. I'm originally from San Francisco.
I live in Hudson Valley, New York now, and I help digital product creators. Those who want to, or those who are already actively doing this, especially service providers wanting to pivot into that. Create and sell more of their offers with lazy funnels. I love lazy funnels, clever marketing automation.
I'm big on that. And strategic systems. So my business model is low ticket, high volume. So most of my offers are super duper, duper affordable. And I also like to work with folks one-on-one to strategize and implement their offers, copy and launches. So I'm all about that launch and offer side in the online business world.
Now that we know a little bit more about you and your phenomenal business, I wanna talk about email because here on these Empire exclusive episodes, we dig into how business owners are specifically using email marketing for their business. So something you do that I just love is something that you call subtle selling.
So can you share with us what that looks like? I mean, I love email marketing, so I was really happy that you invited me on 'cause I'm a big email marketing junkie. So subtle selling is really just, I stay yapping about my offers. Like, that's plain and simple. I have a lot of offers at this point. I have, like 30 different individual offers in three main categories.
When somebody hears me speak at a summit or on a podcast as they get into my world. It's a lot and I understand that it can be overwhelming, so I just stay talking about my offers. No one will buy your offer if you don't talk about it, right? Like we all wanna believe in like passive income and it's like if I put it out there, they'll buy it.
As long as there's a checkout, they'll buy it. I'm so sorry to say, they won't. You have to tell people about it. They need to hear about it, whether you use social or email or whatever. So for me, subtle selling is in my emails. I just look for really subtle ways to bring in, what I, what I teach and what I do.
So, for example, I have an email in mind. I just joined a high ticket program. I really love the coach and the content is amazing. But the videos don't have subtitles and the workbook for the course where they keep talking about like, oh, you know, it's in the workbook. It's in the workbook, is a 324 page.
Non fillable. PDF. So those are two pieces of friction for me. Like, I can't watch videos without subtitles and I can't, like, I want a fillable PDF or even better. I want it as a Google doc. I want a Google Doc where I can pull it up on my phone, I can edit it, I can insert, I can drop screenshots. You can't do that in A PDF.
So for me, I'm gonna write an email about making your programs accessible. And I have two offers about this. One is called Replay Ready recordings, where I teach people how to actually get the best quality recording from their like Zoom meetings or their coaching calls or webinars or whatever, because there's always like, I hope I don't mess it up, right?
I need this to be my webinar. Like I hope, how can I hide the, the audience people? How can I stop people from muting? Like I'll mention replay Ready, like, this is how to get your subtitles and how to enable them. By the way, did you know you can enable them on live calls also? You know, like so, and then I will link.
And I don't say bye replay ready recording. I'll just be like, did you know that you can enable subtitles on a live call for accessibility? Ask me how I know because somebody, I had a person who was, hearing and prepared. On a live call and just said, Hey, can you enable it?
And I had a little panic attacks. I was like, can I, I don't know. I wanna make this available to this person. So I learned, and now I have this training called replay ready recording. So I'll put that in parentheses and I'll link it and I'll be like, you know, and I'm in this new program. I love a, I love a good workbook, but I wish it were a Google Doc sidebar.
If you don't know how to make your workbooks highly implementable and even sellable. Do it in Google Docs. Here's my $9 training, has 5,000 students in it, and it's a viral success. So I will talk about things that I'm seeing and then I always try and relate things back to my offer. So in every email I'll have a point to it like I'm selling X or I'm promoting this summit or whatever, but I gotta stay talking about my offers, right? So I will put in parentheses like, oh, I rocked up a flash sale in 22 minutes last week. By the way, this is the system that I use to do it.
So I just stay yapping about my offers. So I will write my emails, but as I go through, before I hit send, I will look and be like, what? How can I relate any of this to my existing offers? Mm-hmm. So I just do that and it's not, it's almost never in a ps it's almost always in the body of the email. There you go.
I just gave me the whole strategy. I love, I mean, I love it. Like somebody coming to me right now, what I think is really strategic about this is that. It helps people to see, because you have these offers that are very like, this is how you do this thing. They're very like, teachable. There's not a lot of like, um, and sit in the space of this brainstorm.
No. It's like, here my tagline is literally. How implement this in a single afternoon. Right. And it will change how you do your business forever. Yes. So people understand that. Right. There's a very clear connection there. So it makes it so that it's like a duh no brainer. Like if this is something that you want, like you have the answer for them.
Mm-hmm. And it just makes like it leads with your expertise and, and your experience, which is. So invaluable. Yeah, and I, I try not to make it, like if I'm recommending a solution, I try not to make it bullying. Like I ask the coach, can you enable subtitles? And they're working on that. Like, I'm not gonna badmouth them for that.
But also, me personally, I'm 99% sure I have A-D-H-D-I can't watch TV or course videos without subtitles and onto X. Yeah, I have to have both of those things, or otherwise I just like. I am gone. You know, so I put make sure that, yeah, I make sure all of my offers have speed control subtitles and also like a transcript if you just are a skimmer.
And also if I provide a workbook, you better believe it's not a cruddy PDF that can't even be typed into like, I'm supposed to print this. Like, I know how to work my printer. No. It's a Google doc. And it's Brandon and beautiful. And there's probably some subtle selling in that Google Doc too. I'm always gonna be linking to my stuff.
Yeah. I mean, you run a, we run businesses, you run a business like we are here to sell things and to actually help people. Right. And so it makes perfect sense to me. And I, like I have so many ideas, now swirling around in my head because of this. So you also have, this is the thing I'm actually super interested in, is a.
Evergreen Forever Funnel. Can you describe to us what that actually is? Yeah. This is so silly, but my friend used to work for anthropology, and Anthropology is sort of known for having these really beautiful window displays and physical elements to their marketing. So these beautiful like six foot across paper hibiscus and just like, who makes this and where do they go afterward?
And my friend said, you know, the employees can take them home when a campaign is done. And I had this thought of like, why not? Like you're gonna throw that away. That's such a beautiful. Thing. And when I sit down to write a sales email, I don't wanna throw those things away. So the conventional wisdom is take your emails that you launched with and then put them into an evergreen funnel.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I could do that. But I have 30 offers and some of them are really cheap. Like some of 'em are like 97 bucks or 47 bucks. I'm not gonna spend time on an evergreen funnel for. Something low ticket. So I take all of my best performing sales emails, take out the cart, you know, price increases on Saturday, or cart closes on the 19th, and I clean that part up and I put in a conditional CTA and I turn that into my, it goes out on Saturdays, my simple solution series.
And because all of my sales emails follow a very similar format. Value up top where I'm just like, here's a problem as I see my model is, here's a problem, or here's a thing that you're maybe stuck with, or I'm seeing in the industry there's a problem. Here's my solution, here's what I tested, here's how to shortcut and buy my solution.
So I. That's my sort of email strategy thing. And why waste those beauties? Like I'm not throwing those babies in the trash and I know good and sure that I'm not gonna do a 16 email deadline funnel, evergreen funnel for $197. Thing like. I'm not doing that. I don't have time for that. So all my stuff gets into is I put them in Airtable or my brilliant assistant puts them in Airtable.
We, she cleans up the CTAs and we put a conditional on there. So if the person already has it, it's a, they get a different CTA and then it goes. I plunked into my Saturday Simple Solutions emails that I toggle off when I'm in a launch. I can just pause them when I'm in a launch, takes me 12 seconds. And when I'm not in a launch and if I'm sick, like I got sick twice last year and was laid out, like I know that I'm still sending sales emails out.
So the simple Saturday solution emails, they are sales emails. Almost exclusively. Almost exclusively. So every time, I wanna say 95%, I have a couple where it's like, here I was on Allison's podcast. You should, here's what thing I yapped about. You should go check it out. You know, or, so there's some, when I'm in a podcast and like they're great podcast episodes, I do include them in that.
And I have a few that are like, you know, the, I put this blog post out. It happens to be my highest traffic blog post. It happens to be a blog post that is like my ConvertKit, or Kit versus Drip blog post is super popular on thrivecart template shop.com, which is one of my sites. I have an email that is like, this should be required reading.
Stop faffing around comparing sheets. Like, you know, let a real email expert tell you what the difference is and are you, are you a mailer light person or do you really need to just buckle up and get drip already? You know, like stop with the mailer light enough with the MailChimp, put down the flow desk.
So, yeah, so I have a lot of them. Some of them are about evergreen content, but they're almost always, sales emails. Yeah. I love that. And it's training your audience to get used to that, right? So they know every single Saturday Dom's gonna send me this email and it's gonna be super high value, and oh yeah.
I'm also gonna be able to buy something off of it. What sort of results have you seen from that? It brings in thousands of dollars a year for me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And up until right now, the email, the offers that I'm. Mentioning? Mm-hmm. They're not discounted. You're just saying, Hey, I have this thing, I have this thing.
Hey, here's this. You know, like, what was one that went out recently and somebody bought it? Like, Hey, do you have any idea where your leads are coming from? Was that podcast or summit useful? Should you be podcast guessing more? Or should be you be doing more summits, or should you be doing more guest blog?
Blog posts? Do you even know where the people coming into your email list are coming to? Here's, I spent five years not tracking, and then I spent the last year and a half tracking with a hands-off automated system, and now I know exactly which podcasts I wanna say yes, or which collaboration opportunities I wanna say yes to because I have real data that is automated.
The collection is automated, it's very hands-off, and I just get a little automated reminder like, Hey, dama, here's your report. For where your leads came from this past 30 days, you like want to take a peek, you know, and like it's always there. And so I just, it's almost like in a non braggy way, but I'm like flexing on my systems because it's like, do you know, like you should know where your leads are coming from.
I can tell you for a fact that sales for me. Of low ticket items are not coming from Instagram because I tested, I did a 90 day, or 120 day, four straight months, oh my God, of recording reels. The B-roll reels, talking about my offers, and that cost me a lot of money and hiring a social media manager and I had to look cute and make reels and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it did not, it maybe brought me one $97 sale. That is real numbers. So I just piece drawn right on out of Instagram for my low ticket offers. Like it's either gonna be ads or it's gonna be my subtle selling, like it's gonna be email and speaking, you know what I mean? Like I kind of know, like I know what I'm doing.
So then I tested YouTube wildly different results. So, and it's like, I know that because I have data, YouTube is way more work, but the numbers are, the math is mapping, right? Mm-hmm. So. You can't make those decisions based on gut or based on what other people are doing until you try it. So it's really just like, do you know, if you don't know, set this up now and in six months or in three months, you'll have a much better idea of where your leads are coming from and where you should be spending your time and your effort.
Because I don't wanna waste time on stuff I don't wanna waste that isn't gonna move the needle right. So, yeah, I, so I said one of the, I guess it was about like, oh, I was like, oh, my email went out, it goes out on Saturdays at 11:00 AM in that person's time zone. And then it's like, oh, okay, I got a full price sale of, of the, traffic tracer.
Cool. I must have, you know, somebody must be at that part of the, you know, series or whatever. Um, and so as of now, there's no discount on it. I am experimenting with adding a discount as we speak. So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. 'cause of course I have to do it in a very te, nerdy and technical and lazy as possible way.
So, um, we'll see how that goes. But yeah, well that's be life proof. Like it has to actually work so that your systems can work for you. Yeah, absolutely. I'm hearing a lot of like, I know what works come from you, so how did you land on this is how you do email marketing. I dunno,
I don't know. I, all I know is that I used to write stories when I was a kid and I did never consider being a writer. I always wanted, I wanted to be, I wanted to work for nasa, I wanted to be a science girly. I wanted to be a marine biologist or a park ranger or in nasa. Like, you know, I just. I've always been a STEM girl.
I didn't ever consider the T in stem. I thought hardcore I was gonna be an S science or E engineering. Turns out I'm not good at math. So the E was the E and the M were like out the window. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna be a science girly. 'Cause I'm a problem solver and like I'm gonna be a science person growing up.
And then I went to school during a recession and panicked. Got a degree in international business and finance. 'cause I was like, oh, international business, that's not secure enough. Let me add another major finance, you know. And so went to school. Ended up working as an accountant. I, I never thought that I would be a writer or that I would like writing as much as I do.
But the accounting was just so unstimulating and boring for me. There's not enough problem solving and creativity. So I left that, started my business and found that writing copywriting was really fun for me. I learned, I like took programs and learned how to get better at it and took critique.
So how I landed on my own email style was, do it scared. Basically. I remember the first like. Emails I sent as a service provider, as a baby business owner. Like, this is terrifying. Is anybody reading this? I don't know what I'm doing and I don't. I think I, I literally just realized recently what my email style is and that was analyzing a lot of, as I was working on, I just added another 42 emails to my Evergreen funnel.
So your girl is set up for life right now? You really are. I have, I think I have like. Yeah, two years worth of content, so could always turn them off. But I can, you know, I can't get time back, so I'm just adding them in there and I can just turn 'em off later. But yeah, I was looking at so many of my emails and I just recently kind of came to like, oh, this is my style.
But I've just, I think, I don't entirely know how I looked into it. I didn't, I've never taken an email marketing course. I've never learned email marketing from anybody. Mm-hmm. I just started writing in 2019. To my tiny list of like 37 people and then, you know, just kept with it and it grew. And then I started writing for clients.
'cause I pivoted from Pinterest marketing to funnel building almost immediately as I started as a Pinterest marketer in 2018 or 2019. And then almost immediately pivoted within six months. I was like, oh hi, this is hella boring. And then immediately. This is not problem solving enough. I'm getting you traffic and you're not monetizing it.
How's that my fault? Like what do you, you know, so like very quickly pivoted and so. I started writing for clients and then just learning how to write. I learned, I took programs and courses and stuff to learn how to write copy and write conversion copy and, but I never took an email course, so I just was like, I'm just gonna, that.
I think that's why all my emails are sales emails 'cause I'm a, like, I'm a conversion copywriter at Core. Like the worst thing to have me do is send an email that is just black and white text, no links like. No ct. I don't even read those. If you don't send me a CTA girl, I ain't gonna read your email. Yeah, like hard.
No, I don't care if there's pictures or if it's pretty, if it's not compelling from the beginning and there's no CTA, why should I read this? I don't read those. So I think my email writing style is pretty much exclusively sales. All I write, all I really know how to write is sales.
I don't know how to write nurture emails. That's why I subtle sell. 'cause I don't know how to not do it. I can't turn the conversion copywriter off. That's really cool to hear you talk through that because I think a lot of times people think that there's one way or there's this right way or there's this thing I have to do in my email marketing and sure there are best practices, but at the end of the day, which is why we do these interviews, it's like what works for you and why do you do the things that you do in your email?
What results have you seen from that? And it's landing on like that. That like juxtaposition between how you wanna show up best practices and then what actually gets it done. So I love hearing you talk through that, so thank you. Doma if people just wanna like get into your world where, visit you. Yeah. Um, so two, two different things. Where I pour my best content is an email. I'm not the person who write, writes my email 17 months in advance and like forgets about them.
Like, yes, I do that on my Saturday series. But if you wanna know what is front, what is pressing on my frontal lobe at that exact moment, I get up and write my emails in the morning and you get them an hour later, like even during a launch. Like what? I don't even preplan all my emails for launches.
Like, oh, yep, I have this launch scheduled from months ago, but I'm gonna rock up and either write my email from scratch or. It's redo the beginning of my email 'cause I can't go to bed knowing like it's scheduled. It's gonna go. I just feel better knowing like what do I feel? What's pressing, what's nearest and dearest to my heart?
Some people find that chaotic. But yes, email is the best place to find what's going on right now in my, in my business, and also problems and solutions that I see. You know, issues that are happening in the online space and how you can. Jump those off at the path. Right? And so yeah, email marketing, I don't do much on social, but I am active on threads.
But I, I talk a little bit about business on threads, but also about like gardening and travel and, all the other cooking and dogs and all the other stuff. So I'm on at dama ju and then email marketing is the best place. So if you just wanna hop on my list. But we'll, I'll give Allison a link for that too. So listeners, this will be all in the show notes. Stama, thank you so much. This was wonderful having you. I loved getting to nerd out about email marketing with you, so thank you being for being so generous and sharing all of your knowledge with us.
Happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
